Digital Commons Network^™

Multifaith Families And Their Narratives Within Society, Josh Friedberg

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this project is to nudge the conversation about interfaith families in a direction that examines the family post–interfaith dialogue. The term multifaith better represents this new aim because it encompasses all interactions and does not limit the family to the constraints of the moniker interfaith. I apply Walter Fisher’s concepts of coherence and fidelity, in coordination with family communication literature, to structure this project and to study the various aspects of a multifaith family and narrative. I also use three typologies of multifaith family (Passive/Passive, Passive/Active, and Active/Active) to better understand the variations of this family. The …

A Praxis Of Oral Homiletics: Preaching From The Heart, Weiwen Tu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Christian preaching has been a central and significant custom to the practitioners of biblically confessional and creedal communities in worship, evangelization, and discipleship. Yet modern preachers confront two challenges presented by the New Homiletic and the media environment. Undue favor toward narrative-based form, audience-oriented eventfulness at the expense of biblical authority, and shifting media that alter the preacher’s identity and incapacitate the preacher’s orality have led to a dissonant handling of form and content and thus a profound decline in the quality of the Christian pulpit.

This project grows out of an attempt to integrate an Augustinian hermeneutic and homiletic, …

Unlikely Partners: Collaboration Between Colonizationists And Radical Abolitionists In Washington County, Pennsylvania, During The 1830s, Joseph Andrew Smydo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the scholarly literature, colonizationists and radical abolitionists are portrayed as composing perpetually warring camps. While that may have been true at the state and national levels of the movements, the evidence suggests that the relationship between the groups was much more fluid at the grassroots. In Washington County, Pennsylvania, colonizationists and radical abolitionists cooperated on various community-development initiatives during the 1830s. Slavery was important to these community elites. But other issues were just as important to them, if not more.

Visionary Nonconformity: Miltonic Resonances And The Poetics Of Religious Dissent In The Long Eighteenth Century, Matthew Vickless

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the wake of three decades of critical recovery work, which has restored poems by women and working-class poets to the British canon, critic Joseph Wittreich's groundbreaking critical model about visionary poetics now may be enhanced in order to reveal a more expansive and fluid Miltonic presence, particularly within much eighteenth-century visionary verse. This dissertation applies and at times refocuses Wittreich to achieve a clearer picture of how visionary poetry developed in Britain after Milton, accounting for key poetic visions by several women poets who wrote during the long eighteenth century. The visionary poetics of Jane Barker, Elizabeth Rowe, Mary …

Italian Immigration In The United States, Giuseppe Piccoli

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study is a historical research that used content analysis of secondary sources (newspapers, magazines, literature, movies and sociological studies) in order to describe Italian immigration in America. The research is focused on Italian-American communities in the areas of Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York City and Boston.

Between 1880 and 1920, Italian-Americans became one of the largest ethnic groups in the United States. For a long period, they faced discrimination and lived at the edge of the American society. Education, immigration and urban policies influenced the social structure of the Italian communities. Later, second generation immigrants started writing books and making …

A Higher Public Spirit And A Better Social Order: The Civic Club Of Allegheny County, 1895-1930, Aaron Matthew Gallogly

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Civic Club of Allegheny County was an organization created in the Progressive era that confronted urban issues that plagued early twentieth century Pittsburgh. Although the club's origins were part of a long tradition of women's reform groups, this organization was a mixed-gender organization, different than most cities in the United States. The membership and leadership of the organization shifted from the active, club female to the professional male. Professionalism appealed to the members of the Civic Club because it limited decision-making to those who possessed certain qualifications. This belief helped facilitate the shift, as professionals became important to both …

Student Perceptions Of The Integration Of Faith And Learning In A College Foreign Language Course, Patricia Tinkey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative case study investigated how students perceive that the integration of faith occurs in the foreign language classroom. Research questions included:

1. What factors and conditions of faith-learning integration do students identify throughout the course? 2. How do these students define integration of faith and learning? 3. Is there consensus among students as to whether or not faith and learning is being integrated in the course? How did the integration of faith and learning impact the students?

The non-probability convenience sample included 77 Elementary Spanish students at a small Christian liberal arts college. Data collection consisted of focus group …

Discerning Redeeming Communities: Rita Nakashima Brock And Elizabeth A. Johnson In Dialogue, Alison Downie

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Rita Nakashima Brock's Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power and Elizabeth A. Johnson's Friends of God and Prophets: A Feminist Theological Reading of the Communion of Saints offer resources for reflecting upon what redemptive community is, how it functions, and how women, in particular, experience redemption.

With deep roots in Trinitarian creation theology and a strong trunk of feminist theological anthropology, the branches of Christian feminist reconstructionist theology produce rich soteriological fruits. Without rootedness in creation theology, theological anthropology is anthropocentric, not sufficiently holistic or ecologically aware. Similarly, without development of a feminist theological anthropology, soteriology inevitably reflects …

The Lived Experiences Of Evangelical Christian Men Who Self-Identify As Sexual Addicts, Kailla Edger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Issues of sexual addiction have swept the evangelical movement, and ongoing concerns in the evangelical community are evidenced by its self-help literature, men's movements, and sex manuals. The purpose of this investigation was to examine the lived experiences of evangelical Christian men who self-identify as sexual addicts. This qualitative method was existential-phenomenological and focused on the lived experiences of this population. Individual interviews and follow-up individual interviews of six self-identified evangelical male sexual addicts were analyzed. The results of the study indicated that the male evangelical self-identified sexual addict lives through compartmentalized worlds: the religious or spiritual world, the committed …

John And Charles Wesleys' "Hymns On The Lord's Supper" (1745): Their Meaning For Methodist Ecclesial Identity And Ecumenical Dialogue, Aaron Kerr

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the historical context, theological relevance and ecumenical potential of a body of theological poetry, hymn lyrics about the central Christian ritual, the Eucharist. The research is undertaken in the interest of the Roman Catholic-Methodist dialogue, a decades long conversation in which these 166 hymns have gained mutual recognition. There are three inter-connected areas explored: history, textual formation and the theological shape of lyrical poetry about the Lord's Supper. These three dimensions are brought to bear on the question of Methodist ecclesial identity and ecumenical dialogue. The study explores the significance of the relationships derived from the synthesis …

C. M. Sedgwick's 'Patient Investigation' Of America's Past: An Intertextual Study Of Hope Leslie, Ellen Adrienne Foster

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since the 1987 republication of Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie ; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts (1827), literary-historical interpretations have most often explored its proto-feminist impulses, revisionary history of the Pequod War, and models of American citizenship. Inquiries into Sedgwick's historical research for Hope Leslie have largely been limited to internal textual references. This dissertation answers questions regarding Sedgwick's research and also provides a foundation for a number of future studies. That foundation derives from extensive archival research conducted at and supported by the Massachusetts Historical Society, involving the examination of several layers of textual evidence (the unpublished correspondence …