Digital Commons Network^™

The Shared Values Society: On The Inability To Validate Beliefs And Its Effect On Pluralistic Governance, Tanner L. Smith

Masters Theses

The nature of truth affects beliefs in such a way that all worldviews are left on a level playing field, each with no more of an objective claim to truth than any other. As a result, no one worldview has an intrinsic right to dominate the government or, through it, other worldviews. Furthermore, philosophical secularism’s noble notion of protecting individual freedoms by limiting the influence of moral values in the government has led to a loss of intergroup bonding and a value vacuum in public life. At the same time, because beliefs constitute some of the most profound aspects of …

Soft City: Reclaiming Urban Public Spaces For Play, Jennifer Pham

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the relationship between children’s play and urban public spaces. What kinds of play are prioritized, and consequently, what ways of learning are celebrated above others? How are public spaces serving or not serving to nurture children’s development and joy?

The thesis design project is a strategic plan for spatial activism. Using a “guerilla architecture” approach, I am developing a series of workshops with the local community that culminate in collectively designed urban installations. This participatory design process enables people to perceive public spaces in new ways, and it invites community members and children to become active parts …

The Criteria Of Liturgical Worship And Analysis Of Wesley‘S Theology And How His Approach Challenges Contemporary Christians, Especially In Terms Of Worship, Eunice H. Ahn

Masters Theses

Although liturgical traditions were introduced during the Modernism Era, they continue to play an influential role in churches today. The worship and teaching practices applied in Roman Catholic Churches reflect how important traditional liturgy is in the Post-Modernism Era. While many catholic congregations are aware of the significance of liturgy, many Christian and Protestant Churches are not. There is missing knowledge regarding liturgical traditions in these churches. This study will propose liturgical worship in contemporary Christian and Protestant congregations as an alternative proposal from the perspective of John Wesley. This proposal will discuss the criteria of liturgical worship and analyze …

American Religion: A Study Of Religious Change From The 1920s Through 1970s, Alexander R. Marks-Katz

Masters Theses

Religion in America persisted along traditional Christian lines until the 1870s. It was then that theological liberalism gained significant headway. The Gilded Age and Progressive Era were still infused with revivals and preachers but there was a growing contingent that challenged the fundamentals of Christian belief. Sometimes this contingent supported revivals but promoted social causes and brought unorthodox biblical interpretations. At other times, they challenged traditional Christianity altogether. By the Great Depression, American culture had undergone such a tremendous amount of change that, faced with adversity, the bottom of religion fell out. Fewer people attended services and contributed funds. More …

Negative Realism: Reading The Novels Of John Williams, William Wells

Masters Theses

This thesis attempts to posit a dynamic theory of literary realism that accounts not only for the commonly understood “historical” realisms of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, but for the more fluid realisms that arise in the modern and postmodern eras. Realisms of this sort are still understood to be expressions of particular, sociohistorical eras, but these expressions must be understood to be subject to material change in society. This paper breaks, then, with traditional Marxist conceptions of realism as the direct response to enlightenment thought and early capitalism, and instead argues for traceable eruptions of realism throughout …

Debunking The Curse Of Ham And Its Generational Impact On The Black Race, Fraendy Clervaud

Masters Theses

The so-called curse of Ham became a major issue for Christian Theology and apologetics. The false interpretation claimed that the Black race were to be enslaved. Therefore, these individuals were subjected to inhuman treatment through the institution of slavery for generations. Many believed that those from Africa did not receive Christianity until after they were kidnapped from their homeland. The false narrative that slavery introduced them to Christ is disingenuous. That is because Christianity prevailed in Africa even before it did in Europe. Individuals from African contributed immensely to the history and theology of Christianity. Three of the major Christian …

True Pauline Worship Is Trinitarian: A Look At Paul’S Trinitarian Presuppositions, Connie Heberlein

Masters Theses

This thesis seeks to show that true Pauline worship is Trinitarian. Thus, proper Christian worship must be Trinitarian. This work begins by examining the Shema and exploring the unique identity of God presented in the Old Testament and the literature of Second Temple Judaism. Building on this foundation, this work evaluates statements found in Paul’s letters in which Paul reformulates the Shema to include Christ and the Spirit in the divine identity of God. The goal is to understand how the first Christians, who were Jews committed to the exclusive worship of Yahweh, moved from monotheistic worship to Trinitarian worship …

“A Constant Surveillance”: The New York State Police And The Student Peace Movement, 1965-1973, Seth Kershner

Masters Theses

Historians recognize that there was an increase in political repression in the United States during the Vietnam War era. While a number of accounts portray the Federal Bureau of Investigation as the primary driver of repression for many groups and individuals during the 1960s and 1970s, particularly those on the left, historians typically overlook the role played by local and state law enforcement in political intelligence-gathering. This thesis seeks to advance the study of one aspect of this much larger topic by looking at New York State Police surveillance of the Vietnam-era student peace movement. Drawing extensively on State Police …

Queer Spaces, Religious Places: Sharing Risk And Making Kin Within A Queer Church Amidst A Pandemic, Sadie V. Counts

Masters Theses

This thesis aims to explore the effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic on a queer, Christian congregation of the Metropolitan Community Church in Knoxville, TN and the impacts of the pandemic queer kinship and intimacy within the church setting. The thesis explores the ways in which queer kinship manifests within the church and how those relationships have been disrupted and altered by COVID. It also compares the long-term effects of the AIDS epidemic on the church congregation and they ways in which they may be experiencing COVID in a similar manner. Finally, the project explores the ways that intimacy has …

Treating The Revolution: Health Care And Solidarity In El Salvador And Nicaragua In The 1980s, Brittany Mcwilliams

Masters Theses

Health care played an important role in the revolutions of El Salvador and Nicaragua. Both the Sandinistas and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) prioritized popular health throughout the 1980s. Clinics and hospitals served as sites of revolution that drew healthcare solidarity activists from the United States. These health internationalists worked to build community-level networks that relied upon trained medical volunteers. In both El Salvador and Nicaragua, women comprised a bulk of the community health workers. These women chose to interact with revolution by building on radical promises of universal healthcare access. Healthcare solidarity activists trained community volunteers and …

I Speak As One In Doubt, Margaret Hazel Wilson

Masters Theses

A written thesis to accompany the M.F.A. Exhibition I Speak as One in Doubt. Blending epistolary format and visionary narrative, the artist addresses her complex relationship to her Catholic upbringing.

The Meaning Of The Civil War In Northern Religious Periodicals, 1865-1877, Jeffrey Mark Charles Joslin

Masters Theses

The American Civil War had a profound effect on the minds of religious northerners during the Reconstruction Era that followed the war. Through church periodicals, members of the Methodist, African Methodist Episcopal, and Seventh-day Adventist churches demonstrated and expounded the various meanings they understood the war to contain. This thesis examines each denomination‘s flagship newspaper in order to categorize, describe, and contextualize the major themes of meaning attributed to the war within each church. The major themes that emerge closely reflect each church‘s sense of identity and purpose, such as viewing the war as punishment from God, purification in creating …

Soteriology In Mainstream Monotheistic Religions: The Messiah Conundrum, Jay Fox

Masters Theses

For the promotion of the Gospel, this study seeks to examine Soteriology in Mainstream Monotheistic Religions: The Messiah Conundrum. This decidedly charged topic critically researches the philosophy of salvation doctrine, or soteriology, within major monotheistic religions. The highlighted problem is the Messiah conundrum, with critical research on each doctrine for epistemological significance of a savior and their beliefs surrounding salvation. This mystery of where, or who humans turn to for salvation, is vitally important when considering the principle of sufficient reason in today’s hermeneutic and apologetic circles. The purpose fueling this thesis is the resolute documenting of beliefs of major …

The Problem Of The Stigma Of Marxism For Christian Advocacy Writers Whose Focus Is Historical, Social Inequalities, Kandy Crosby-Hastings

Masters Theses

Christian advocacy writers seek to advocate on behalf of and empower the marginalized. Christian advocacy writers who focus on historical, social inequalities reveal oppressions from history in order to advocate for the oppressed in similar circumstances in today’s world. They must be willing to learn from all scholarship that reveals the hardship and oppression endured by the exploited of society. There is often a stigma associated with the use of Marxist sources for reasons that include Karl Marx’s own anti-religious, anti-Semitic, pro-revolution, and reductionist ideas and the later association of Marxism with Soviet Communism. Christian advocacy writers must understand both …

Annie Dillard: At The Altar Of Nature, Kelley A. Kasul

Masters Theses

This thesis intends to delve into Annie Dillard’s time spent at Tinker Creek. Why Dillard chose to go into nature is critiqued, as well as what she found. One of the things it appears Annie Dillard sought and found was a connection to the Divine. She had been searching for this connection in various churches but had not found what she needed there. There is another, perhaps more pressing, issue of the mystical journey Dillard went on as well. This was an internal journey, not a physical journey. Both of these topics are vetted for the purposes of furthering the …

Trinity, Freedom, And Evil: The Importance Of The Triune Nature Of God In The Problem Of Evil, Seth Pryor

Masters Theses

This thesis presents an abductive argument for a trinitarian conception of God as opposed to a unitarian conception especially when juxtaposed against the problem of evil. On the whole, this author argues, the Trinity has more conceptual resources to answer the problem of evil by granting freedom of the will to its creation, specifically the will to go against God, by himself consisting in an inherently relational ontological structure of three persons yet the same being that would grant such a capability.

The Ideologies And Outcomes Of The French And American Revolutions, Donald D. Palmer

Masters Theses

One effective way to compare the fruits of biblical Christianity with modernism is to contrast the ideologies and outcomes of the American and French Revolutions. Pre-revolutionary America was rich with biblical influence. Adherents of both Protestantism and Deism sought a “Christian society,” and while revolutionaries drew from both biblical Reformation and secular Enlightenment thought, much of the latter was biblical thought in secular form. Ministers employed the Bible extensively to support the Revolution. This relative theological consensus encouraged religious practice and a political system that accommodated dispute. Human rights were secure thanks to man’s subordinate position under God. Even after …

Transgressive Acts: Adapting Applied Theatre Techniques For A Transgender Community, Theo F. Lefevre

Masters Theses

This MFA Thesis traces my work as a joker (a la Theatre of the Oppressed) and facilitator through a three-year-long project with a trans applied theatre troupe. The troupe explored several techniques, including Image Theatre, Playback Theatre, storytelling exercises, and somatic movement. In three semester-long workshops, the troupe focused work around three sets of techniques. In the first workshop, the troupe explored the community-based interview process of Undesirable Elements, as designed by Ping Chong in collaboration with Talvin Wilks and Sara Zatz. These techniques were interrogated using queer and trans temporalities. In the second unit, the troupe practiced Augusto …

Legacy And Dwelling: The Role Of Manufactured Housing In Central Appalachia, Steven Mark Whitmore Ii

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the power of architecture to raise the standards of dwelling in a region where housing conditions, economic stability, and environmental consciousness is considerably lower than the rest of the United States. Historically, many towns and cities in Central Appalachia were developed by coal companies as ‘coal towns’. Considering the diversity of workers in these communities, the coal industry is largely the platform for the cultural identity of Central Appalachia. As a result of coal depletion in the US, and increased regulations of pollution by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), coal companies across the region are closing mining …

Intergroup Dialogue In Undergraduate Multicultural Psychology Education: Group Climate Development And Outcomes, Joel Timothy Muller

Masters Theses

We examined group climate and outcomes in 19 intergroup dialogues (IGD) focused on gender, race and ethnicity, religion and spirituality, sexual orientation, or social class at a large, public university in the Southeastern United States. Group members were undergraduate students enrolled in a course in multicultural psychology. Participants completed pre- and post-dialogue outcome measures of: attitudes toward diversity, colorblind attitudes, and ethnocultural empathy. Following each of the eight weekly sessions, participants completed a group climate measure assessing engagement, avoidance, and conflict. Across eight weeks, group members perceived significant increases in engagement and decreases in avoidance, but no significant changes in …

The Relationships Between Internalized Heterosexism, Spirituality, And Mental Health In Lesbian, Gay, And Bisexual Young Adults, Jon Raymond Bourn

Masters Theses

Minority stressors like internalized heterosexism have been found to be related to suicidality among lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals (e.g., Savin-Williams & Ream, 2003). Additional research is needed, however, to better understand the factors that may serve as moderators (i.e., protective factors) in the relationships between minority stressors and negative mental health outcomes, such as depression and suicidality (e.g., Szymanski et al., 2008). The current study attempted to examine the relationships between internalized heterosexism and two negative mental health outcomes associated with suicide, psychache (defined as unbearable psychological pain) and depression, in a sample of LGB young adults. Given …

Women Authors Of Technical Writing Textbooks From 1923 To 1973, Melissa Nicole Wampler

Masters Theses

"The published histories of technical writing textbooks do not usually include many women-authored textbooks. To find out why women-authored textbooks have been marginalized in these pedagogical histories, I selected seven women-authored textbooks and four men-authored textbooks published from 1923 to 1973, investigated the backgrounds of the authors and key features of their textbooks, and used the collected data to compare the women-authored textbooks to the men-authored textbooks. I was not able to find any reason why the women-authored textbooks have been or should be marginalized in histories of technical writing textbooks; however, my study had several limitations. My thesis begins …

Frontier Access To East Tennessee: A Ceramic Analysis Of Ramsey House (40kn120), Bell Site (40kn202), And Exchange Place (40sl22), Abby Jane Naunheimer

Masters Theses

East Tennessee, falling within the Appalachian sub-culture, was romanticized by 19th-century writers as an unchanging, rural society. The stigma of a non-consumer, frontier culture persisted, questioning the ability of East Tennessee residents to access consumer goods during the frontier period. By using multiple lines of evidence, historical archaeology is well-positioned to study unknown settlers living within a misunderstood region.

Three frontier-era East Tennessee homesteads were chosen to conduct ceramic analyses as a beginning point of understanding consumer access. Ramsey House, Bell Site, and Exchange Place were each occupied beginning in the late 18th century and continued into the first quarter …

The Obstacles To The Integration Of Muslims In Germany And France: How Muslims And The States Impair The Smooth Transition From Immigrant To Citizen, Yael R. Cohen

Masters Theses

The place of Islam has been an ongoing debate for decades and still remains unresolved. Since the inception of the guest worker program initiated by European countries following the devastation of WWII, particularly France and Germany, Europe’s largest economies, the unanticipated occurred; what was conceived to be a temporary imported labor force which would eventually return home, turned into permanent settlement. For France, the labor pool emanated from colonial holdings predominantly from Maghreb, North Africa. Germany had no such labor source, but had a long ongoing relationship with Turkey which dated back to the Ottoman Empire. The entrance of this …

"An Asylum To The Persecuted And Oppressed Of Every Nation And Religion": Dissenters And Liberals In The Drive For Religious Freedom In Virginia, Shelley Dawn Bailess

Masters Theses

The struggle for full religious liberty in Virginia encompassed nearly two decades and generated thousands of documents in the form of petitions and legislation. In spite of historical tendencies to claim primacy in the victory of liberty over establishment in matters of religion for one denomination or individual, it was a unique triangulation of religious dissenters and prominent legislators that resulted in the separation of church and state in Virginia. The ideas that brought these seemingly disparate groups together emerged from theological, as well as political ideas that were prevalent in 18th century thought. The passage of Jefferson's Statute Establishing …

Disenchantment: The Formation, Distortion, And Transformation Of Identity In Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, Lydia K. Christoph

Masters Theses

Charles Dickens' Great Expectations (1861) stands apart from his other works as a powerful expression of his later social and theological views. Rife with rich characterizations, fairy-tale elements, grotesque and bizarre plot twists, Victorian social issues, and a beautifully thoughtful and imaginative commentary on the universal human themes of loss, guilt, abuse, identity, money, social status, and love, this novel remains an outstanding example of truly great art, both popular and classic. This story of identity formation in a nineteenth-century English context demonstrates how Dickens' life and writings, influenced by spurious and inconsistent theological beliefs, express the idea that sin …

The Puzzle Of Syphilis: A Literature Review On Putting The Pieces Together, Tabatha Anne Boekhout

Masters Theses

As culture changes, so does disease. This change has been seen in a variety of diseases, but none are so hotly debated and researched as the treponematoses, the four diseases related to and including venereal syphilis. There have been decades of debate on every aspect of syphilis: where it came from, who gave it to whom, how it evolved, and what the distribution was at various points in time. Herein, the four types of treponematoses will be examined along with the clinical pathology of each. The skeletal evidence will be examined carefully, taking into account the distribution of lesions for …

The Dial And The Transcendentalist Theory Of Reading, Emily A. Cope

Masters Theses

The two major anthologies of Transcendentalism, Perry Miller’s The Transcendentalists: An Anthology (1950) and Joel Myerson’s Transcendentalism: A Reader (2000), illustrate the scholarly divide over whether the movement was primarily religious or social and political in nature. Where Miller’s volume prioritizes the Transcendentalists’ theological radicalism, Myerson’s emphasizes their interest in social and political reform. This paper presents a third alternative: that the Transcendentalists be understood primarily as a community of readers invested in reimagining how and why antebellum Americans read, a concern we can see clearly in the pages of the Dial. Margaret Fuller’s article “A Short Essay on …

Ethics In Architecture: The Application Of An Ethic Of Care In The Design Of A Cancer Treatment Center, Emily Lynn Hardin

Masters Theses

The project chosen for this thesis is a healthcare facility, specifically a Cancer Treatment Center, as it is a paradigmatic project for application of an ethic of care. Moreover, healthcare facilities are not given due attention in architectural discourse and education despite the importance of their role in society. While healthcare specific organizations have begun to recognize and research the effects of built environment on health, this newfound concern seems to be generally limited to those organizations. Broader discourse involving other related professions, i.e. architecture, philosophy, psychology, sociology, etc., could benefit research as healthcare entails not only the treatment of …

Predictors Of Children’S Understandings Of Death: Age, Cognitive Ability, Death Experience, And Maternal Competence., Sally Beville Hunter

Masters Theses

Several factors have been documented as major factors affecting children’s formation of a mature death concept. Among these factors are the child’s age, cognitive ability, and exposure to death in his or her environment. The effects of parent communication patterns on children’s understanding of death have been understudied. This has left a gap in our knowledge of parents’ influence on their children’s conception of death.

In addition to the investigation of individual child factors, the present study investigated the relationship between mothers’ styles of communication about death and their children’s understandings of the subconcepts of death (i.e., inevitability, universality, finality, …