Arts and Humanities Commons^™

My Kinship With The Trees, C. Daniela Shapiro

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This paper explores facets of patriarchy affecting women and the natural world. The paper suggests a cultivation of allyship and relationality between women and nature due to a shared experience of objectification within patriarchy. The separation of women from nature through origin stories, science, religion, language, and advertisement will be discussed. Examples from the graphic memoir Running without Moving are employed to emphasize this philosophy, including first person accounts.

The Voice Of One Crying In The Wilderness, Megan Kenyon

MFA in Visual Art

I am a Midwestern, Christian, and feminist artist. I make work about the beautiful, broken, and absurd ways in which American evangelical culture influences lives, especially women’s lives. I’m dragging everything into the light by deconstructing and critiquing the world in which I live, move, and have my being. I do this by harnessing prophetic imagination and incarnational space to shine a light on how patriarchy infects evangelical Christian theology and practice. Using prophetic imagination through photographic self-portraiture and text (my own and found texts using the Bible), I seek to make plain the effects of white, Christian patriarchy on …

Necessary Myths, Jessica Ramsey

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

My thesis essay was inspired by my search for a belief system that could transform despair over what will be lost through climate change into valuing what we still have. In researching the earliest iterations of belief structures, I came across the Maros-Pangkep cave paintings. These paintings are the oldest known works of art, and by my interpretation the first evidence of religious life. They are a series of representational paintings which tell a story, and I was inspired to emulate this methodology in my own exploration of belief.

My essay investigates the relationship between images and religion. Through W.J.T …

From The Papers Of One Still Living: Kierkegaard And British Literature, 1932-1995, Asher Gelzer-Govatos

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation traces the impact of the life, work, and thought of the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard on British authors of the mid-twentieth century. Following the translation of Kierkegaard’s writings into English in the mid-1930s, British intellectual life underwent a Kierkegaard boom, but Kierkegaard’s impact lingered long after his initial introduction in the build up to World War II. In sketching Kierkegaard’s importance to a handful of midcentury authors – Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Flann O’Brien, W. H. Auden, and R. S. Thomas – I show that Kierkegaard remained connected to a sense of “crisis” in British …

Contrite Hearts: Lay Clergie In Late Medieval England, Sara Fredman

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project reads two texts composed by women in the shadow of Arundel’s Constitutions – The Book of Margery Kempe and Eleanor Hull’s Commentary on the Seven Penitential Psalms – as two forms of response to the late fourteenth-century critique of clergy best exemplified by William Langland’s Piers Plowman. Langland’s poem describes the failures of institutional clergy, particularly that of their responsibility to evoke contrition in lay penitents. The poem deftly questions “Clergie,” revealing a multiplicity of meanings and the inability of the myriad forms of clerical authority to serve the “lewed.” The poem ends with the allegorical figure of …

The Sacred Emergence Of Nature, Ursula Goodenough, Terrence W. Deacon

Biology Faculty Publications & Presentations

No abstract provided.

Subjective, Cultural, And Natural Ecology, Ursula Goodenough

Biology Faculty Publications & Presentations

No abstract provided.

A Setback To The Dialogue: Response To Huston Smith, Ursula Goodenough

Biology Faculty Publications & Presentations

Huston Smith's book, Why Religion Matters, offers an eloquent evocation of mystical sensibility. Unfortunately, along the way, he offers a strongly negative and often inaccurate account of the scientific worldview, the claim being that the science is laying siege to the spiritual.

Religiopoiesis, Ursula Goodenough

Biology Faculty Publications & Presentations

Religiopoiesis describes the crafting of religion, a core activity of humankind. Each religion is grounded in its myth, and each myth includes a cosmology of origins and destiny. The scientific worldview coheres as such a myth and calls for a religiopoietic response. The difficulties, opportunities, and imperatives inherent in this call are explored, particularly as they impact the working scientist.

Reflections On Scientific And Religious Metaphor, Ursula Goodenough

Biology Faculty Publications & Presentations

The importance of scientific conflicts for theology and philosophy is difficult to judge. In many disputes of significance, prominent scientists can be found on both sides. Profound philosophical and religious implications are sometimes said to be implied by the new theory as well. This article examines the dispute over natural selection between Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould as a contemporary instance of such a conflict. While both claim that profound philosophical conclusions flow from their own alternative account of evolution, I suggest that the implication is not as great as is claimed and that the alleged implications have as …

Reflections On Science And Technology, Ursula Goodenough

Biology Faculty Publications & Presentations

Science and technology are frequently confused. This essay points out the bases for this confusion and then focuses on a basic distinction, namely, that whereas science brings us information that we have little choice but to absorb and reflect upon, technology is something that humans elect to do and, hence, can also elect not to do. It is proposed that technological ethics are most cogently undertaken with scientific understanding as the linchpin and religious/artistic sensibilities as the muse.