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Four Case Studies In Teaching Sermons At A Public University, Robert Ellison

English Faculty Research

In this paper, delivered at the March 2017 meeting of the Northeast Modern Language Association, I discuss my experience with teaching sermons at Marshall University, a public institution in Huntington, WV. I have done this in four classes over the past several years: “Good Essays” (a 200-level general-education course in the English Department); “God Talk” (another gen-ed course, team-taught with a faculty member in religious studies); “Sermon: Text and Performance” (a 400-level class in the Honors College); and “The Victorian Spoken Word” (a graduate seminar in English).

The audiences were very different, as were the texts we used (Newman, Spurgeon, …

0836: M. Homer Cummings Papers, 1909-1968, Marshall University Special Collections

Guides to Manuscript Collections

The 31 boxes in this collection contain the following materials by Cummings: college examination papers; sermons and radio addresses; newspaper columns; letters; poems (single copies, booklets, and a spiral-bound book); and songs (single copies, booklets, song books, printing plates, and recordings). There are also letters written to him; newspaper articles about him and his family; materials from the Literary and Bible Training School and McCrum Slavonic Training School (Rev. and Mrs. Cummings’ alma maters); song books and vinyl records from his collection; and various miscellaneous items.

To view materials from this collection that are digitized and available online, search the …

Some Reflections On The Field Of Sermon Studies, Robert Ellison

English Faculty Research

Multidisciplinary endeavours with the word ‘studies’ in their names have brought like-minded scholars together for over sixty years. Those specializing in certain parts of the world, for example, can join the North American Conference on British Studies (founded in 1950), the British Association for American Studies (1955), the African Studies Association (1957), or a host of other groups. Similarly, organisations for scholars interested in specific time periods include the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies (1983), the Society for Renaissance Studies (1967) and the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies. Finally, students of politics, gender and other aspects …

The Sedes Sapientiae: Orthodox Sculptural Images Of The Virgin Mary Derived From The Ancient Mother-Goddess Tradition, Carol King

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The Virgin Mary is rarely mentioned in the Bible yet legends about her abound throughout the centuries. Worship of the Virgin is recorded as early as the 3rd century, and soon thereafter visual representations emerged to serve as devotional objects for her patrons. Mary’s popularity among the people left the Church with a fundamental problem: they must either sanction her worship and bring the pagans into their fold; or they must diminish her role in salvation, totally rid Christianity of the female divine, and risk losing converts to older-world traditions. This dilemma was settled at the Council of Ephesus in …

Genesis 2:26, Michael G. M. Cornelius

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

On the eighth day, God sighed.

The noise rumbled through heaven and earth. The cherubim were silenced; the seraphim held their breath. Even the archangels ceased their endless activity to crane their necks and look about.

The earth trembled. Volcanos erupted, the great continental plates divided. The pools of celestial ooze stopped bubbling and crackling.

All angels, all creatures, all rocks and trees - even the land itself waited in breathless, awful anticipation.

Nothing happened.

A rock relaxed, falling off a mountain. The volcanos grew dormant. The cherubim laughed, softly, nervously, then began to sing again, a lullaby. The seraphim …