Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Fortune, Fate, And Free Will: Chaucer’S Encounters With Providence, Ciara Jane Turula

Masters Theses

It’s easy to assume that the world is innately unstable as Chaucer seems to do in the short poems “Truth”, “Lak of Stedfastnesse”, “The Forger Age” and “Gentilesse”, and yet we are called to wonder with the Black Knight in The Book of the Duchess how any divine authority could let this be the case. As Lady Philosophy informs readers in Boece, the world is not really Fortune’s chaotic kingdom of unreliability. Instead, the Earth and all that happens within it has already been laid out in the plan of Providence, which unravels regardless of whether individuals are aware …

Freedom Is A Leaky System: Living Together In The Mess, Calgary Haines-Trautman

Masters Theses

Litter is upsetting.

People upset by litter often misunderstand its sources. Those for whom state power has worked look for simple solutions that seek to surveil, fine, and punish culprits.

Reality is messy.

The path of trash from hand to landfill requires a series of successful transfers between receptacles and responsibility. Wind, accidents, and spills in automated systems complicate trash’s path from here to away. Out of this complexity, leaks accumulate—visible issues without clear causes or responsibility.

Leaks are unavoidable.

There is an irreducible gap between the world as it is and our models of it. In this mismatch, …

Moretheless, Abdelghani Alnahawi

Masters Theses

material investigations becoming questions with interjections

From John Street To Union, Andrew Shea

Masters Theses

I have been making paintings constructed loosely from my experience of walking about one mile each morning from my apartment in Fox Point to my studio in downtown Providence, and of walking back each night. My goal is to rediscover the feeling of these outdoor places—their lights, atmospheres, colors, and topographies—through the process of painting inside the studio. As such, the visual representations of these paintings are not straight-forward and objective, but oblique and affective.

I hope that these works draw one’s attention to the idiosyncrasies of natural life and to the particularities of weather. I want the paintings to …

Providential Capitalism: Heavenly Intervention And The Atlantic’S Divine Economist, Ian F.P. Green

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Providential capitalism names the marriage of providential Christian values and market-oriented capitalist ideology in the post-revolutionary Atlantic through the mid nineteenth century. This is a process by which individuals permitted themselves to be used by a so-called “divine economist” at work in the Atlantic market economy. Backed by a slave market, capital transactions were rendered as often violent ecstatic individual and cultural experiences. Those experiences also formed the bases for national, racial, and classed identification and negotiation among the constellated communities of the Atlantic. With this in mind, writers like Benjamin Franklin, Olaudah Equiano, and Ukawsaw Gronniosaw presented market success …

The Spirit Of A Weak God: Reimagining Divine Providence After The Critique Of Ontotheology, Wendy Theresa Crosby

Dissertations

The question of this dissertation is whether and how divine providence can function within the framework of a weak God theology. While theories of divine providence traditionally depend on a powerful God capable of bringing all to a good end, I argue that providence remains essential to Christian hope and participation even if God is rethought as weak. This dissertation develops a concept of providence within weak God theology through an understanding of the Holy Spirit which is non-totalizing and dependent on creation's response. Therefore, providence empowers human action rather than ensuring victory despite our actions.

The dissertation begins by …

Paul Helm's "Compatibilist" View Of Divine Providence In Light Of The Frankfurtian Debate., Simon Sang-Kyun Ko

CTS PhD Doctoral Dissertations

It is easy to find in prominent scholarly opinion today that to maintain its comprehensive divine determinism the Reformed Christian tradition must endorse metaphysical compatibilism to affirm some semblance of creaturely freedom. Arguably, one of the two Reformed scholars who have promulgated this idea the most is Paul Helm. Interestingly, while Helm’s “no-risk” view of divine providence started off with pretty straightforward classical compatibilism, it has since morphed into what is akin to source incompatibilism. At the heart of this transformation is Helm’s increasing interest in the feasibility of “irreducible agency, despite the fixity of the future” (or to use …

Inscrutable Providence: The Doctrine Of Divine Concurrence And The Theology Of Charles Hodge., Nathan J. Archer

CTS PhD Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation will discuss the doctrine of concurrence within the larger doctrine of providence. Although concurrence was once a key component of the doctrine of providence, it was difficult to maintain in a post-enlightenment theological and philosophical context, even for a Reformed thinker such as Charles Hodge. Although Hodge labored to explain the older formulation of this doctrine—especially as articulated by Francis Turretin—Hodge found concurrence problematic and did not commend its use. In addition to shifting philosophical sensibilities, concerns regarding pantheism were a significant reason why some nineteenth-century American Calvinists distanced themselves from concurrence. Nonetheless, Hodge’s theology stands largely in …

Leibniz's Theodicies, Joseph Michael Anderson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Evil poses a particular problem to early modern thinkers. Late scholasticism, while itself variegated, provided a number of resources for dispelling concerns about the justice of God raised by the existence of evil. With much of the metaphysics of the scholastics rejected, the new philosophers needed either to find inventive ways to make the old solutions fit into their new systems, to come up with new resources for dispelling the difficulties, or to accept the difficulties as insurmountable, likely via fideism or atheism. Leibniz, I claim, provides a provocative mixture of the first two approaches.

Many readers think Leibniz's solution …

The Pulpit And The Nation: Clergymen, Political Culture, And The Creation Of An American National Identity, Spencer W. Mcbride

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the politicization of clergymen during the American Revolution and explains the direct impact this process had on the development of a national polity and a distinct American national identity in the early republic. Both during and after the Revolution, clergymen utilized providential rhetoric and biblical symbolism to assign greater religious and moral significance to political events. Focusing on the period between 1775 and 1800, this dissertation describes and analyzes the extent to which national political leaders relied on local clergymen when securing independence and thereafter inventing a new nation. Ultimately, it argues that clergymen were essential to …

Man Down South, Joseph B. Plicka

Theses and Dissertations

In this novella the main character, David Crumm, is getting older and decides not to wait around and die on his frozen ranch, but to retire to warmer climates. He leaves everything with his daughter, gets in his truck and drives south with his dog. In Florida, he accidentally hits and kills a migrant woman on her bicycle. The woman has a young son who survives the accident and, through a number of converging factors, David is compelled to personally take the boy back to his relatives in Nicaragua. The book then deals with David's experiences as he heads farther …

Study Of The Pioneers Of Providence, Utah And Their Children, Hazel Mclean Tibbitts

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis poses a number of questions about the pioneers and their decendants: Where did the pioneer settlers of Providence come from? What skills and resources did they bring with them to "tame" the wilderness? Did they come as family units or as single men? What happened as the community grew and the resources were limited? Where did the settlers go or what did they do as the land became scarce? Was limited land the reason for the movement out of the community or were there other considerations? What effects did emigration have on the family ties of the second …

Portent And Providence- An Investigation Of The Puritan Habit Of Deciphering The Will Of God In The Natural And The Preternatural With Special Reference To "The Scarlet Letter" By Nathaniel Hawthorne, Milton Sernett

Master of Divinity Thesis

This paper has something to do with both Puritan history and Nathaniel Hawthorne. As originally conceived it was entitled The Puritan Prolapsis: A Study in the Conception and Collapse of the "Holy Commonwealth," with Special Reference to the Interpretation of Nathaniel Hawthorne. It was to have been an attempt to isolate the basis, both experiential and theological, for the "Holy Commonwealth" and to determine what undermined the colony, especially as to the tension between the individual and the society in New England. However, after a good deal of research, it was found that such a problem would force a consideration …

The Validity Of Conditional Prayer And The Providence Of God, Robert Spieler

Master of Sacred Theology Thesis

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the problem stated towards the end of' establishing unequivocally the fact that conditional prayer is a valid reality in the realm of God's providence. A solution of the problem is, of course, impossible on any other premises except those which are faithful to Scripture. It will be noted how the systems of rational philosophy serve only to establish the impossibility of reconciling the fact of God’s providence with the fact of conditional prayer. According to such systems, the problem is usually solved by denying either the reality of conditional prayer or …