Digital Commons Network^™

Profiles Of Selected Mormon Actors, J. Michael Hunter

J Michael Hunter

“Profiles of Selected Mormon Actors” provides brief profiles of over 80 Mormon actors and actresses, including some biographical information and career highlights. This chapter appears in the first volume of Mormons and Popular Culture: The Global Influence of an American Phenomenon (Praeger 2013), a comprehensive treatment of Mormons and popular culture, providing an introduction and wide-ranging overview of the topic.

Can Intelligent Design Become Respectable, Kelly Smith

Kelly C Smith

What I want to try to do is give you a basic blueprint for respectability. If we make the assumption (and there are lots of people who would question this assumption, but I will make it for the purposes of this talk) that ID theory seriously wishes to become a respectable scientific theory, then I will tell you how to do it. If you follow my 4 simple steps to scientific respectability, you will get what you want: scientific respect, research funds, access to science classrooms, and so on, and so forth. It is actually fairly simple — all you …

I Also Survived A Debate With A Creationist (With Reflections On The Perils Of Democratic Information), Kelly C. Smith

Kelly C Smith

A personal narrative is presented which explores the author's experience of debating with a creationist.

God And Discipline: Religious Education And Character Building In A Christian School In Jakarta, Chang Yau Hoon

Chang Yau HOON

No abstract provided.

ظهور پيدايش قدرت هاى نهادی در دولت ایران وتأثير آن در مذاكرات با ايالات متحده, Ahmed Souaiaia

Ahmed E SOUAIAIA

Making Room: A Place For Children's Spirituality In The Christian Church, Heather Ingersoll

Heather Ingersoll

A relatively uncharted territory until recently, the concept of children as innate spiritual beings has garnered significant attention among scholars over the past two decades. The more that is learned about children’s spirituality the more apparent it becomes that the Christian church in the United States generally fails to provide sufficient space for children to explore, develop, and share their spirituality. This potentially leads children to suppress or disconnect from their spirituality in later years and also deprives a Christian community of the ability to learn and grow from children’s unique experiences of God and spirituality. This paper examines the …

Review: Worlds Without End: The Many Lives Of The Multiverse, Patrick Blanchfield

Mary-Jane Rubenstein

No abstract provided.

Technology And Power, Michael J. Paulus Jr.

Michael J. Paulus, Jr.

No abstract provided.

Hospitality As Companionship And Justice, Laura Stivers

Laura Stivers

My work has not been in direct ministry to people who are homeless but instead I have been involved in writing, teaching, and organizing to do the work of justice. . .to end homelessness as this homeless poet asks us to do. Organizing for justice through structural change (e.g. affordable housing, good work for all, universal healthcare, no wars, etc.) is of paramount importance. It is our fight. The problem of homelessness is less about the individuals who find themselves without a place to sleep and more about our collective identity as a people and a society. Organizing for justice, …

Earth-Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics In A New Key By Larry Rasmussen, Laura Stivers

Laura Stivers

Larry Rasmussen’s new book, Earth-Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key, like his last environmental ethics masterpiece Earth Community Earth Ethics (won the 1997 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion), is eloquently written and incorporates a multitude of interdisciplinary sources to argue for Creation justice.

Antiracist Education: From Theory To Practice By Julie Kailin., Laura Stivers

Laura Stivers

Although I help students to see the complexity of racism and how their actions or inactions can further individual and institutional racism, this book pushed me to think more deeply about the racism in my own university and classes and how I can more intentionally pursue antiracist education. The book is written for primary and secondary education, but it is useful for college and seminary professors in religion as well.

To Be Or Not To Be A Vegetarian, Laura Stivers

Laura Stivers

Teaching Goals: To explore personal integrity in environmental ethics. To understand the connection between environmental destruction and meat eating. To explore attitudes towards nature and nonhuman animals and the interconnections with attitudes towards various human animals. To explore the differences between individual and holistic ecocentrism. To explore how theology informs the question of whether to be vegetarian.

Science And Theology: Questioning The ‘Two-State Solution, William Cavanaugh

William T. Cavanaugh

No abstract provided.

Smart Growth: Affordable Housing, Public Transportation, And Open Space, Laura A. Stivers

Laura Stivers

Pastoral Care: From Past To Present, Ann Marie Kerlin

Ann Marie Kerlin

According to the U.S. National Conference on Mental Health, “Nationally, an estimated 45 million Americans suffer from illnesses like depression, schizophrenia or post-traumatic stress syndrome.” In a speech at this conference, President Obama stated that one out of five Americans experience mental illness in any year. A study published in 2013 surveyed prescription drug use and found that the second most common prescribed drugs were anti-depressants. Obviously there is a great demand for counseling and psychological care in the United States, and both secular and religious approaches to care are available. The purpose of this article is to review briefly …

Digital Wisdom For A Digital Age: Spirituality And Technology In The 21st Century, Michael J. Paulus Jr., Ryan Ingersoll

Ryan Ingersoll

In 2011, the Seattle Pacific University Library established a new service area for students called the Tech Desk. Initially conceived as a place where students could get help with and access to technologies needed for academic work, this program quickly became an incubator for ideas and innovations around meeting students’ technological needs. In 2014, we surveyed our largely “millennial” undergraduate population to assess the program and explore ways of enhancing it. Results from this survey, which are consistent with other research that complicates the notion of “digital natives,” revealed that our students desire and need help thinking about the role …

Digital Wisdom For A Digital Age: Spirituality And Technology In The 21st Century, Michael J. Paulus Jr., Ryan Ingersoll

Michael J. Paulus, Jr.

In 2011, the Seattle Pacific University Library established a new service area for students called the Tech Desk. Initially conceived as a place where students could get help with and access to technologies needed for academic work, this program quickly became an incubator for ideas and innovations around meeting students’ technological needs. In 2014, we surveyed our largely “millennial” undergraduate population to assess the program and explore ways of enhancing it. Results from this survey, which are consistent with other research that complicates the notion of “digital natives,” revealed that our students desire and need help thinking about the role …

Fossil Baramins On Noah's Ark: The "Amphibians", Marcus R. Ross

Marcus R. Ross

Here I provide a compendium of extinct “amphibian” groups, representatives of which may have been carried aboard Noah’s Ark. Following previous work by the Ark Encounter team, I selected the taxonomic rank of family as a first-order proxy for the biblical “kind.” The resulting tabulation places 54 extinct “amphibian” families/kinds on board the Ark. While this number hinges upon taxonomies built upon fossil data (and its inherent shortcomings compared to extant forms), it serves as a reasonable approximation of the number of fossil “amphibians” taken aboard the Ark. When added to previously determined kinds of extant anurans, caudates, and gymnophionans, …

Responding To ‘Not In My Backyard’ Advocates: A Christian Feminist Justice Approach, Laura A. Stivers

Laura Stivers

What Is Enlightenment? An Islamic Perspective, Muqtedar Khan

Muqtedar Khan

This essay draws on Immanuel Kant’s concept of enlightenment as an escape from self- imposed ignorance and argues that a similar concept of enlightenment can be understood within the Muslim context as escape from self-imposed jahiliyyah, which is understood as fear to exercise reason publicly. The article advocates for ijtihad, is critical of Taqlid, and invokes Islamic sources to invest confidence in contemporary use of reason for interpreting Islam.

Contesting Faith, Truth, And Religious Language At The Creation Museum: A Historical-Theological Reflection, Brent A. R. Hege

Brent A. R. Hege

The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, attempts to demonstrate the flaws in contemporary science and to offer an alternative explanation of human origins and biological complexity rooted in a specific reading of the biblical narrative. This effort, however, is paradoxically rooted in the worldview of modern science and the Enlightenment. This article will examine the Creation Museum’s definitions of faith, truth, and religious language and will compare these definitions to those of mainline Protestant Christianity to uncover the historical and theological presuppositions of Creationist and mainline Protestant engagements with contemporary science.

Love Your Enemy? Reflections At The Centenary Of World War I, Denis Kaiser

Denis Kaiser

No abstract provided.

The Aesthetic Of Revolution In The Film And Literature Of Naguib Mahfouz, Nathaniel Greenberg

Nathaniel Greenberg

In the wake of the 1952 Revolution, Egypt’s future Nobel laureate in literature devoted himself exclusively to writing for film. The Aesthetic of Revolution in the Film and Literature of Naguib Mahfouz is the first full-length study in English to examine this critical period in the author’s career and to contextualize it within the scope of post-revolutionary Egyptian politics and culture. Before returning to literature in 1959 with his post-revolutionary masterpiece Children of the Alley, Mahfouz wrote or co-wrote some twenty odd scripts, many of them among the most successful in Egyptian history. He did so at a time when …

The Tension Between Normativity And Plurality In Religious Dogmas And In Constitutional Principles, Vinicius Pintas Marinho

Vinicius Pintas Marinho

This essay briefly analyzes whether the tension between normativity and plurality in religious dogmas may shed a light in the similar tension also found in the dynamics of constitutional principles. The application of Gadamer’s hermeneutical theory to a transcendental theological framework is placed into conversation with Dworkin’s integrity of the law. This is undertaken through a comparison between the dynamics of conversation for religious dogmas as symbols of a tradition and the function of constitutional principles in the context of Ronald Dworkin’s theory of law as integrity.

Christian Feminist Conception Of Justice, Laura A. Stivers

Laura Stivers

Review Of Old Testament Theology By R.W.L. Moberly, David D. Pettus

David D Pettus

No abstract provided.

Caritas In Communion: Theological Foundations Of Catholic Health Care, M. Lysaught

M. Therese Lysaught

No abstract provided.

Unaffiliated Lay Vincentians' Informal Engagement With The Vincentian Mission, Jonathan L. Wiggins Ph.D., Mark M. Gray Ph.D., James Fangmeyer Jr

Scott Kelley

In winter 2013, DePaul University’s Office of Mission and Values (OMV) commissioned the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University to conduct a survey of “unaffiliated lay Vincentians,” that is young adults between the ages of 18 to 35 who have had a formative experience in the Vincentian mission either as a student or as a post-graduate volunteer at a Vincentian institution. The central purpose of this research is to help OMV explore these unaffiliated lay Vincentians’ understanding of their experiences with the Vincentian mission, their commitment to that mission, and their desire for more formation …

The Anomaly Of Tony Alamo Christian Ministries: A New Testament-Based Call For Christian Polygamy, Spencer L. Allen

Spencer L Allen

Currently serving a 175-year prison sentence for transporting underage girls across state lines for sexual purposes, new religious movement leader Tony Alamo (b. 1934) of Tony Alamo Christian Ministries contends not only that Christian men should be polygamous but that they actually are commanded to be by Old Testament polygamy laws. Alamo bases this interpretation primarily upon Jesus’ statement in Matthew 5:17 that he came to fulfill the law, not abolish it. Numerous other New Testament passages regarding marriage and the law are likewise reinterpreted through a polygamous lens, and the Old Testament’s ‘‘Holy Men of God’’ (e.g., Abraham, Jacob …

Theology, Politics, And Antimodernism In Nazi Germany: Problematizing Theological Rhetoric And Political Theology, Brent A. R. Hege

Brent A. R. Hege

A review essay of: Hitler’s Theology: A Study in Political Religion. By Rainer Bucher. Translated by Rebecca Pohl. Edited and with an introduction by Michael Hoelzl. London: Continuum, 2011. xx+140 pp. $120.00 Cloth, $34.95 Paper Theological Tractates. By Erik Peterson. Edited, translated, and with an introduction by Michael J. Hollerich. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. xxx + 256 pp. $75.00 Cloth, $24.95 Paper