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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, …

Charlotte Brontë'S Spiritual Vision, Andrew James Weiler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I explore the Victorian poet and novelist Charlotte Brontë’s remarkable understanding of scripture and powers of analysis. As a daughter of the notable reverend Patrick Brontë, Brontë’s dissenting feminist views of the Bible are particularly significant. Although Brontë demonstrated a lifelong belief in God, and in the individual’s right to develop and maintain a direct relationship to God, personal tragedies in her life shaped the ways in which she interpreted scripture and informed her ideas regarding the spiritual realm. As the number of personal tragedies increase, Brontë’s spiritual vision, which migrates from one novel to the next, …