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From Modes Of Production To The Resurrection Of The Body: A Labor Theory Of Revolutionary Subjectivity & Religious Ideas, Benjamin Suriano

Dissertations (1934 -)

In this dissertation I attempt two needed tasks within historical materialism: first, to reestablish the standpoint of labor as the normative basis for critical theory beyond irrational bourgeois categories, and second, to show that labor’s own self-mediating rationalization, if it is to move beyond these contradictory categories, necessarily requires a certain religious-utopian consciousness. The dominant Weberian and Marxist paradigms for understanding labor and its relation to the religious variously perpetuated irrational bourgeois conceptions of labor as a bare efficient cause, with religion paternalistically positioned as an inherently idealist or mystifying external form. I argue, however, that the concrete rationality of …

Sanctification As Virtue And Mission: The Politics Of Holiness, Nathan Willowby

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation considers the political implications of the doctrine of holiness. I proceed by demonstrating the neglect of holiness in political theology, the viability of the holiness movement as an embodied witness of the political implications of the doctrine of holiness, and a biblical trajectory in Leviticus that extends into the New Testament. I describe this scriptural holiness as vocation for all of God’s people through personal formation and outward societal action to extend God’s holiness. With attention to the approaches of political theology and formation, I demonstrate that the holiness movement of the nineteenth century offers an example of …

The Interplay Between Forms Of Revelation: Implications For Theological Methodology, Andrew Tompkins

Seminary Scholarship Symposium

The interplay between forms of revelation has been a matter of much discussion in theological discourse for many centuries. While this paper is not particularly concerned with the final say on the doctrine of revelation it is concerned with revelation and its relation to theological method. In other words, what is the significance of the various modes or forms that revelation takes in connection with the way theology is approached and done? The thesis of this paper is that God is not limited to one form of revelation, but rather that each revelatory form can and does inform the others …

Return To Me: Lenten Reflections From Holy Cross (2016), Office Of Mission, College Of The Holy Cross

Office of Mission Publications

This reflection booklet was prepared by the Office of Mission at the College of the Holy Cross to serve as a prayer aid throughout the liturgical season of Lent. Within these pages are the unique voices of many people from the Holy Cross community: faculty, staff, students, alumni, administrators, members of the Board of Trustees, benefactors of the College and Jesuits. Each contributor reflects on the readings prescribed for the Mass of the day and while we hope that their own prayers help you to pray, we hope, too, that the reflections contained herein might also help you to return …

The Greening Of Faith: God, The Environment, And The Good Life (20th Anniversary Edition), John E. Carroll, Paul Brockelman, Mary Westfall

University of New Hampshire Press: Open Access Books

The recent release of Pope Francis’s much-discussed encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, has reinforced environmental issues as also moral and spiritual issues. This anthology, twenty years ahead of the encyclical but very much in line with its agenda, offers essays by fifteen philosophers, theologians, and environmentalists who argue for a response to ecology that recognizes the tools of science but includes a more spiritual approach—one with a more humanistic, holistic view based on inherent reverence toward the natural world. Writers whose orientations range from Buddhism to evangelical Christianity to Catholicism to Native American …

The Stromata Vol. 58, No. 1, Calvin Theological Seminary

Stromata (1956-2020)

Inside This Issue

5- Caring for Words as a Moral Issue by Isaias D’Oleo-Ochoa

8- Academics and Spiritual Formation by Jeffrey L. Sajdak

13- Barcellos, Richard C., ed., Confessing the Impassible God: The Biblical, Classical, and Confessional Doctrine of Divine Impassibility by Brent McCulley

15- McGowan, Andrew B., Ancient Christian Worship: Early Church Practices in Social, Historical, and Theological Perspective by Lucky Samuel

17- McKnight, Scot, Kingdom Conspiracy: Returning to the Radical Mission of the Local Church by Benjamin M. Oliveira

19- Sexton, Jason S., ed., Two Views on the Doctrine of the Trinity by Jaehan Kim

23- Bavinck’s Anthropology …

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 …

"Introduction" To Theology And Science Fiction, James F. Mcgrath

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

What is the difference between a god and a powerful alien? Can an android have a soul, or be considered a person with rights? Can we imagine biblical stories being retold in the distant future on planets far from Earth? Whether your interest is in Christianity in the future, or the Jedi in the present--and whether your interest in the Jedi is focused on real-world adherents or the fictional religion depicted on the silver screen--this book will help you explore the intersection between theology and science fiction across a range of authors and stories, topics and questions.

Throughout this volume, …

Applying The Canonical Text Services Model To The Coptic Scriptorium, Bridget Almas, Caroline T. Schroeder

College of the Pacific Faculty Articles

Coptic SCRIPTORIUM is a platform for interdisciplinary and computational research in Coptic texts and linguistics. The purpose of this project was to research and implement a system of stable identification for the texts and linguistic data objects in Coptic SCRIPTORIUM to facilitate their citation and reuse. We began the project with a preferred solution, the Canonical Text Services URN model, which we validated for suitability for the corpus and compared it to other approaches, including HTTP URLs and Handles. The process of applying the CTS model to Coptic SCRIPTORIUM required an in-depth analysis that took into account the domain-specific scholarly …

Raiders Of The Lost Corpus, Caroline T. Schroeder, Amir Zeldes

College of the Pacific Faculty Articles

Coptic represents the last phase of the Egyptian language and is pivotal for a wide range of disciplines, such as linguistics, biblical studies, the history of Christianity, Egyptology, and ancient history. It was also essential for "cracking the code" of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Although digital humanities has been hailed as distinctly interdisciplinary, enabling new forms of knowledge by combining multiple forms of disciplinary investigation, technical obtacles exist for creating a resource useful to both linguists and historians, for example. The nature of the language (outside of the Indo-European family) also requires its own approach. This paper will present some of …

Noble Freedom: The Importance Of Freedom In The Theology Of Beatrice Of Nazareth And Hadewijch, Seth Alexander

Dissertations

The mulieres religiosae were a diverse group of women in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century who lived a variety of lifestyles. Two such mulieres are Hadewijch, a beguine, and Beatrijs of Nazareth, a Cistercian nun both outstanding thirteenth-century writers who exemplify the mystical theology characteristic of this dynamic group of women. The task of this study is to explore the writings of these two medieval authors to examine how they interpreted their experiences of union with God. To do this, I will investigate the ways in which these two particular women of the thirteenth- century Low Countries construct …

Hurry And The Willingness To Be Creatures, Kelly S. Johnson

Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Kelly Johnson diagnoses our busy scurrying as "anxiety about time." But time is "not a scarce resource slipping away," she counsels; it "is God’s terrible, mysterious patience, in which we meet what is beyond us and come to know ourselves as beloved creatures."

Transformation Of The Prescott Foursquare Church: Becoming A Church Planting Church, John W. Gooding

All Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study is a qualitative study of the Prescott Foursquare Church and its transformation from a small, broken denominational church to a disciple making and church planting fellowship of churches. The project sought to discover the key trigger events or processes that brought about church growth in the Prescott church and led to the growth of a fellowship of over twenty-two hundred churches in one hundred and sixteen countries. The result of interviews of pastors and review of historical data of the church and Christian Fellowship Ministries was the discovery of a discipleship culture in the local congregation in Prescott …

Book Review: Comeback Churches: How 300 Churches Turned Around And Yours Can Too By Ed Stetzer And Mike Dodson, Philips Sunday Akinbobola

Great Commission Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Book Review: Donald A. Mcgavran: A Biography Of The Twentieth Century’S Premier Missiologist By Gary Mcintosh, Mike Morris

Great Commission Research Journal

No abstract provided.

To Have Done With Forgiveness: Capitalism, Christianity, And The Politics Of Immanence, Timothy Snediker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This essay seeks to formulate a critical account of the genealogical link between capitalism and Christianity by interrogating the ontology and the processes of subjectivization which subtend these two apparently disparate social and political formations. To this end, I make use of the philosophical thought of Gilles Deleuze, in particular his readings of Spinoza, Foucault, Nietzsche, and Sacher-Masoch. The central themes of the essay--the identity of God and money, and the vicissitudes of the creditor-debtor relation--culminate in a theory of a theodicy of money, which deploys an apparatus of forgiveness in order to obscure and displace the stakes and …

Gateway To The Syriac Saints: A Database Project, Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent

Theology Faculty Research and Publications

This article describes The Gateway to the Syriac Saints, a database project developed by the Syriac Reference Portal (www.syriaca.org). It is a research tool for the study of Syriac saints and hagiographic texts. The Gateway to the Syriac Saints is a two-volume database: 1) Qadishe and 2) Bibliotheca Hagiographica Syriaca Electronica (BHSE).

Hagiography, the lives of the saints, is a multiform genre. It contains elements of myth, history, biblical exegesis, romance, and theology. The production of saints’ lives blossomed in late antiquity alongside the growth of the cult of the saints. Scholars have attended to hagiographic traditions in …

The Digital Humanities As Cultural Capital: Implications For Biblical And Religious Studies, Caroline T. Schroeder

College of the Pacific Faculty Articles

Although the study of the Bible was central to early Humanities Computing efforts, now Biblical Studies and Religious Studies are marginal disciplines in the emerging field known as Digital Humanities (English, History, Library Science, for example, are much more influential in DH.) This paper explores two questions: First, what does it mean for Biblical Studies to be marginal to the Digital Humanities when DH is increasingly seen as the locus of as transformation in the humanities? Second, how can our expertise in Biblical Studies influence and shape Digital Humanities for the better? Digital Humanities, I argue, constitutes a powerful emerging …

Clergy Characteristics As Predictors Of Mental Health Literacy, Jodi Vermaas Vermaas

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The mental health literacy (MHL) rates of Christian clergy in the United States remains underinvestigated in the current literature. This gap of knowledge is problematic for the large numbers of individuals with mental illness who seek assistance from clergy and may receive inadequate care for their concerns. As theoretically designated by the behavioral models of health care and MHL research, denomination-type, educational variables, and demographic characteristics were investigated as potential predictors of MHL. A sample of 238 Christian clergy from throughout the United States completed the web-based Mental Health Literacy Scale and demographic questionnaire. Results of analysis of variance (ANOVA) …

Is God Good? Aquinas, Śamkara, Abhinavagupta, Balinese Śaivism, And The Problematics Of The Argument From Evil, Lance E. Nelson

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

The problem of evil--as opposed to the argument from evil--is an ancient one, but it was not initially formulated as an argument in support of atheism. God's existence was taken for granted, and on that basis thinkers like Augustine engaged an serious intellectual struggle with deep questions about the divine raised by the presence of evil in the world: the unicity of God, the knowability of God, the possibility of Divine providence.⁴ The atheist argument from evil--especially as expounded of late by the New Atheists--tends to reduce this history to a caricature.

Book Review: Re-Imagining South Asian Religions: Essays In Honour Of Professors Harold G. Coward And Ronald W. Neufeldt, Bob Robinson

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

Book Review of Re-imagining South Asian Religions: Essays in Honour of Professors Harold G. Coward and Ronald W. Neufeldt. (Numen Book Series: Studies in the History of Religions, volume 141.) Edited by Pashaura Singh and Michael Hawley. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013, xxv + 302 pp.

Book Review: Sacred Matters: Material Religion In South Asian Traditions, Lloyd W. Pflueger

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

Book Review of Sacred Matters: Material Religion in South Asian Traditions. Edited by Tracy Pintchman and Corinne G. Dempsey. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015, xi + 221 pp.

Briefly Noted: God’S Other Children: Personal Encounters With Faith, Love, And Holiness In Sacred India, Kerry San Chirico

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

Book Review of God’s Other Children: Personal Encounters with Faith, Love, and Holiness in Sacred India. By Bradley Malkovsky. New York: Harper Collins, 2013, xiii + 289 pp.

Narasimha, Lord Of Transitions, Transformations, And Theater Festivals: God And Evil In Hindu Cosmology, Myth, And Practice, Lavanya Vemsani

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

This paper focuses on the multi-faceted nature of the divine depicted in Narasimha and the unique perspectives on God and evil offered by the myths of Narasimha, which is also subliminally represented within the religious practice and performance traditions associated with Narasimha.

The Limits Of Theodicy: An Eastern Orthodox Perspective On Evil And Interreligious Theology, Rico G. Monge

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

This essay is written from the vantage point of a comparative theologian who is personally steeped in the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition and who primarily specializes in Christian-Muslim comparative theology. It might seems curious, then, that the present essay employs the comparative theological method in order to focus on questions of theodicy in the Christian and Hindu traditions. Perhaps even more curious, however, is that I aim not at articulating a comparative Christian-Hindu theodicy, but rather at suggesting that the most productive path forward is a comparative theological rejection of theodicy as a productive enterprise. Drawing from resources within my …

Viewpoint: Hinduism And The Academy: Towards A Dialogue Between Scholar And Practitioner, Ravi M. Gupta

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

Gupta articlulates a rationale as to why the position of both the academician and the practitioner are necessary for meaningful religious dialog.

Book Review:Against Dogmatism: Dwelling In Faith And Doubt, Michelle Voss Roberts

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

Book Review of Against Dogmatism: Dwelling in Faith and Doubt. Madhuri M. Yadlapati. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013, 204 pp.

Ethics Of Love? Morality And The Meaning Of Divine Love, John C. Peckham

Andrews University Seminary Student Journal

While there is wide agreement on the importance of love to Christian ethics, just what an ethics of love includes and entails differs depending upon how Christian love is understood. Toward clarifying the relationship between love and Christian ethics, this essay briefly engages the highly influential agapist conception of love and questions its sufficiency as the basis of Christian ethics. Consideration of some apparent shortcomings of the agapist conception leads to the proposal that the continued quest for a more intentionally and distinctively biblical conception of divine love is integral to a compelling and faithfully Christian ethics of love.

Earthly Destruction: Catholic Social Teaching, War, And The Environment, Daniel Cosacchi

Dissertations

For more than 1700 years in Christian theology, there has been a chasm between just war thinking and pacifism. Advocates of these two ideological positions have attempted to bridge this divide in a number of ways through the centuries. Some, such as Glen Stassen, have brought together thinkers on both sides of the divide to propose a just peacemaking theory. Others, such as Michael Schuck, Mark Allman, and Tobias Winright, have added new stages to just war thinking in order to make that existing tradition more robust. Some groups may identify as contingent pacifists. These would generally accept the criteria …

The “Spirit” That Returns To God In Ecclesiastes 12:7, Dana M. Pike

Faculty Publications

Influenced by the Restoration doctrine of premortality, some Latter-day Saints have employed the KJV translation “the spirit” in Ecclesiastes 12:7 to support the doctrine that spirit personages leave their mortal bodies at death. Furthermore, Latter-day Saints have sometimes asserted, again citing Ecclesiastes 12:7, that a premortal spirit being can only “return” to God because it previously came from him. This verse has thus become one of several in the Old Testament that some Latter-day Saints have employed as support for premortal existence, a doctrine that is so important in the broader plan of salvation.