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Living In Question, Cynthia Rothschild

Occasional Paper Series

September 11 and the following months found Rothschild's students asking: "Why is there suffering?" "What has real value for me and for my society?" and, most resoundingly, "Is there a God?" She had few answers. The value that came to the forefront in her post-September 11 teaching was the value of living in question.

Overcoming Hidden Shame To More Effectively Connect With God And His People, Colleen Lou Worrell

Masters Theses

This research project was designed to help Christians identify and overcome hidden shame so that they would be able to enjoy a more authentic connection with God and as an extension, to His people. I chose this topic because Christians are often seen by non-Christians as being judgmental, critical and unloving. This behavior does not reflect the transformation and behavior mandated in Romans 12 and other similar scriptures. Because these behaviors are sinful, the investigation began with a review of mankind’s first sin in the garden of Eden. Out of that review, I discovered that shame is commonly found alongside …

The U.S. Catholic Bishops And Gay Civil Rights: Four Case Studies, Robert Nugent

The Catholic Lawyer

No abstract provided.

Intelligibility And Normativity In The Study Of Religion, Bharat Ranganathan

Religion Faculty Publications

In his essay “The Devil in Mr. Jones,” J. Z. Smith issues a call. If religionists do not, he writes, “persist in the quest for intelligibility, there can be no human sciences, let alone, any place for the study of religion within them.” How should Smith’s call be construed? In other words, what constitutes the “quest for intelligibility”? And what (if anything) differentiates the religionist’s quest for intelligibility from that of other humanistic scholars? Taking as my starting point Smith’s call, I will mount a constructive proposal. On my proposal, religionists should conceive their task as twofold. First, religionists should …

Martin Luther’S Spiritual Practice Was Key To The Success Of The Reformation, Marion Goldman, Steven Pfaff

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

"On Oct. 31, 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of Germany’s Wittenberg Castle Church and inadvertently ushered in what came to be known as the Reformation.

In his theses, Luther explicitly attacked the Catholic Church’s lucrative practice of selling papal indulgences that promised individuals they could purchase absolution from their sins and hasten their way into heaven.

This was far more than a simple critique of the indulgence trade. Luther challenged the Church’s overall authority. Over the next century, Luther’s ideas seeded upheavals and transformed the Western world by diminishing the Church’s power and introducing new …

Aids: Legal, Public, And Pastoral Implications, Frank C. Morris, Jr.

The Catholic Lawyer

No abstract provided.

A Historical Account Of The Curran Controversy, Michael Scott Feely

The Catholic Lawyer

No abstract provided.

How Can We Respond To Those Who Hate Religion? (Leader's Guide And Participant's Guide), Lydia Marcus

Study Guides for Faith & Science Integration

A study of Antitheism's Major Critiques of Religion

“If You Want Peace, Work For Justice:” Assessing Pope Paul Vi As A Peacebuilder On The Levels Of Insight And Action, Christopher W. Hrynkow

Peace and Conflict Studies

Paul VI was the first reigning pope to travel via airplane. On one such trip, he addressed the UN General Assembly, emphatically declaring “War never again! Never again war!” During the same period, Paul VI also saw the Second Vatican Council through to its completion. Vatican II produced an articulation of substantive peace in one of its final documents, Gaudium et Spes. This article employs an analytical yardstick through reading Gaudium et Spes in conversation with a Peace and Conflict Studies perspective, as a means to assess Paul VI’s peacemaking efforts on the levels of insight and action. Specifically, …

Contemporary Catholic Conversations 2017-2018, Curtis Center

Mission & Culture Publications

The Curtis Center at Sacred Heart University is a new initiative within the Office of Mission and Catholic Identity. The goal of the Curtis Center is engage SHU and the wider community in topics of interest and concern in today’s world.

The Center will host the annual inaugural series “Contemporary Catholic Conversations” during the 2017-18 academic year, a lecture series that will feature expert presenters and meaningful discussions.

Bishop Walter W. Curtis was on the cutting edge in 1963 when founding this university. He was energized by the Second Vatican Council to face the issues of his day, which led …

Tibetan Women’S Experiences With Childbirth: A Comparative Study Of Present-Day Shangri-La And Previous Studies In Tibetan Communities, Billie Dunn-Mcmartin

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

What are the experiences of Tibetan women living in and around Shangri-La with pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood? In order to explore this topic, one must first understand the context in which this topic exists: Tibetan Buddhism and culture. This paper gives a short background on women and the female body in Tibetan Buddhism, the Tibetan Medical system, and the current accessibility and regulation of hospitals, before entering into the topic of Tibetan women’s experiences with childbirth. The experiences and traditional practices of childbirth are important, as birth is universally significant as well as particularly religiously significant in Tibetan Buddhism, and …

Exodus As New Creation, Israel As Foundling: Stories In The History Of An Idea, Christopher Evangelos John Brenna

Dissertations (1934 -)

This study surveys the development of two literary phenomena in early Jewish and Christian tradition. The first is the birth story of a portentous child, exemplified by the birth stories of Moses, Noah, Melchizedek, and Jesus in biblical and Second Temple period literature. The second is the mythical expansion of the exodus tradition, which interprets the crossing of the Red Sea as a recreation of the people of Israel. I examine the appropriation of these two phenomena in the late antique Hellenistic story, Joseph and Aseneth. I contend that (1) the early Jewish birth story paradigm is influenced by the …

What Is The Golden Calf?, Michael B. Hundley

All Faculty Scholarship for the College of Arts and Humanities

The golden calf episode in Exodus is both popular and perplexing. While it has a shared ancient Near Eastern heritage of understanding divine presence, it chooses to undermine that heritage to promote its particular agenda. This study clarifies the text by situating it more firmly in its ancient Near Eastern context and by addressing the biblical adaptations that emerge when we address each of the chapter’s distinct voices. I also consider the importance of perspective—what each character sees and how that vision affects the character’s viewpoint—and the importance of divine visibility both in Exodus 32 and in the larger non-Priestly …

Muslim-Christian Dialogue: A Challenge For North-American Spiritans?, William Headley C.S.Sp.

Spiritan Horizons

No abstract provided.

Fixing Ground Zero: Race And Religion In Francis Lawrence’S I Am Legend, Michael E. Heyes

Journal of Religion & Film

Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend is a complex intertext of Matheson’s novel of the same name and its two previous film adaptations. While the film attempts to depict racism as monstrous, the frequent invocation of 9/11 imagery and Christian symbolism throughout the film recodes the vampiric dark-seekers as radical Islamic terrorists. This serves to further enshrine an us/Christians vs. them/Muslim dichotomy present in post-9/11 America, a dichotomy that the film presents as “curable” through the spread of Christianity and the fall of Islam.

Dreams, Doubt, And Dread: The Spiritual In Film, Joel Mayward

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a book review of Zachary Settle and Taylor Worley, eds. Dreams, Doubt, and Dread: The Spiritual in Film. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2016.

Mixed-Method Study Of Perfectionism And Religiosity Among Mormons: Implications For Cultural Competence And Clinical Practice, Samuel O. Peer, James S. Mcgraw

Issues in Religion and Psychotherapy

Extending prior research on perfectionism and religiosity, the current study investigated their relation among Latter-day Saints (LDS)–also known as Mormons–through a sequential mixed-methods design. An online community sample of 194 LDS completed the Religiousness Measure-Revised and the Hewitt Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale. Subsequently, six of these participants were interviewed to further explore how perfectionism manifests among Mormons in a qualitative pilot study. Quantitative results demonstrated significant positive correlations between religiosity and perfectionism, but only for self- and other-oriented perfectionism. Qualitative content analysis indicated further how adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism manifest in an LDS context. Implications for culturally competent practice and future …

Grace As Psychotherapy: Suggestions For Therapists With Latter-Day Saint Clients, Matthew R. Draper, James S. Mcgraw, Daniel Sturtevant, Richard D. Draper

Issues in Religion and Psychotherapy

There is a growing body of literature that shows how perfectionism has tremendous effects on a person’s well-being. Specifically, maladaptive perfectionism continues to have an alarming influence on many individuals’ experiences with depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and suicidal ideations. Interestingly, for religious or spiritual individuals, perfectionism is often colored by profound religious themes that further complicate treatment. This paper seeks to explore this issue by introducing the case of Sister Vivi, a Mormon woman who suffered a great deal of depression and anxiety, and eventually a suicide attempt due to perfectionism entwined within her religious beliefs. In cooperation with her …

God And Man In The Catholic Law School, Leonard J. Nelson, Iii

The Catholic Lawyer

No abstract provided.

Review Of Council Of Fifty, Minutes, March 1844–1846, Benjamin E. Park

Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel

The Council of Fifty, a clandestine organization founded by Joseph Smith in the final months of his life, has remained one of the most controversial episodes in LDS history. Created during Smith’s 1844 presidential run and while internal and external tensions in Nauvoo were reaching a boiling point, the council embodied both the Church’s growing anxiety and its desperate attempts to find some path to resolution. And because the written records of the council have been restricted from scholars since their origin, the many historians who have tried to reconstruct these meetings were forced to do the equivalent of seeing …

End Matter

Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel

No abstract provided.

An Islamic Approach To Migration And Refugees, Zeki Saritoprak

2017 Faculty Bibliography

No abstract provided.

Retrieving Realism: A Whiteheadian Wager, Matthew T. Segall

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

This essay argues that the organic realism of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) provides a viable alternative to anti-realist tendencies in modern and postmodern philosophy since Descartes. The metaphysical merits of Whitehead’s philosophy of organism are unpacked in conversation with Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor’s recent book Retrieving Realism (2015). Like Dreyfus and Taylor, Whitehead’s philosophical project was motivated by a desire to heal the modern epistemic wound separating soul from world in order to put human consciousness back into meaningful contact with reality. While Dreyfus and Taylor’s book succeeds in articulating the problem cogently, its still too phenomenological answer remains …

Electronic Dance Music Events As Modern-Day Ritual, Audrey Redfield, Marie I. Thouin-Savard

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

Electronic dance music (EDM) events may function as a ritual space for psycho-spiritual exploration and personal development, often linked to the occurrence of non-ordinary states of consciousness in participants. This paper reviews the literature addressing the spiritual, religious, and transpersonal facets of participants’ experiences at EDM events, with an emphasis on the subsequent integration of these experiences into daily life. Several empirical studies conducted in the past two decades, of which the most recent was conducted by the first author of the present paper (Redfield, 2017, this issue), provides grounds to argue that EDM events can be vectors for enhancing …

An Analysis Of The Experiences And Integration Of Transpersonal Phenomena Induced By Electronic Dance Music Events, Audrey Redfield

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

Electronic dance music (EDM) events are attended by millions of people all over the world. While prior research uncovered the spiritual and religious elements as well as the transpersonal nature of EDM events, this preliminary study further explored the types of transpersonal phenomena that participants experience at EDM events and their subsequent integration of these experiences into daily life. A semi-structured, in-depth interview was used to explore this topic with 12 EDM participants. A thematic analysis was conducted on the data. Findings suggested that EDM events have the potential to foster interpersonal relationships with the numinous, spiritual beings, and human …

Taylor’S Soft Perennialism: Psychology Or New Age Spiritual Vision?, Glenn Hartelius

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

Taylor has responded to critiques of his soft perennialism model in relationship to what he has called awakening experiences. The fact that some individuals have this type of experience away from the context of religion or spirituality, according to soft perennialism, is explained by a sort of landscape of experience representing the diverse ways in which one may engage with and experience this essential beingness. While this inspiring vision could possibly be true, just as numerous other speculations about ultimate reality might be true; however, the evidence advanced in support of soft perennialism notion is not valid in the context …

Circular Reasoning Is Not The Uroboros: Rejecting Perennialism As A Psychological Theory, Glenn Hartelius

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

Efforts to present valid evidence for perennialist models do not withstand critical scrutiny. One strategy common to most versions of perennialism points to perceived patterns in reports of spiritual experiences, whether from traditional, clinical, or phenomenological accounts as evidence for such an approach; the shortcoming is that these same patterns are the basis for perennialist premises. Offering one’s premises as evidence for their conclusions is circular reasoning, and does not constitute valid support for an idea. Pointing to similarities between reports of spiritual or other transformative experiences is what inspires perennialist models, but is not evidence for their validity. Careful …

A Time To Laugh: Religious Humor In Contemporary Russia, Mikhail Sergeev

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

"Contemporary Russian religious humor continues the tradition of this spiritual and selfsacrificial laughter. The anecdotes that are gathered here make fun not only of religion and its characteristic attributes, but of human imperfections and shortcomings, which manifest themselves in relation to various aspects of worship. Everything is good in moderation, including religious zeal that is not the goal by itself, but the instrument of spiritual and moral development. There is a proverbial saying in Russia—force a fool to pray to God and he will beat his forehead. Many anecdotes portray in a comic light this certain pseudo-piety, the eternal human …

The New Testament And The Future Of The Cosmos, Ryan P. Juza

ATS Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Review Of Mormons In The Piazza: History Of The Latter-Day Saints In Italy, Richard N. Holzapfel

Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel

Mormons in the Piazza: History of the Latter-day Saints in Italy is a tour de force and has immediately become a model for future histories written about Latter-day Saints living, working, serving, and struggling to find a place in nations outside the United States.