Digital Commons Network^™

Toward Addressing Split-Level Christianity : A Study Of The Interaction Between Christianity And Folk Religions In Romania, Florin Paul Botica

ATS Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Pluralism, Secularism And The European Court Of Human Rights, Zachary R. Calo

Scholarly Works

Beginning with its seminal 1993 decision in Kokkinakis v. Greece, the European Court of Human Rights has defined religious pluralism as an essential good of the liberal democratic society. Yet, in subsequent decisions traversing a range of legal issues [e.g. Sahin, Dahlab, Bayatyan, and Lautsi], the Court has rendered decisions facially at odds with the goal of advancing religious pluralism. This paper is concerned with assessing the discontinuity between the Court’s high embrace of normative religious pluralism and its failure to consistently realize this ideal in practice.The paper argues that the Court has failed to consistently render decisions in accord …

A Tri-Disciplinary Analysis Of Religion, Alicia Wallace

Social Sciences

This paper analyzes religion using a multi-disciplinary approach. Studying the Social Sciences exposes one to an opportunity not just to learn a single discipline, but three, and this unique learning experience can teach one to look at the world’s phenomena with a multi-perspective view. Using a tri-disciplinary approach when exploring topics can broaden ones outlook on how there are many ways to explore and investigate a topic in greater detail. By using Anthropological, Sociological and Geographical theoretical perspectives one can understand a topic more fully by using a multi-perspective approach when exploring this diverse world culturally, socially and physically.

The Search For The Sacred In Gabrielle Roy, Ann Elizabeth Sumsion

Theses and Dissertations

Many anthropological studies have shown the prevalence of the sacred in primitive societies, manifested primarily in significant gestures such as exchanges, rituals, festivals, and the use of time and space. Some studies, in particular those of Roger Caillois and Mircea Eliade, have demonstrated that traces of the sacred, though seemingly displaced, remain present in modern and secular societies. This thesis will examine and bring to light these remnants of sacred behavior in the contemporary settings of the stories of Gabrielle Roy, focusing primarily on food-sharing, gift-giving, and festivals. Each analysis presented will detail how different aspects of the sacred are …

Choosing Our Better History: Religion, Secularism, And American Public Life, Linell Cady

Macalester Civic Forum

No abstract provided.

Places Of Significance In Itelmen Country: Sacredness, Nostalgia And Identity In Kamchatka, Russia, Tatiana S. Degai

Anthropology

"This research was conducted among Itelmen people, a small indigenous group who live on the Kamchatka peninsula in the Russian Far East. The thesis explores places of significance and sacred places of Itelmens who traditionally occupied most of the peninsula. At present the majority live on the Western coast of Kamchatka on the Okhotsk Sea shore. Providing some historical background, outcomes of colonization and western presence, and description of contemporary Itelmen worldview, this study offers an overview of Itelmen concepts of perceiving, knowing, appreciating and "animating" places. These concepts are formed primarily on the basis of a sense of loss …

Self-Love And Forgiveness: A Holy Alliance?, Patrick Mckinley Brennan

Working Paper Series

Forgiving is not pardoning, excusing, condoning, forgetting, or reconciling, nor is forgiving just about a change in emotions on the part of a victim. This paper pursues a virtue-theoretic account of the human person in the context of the theology of Thomas Aquinas, arguing that human forgiveness is the form love takes by an offended toward her offender. The paper argues, first, for the priority of the offended person's self-love and, second, for such self-love's extension into love of the offender as another self. The paper explores in depth the challenges of seeing one's enemy as "another self." Forgiving, the …

Religion And The Politics Of Ethnic Identity In Bahia, Brazil (Book Review), Jan Hoffman French

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Stephen Selka investigates the role of religion in encouraging, or discouraging, the formation of black identity in Bahia, the Brazilian state that is regarded as the center of Afro-Brazilian culture, religion, and politics. As he strives to understand and theorize the crucial, but complex, relationship between religion and what he terms "Afro-Brazilian identity," Selka describes how adherents of the three primary religious trends in Bahia (Catholicism, Candomble, and evangelical Protestantism) view the effects of their religious institutions on the construction of that identity. This question is addressed through selected quotes from leaders and members of the respective religious groups (and …

The Essence Of Human Rights: A Religious Critique, Gordon Butler

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Sugpiaq Russian Orthodoxy---Conceptual Analogy In Religious Syncretism In Nanwalek Alaska, Medea Csoba Dehass

Anthropology

Religious conversion is often highly unstable, can be nominal in nature, and may not have lasting effects on converted people and their culture. For the Sugpiaq of Nanwalek, however, Russian Orthodoxy has become "native" (and Native) in the sense that it has been incorporated into everyday Sugpiaq reality, and referred to as such by all in the community. Therefore, examining the unique history and practice of Orthodoxy in Nanwalek provides insight into the process of integration of a foreign religious idea into a new cultural environment. The focus of this dissertation is on contemporary Sugpiaq Russian Orthodoxy, as it is …

Penn State: Symbol And Myth, Gary G. Desantis

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will focus on the popular culture iconography of the Pennsylvania State University: the Nittany Lion-as a symbol and apolitical mascot; Happy Valley, the geographic area in which the university is located, as a kind of sacred place and utopia in the Keystone State; football-its hallowed shrines, legendary coaches, and heroic players; regional foods and delicacies-from the unique offerings of the area's diners to the University Creamery (where patrons yearly consume more than 750,000 ice cream cones); and Lion Shrine and the adjacent Nittany Lion Inn-where the faithful have made pilgrimages since the early-twentieth century. The sum of these …

Draper, Shirley (Fa 386), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid and full-text scan of papers (Click on “Additional Files” below) for Folklife Archives Project 386. Two papers: "Brush Arbors of Southern Logan County: How and Why They Were Made" and "South Logan County, Kentucky: Life in the First Half of the Twentieth Century" written by Shirley Draper for a Western Kentucky University folk studies class.

Theology, Spirituality, And The Academic Study Of Religion In Public Universities, Don Saunders

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines whether the secular institutions of American higher education should address students questions of meaning, purpose, wisdom, and human destiny. That is, it investigates the place of the normative analysis of religious experience and behavior within the public university. I use the work of Ninian Smart, Russell T. McCutcheon and Ivan Strenski to illustrate the case against the inclusion of theology and spirituality in the academic study of religion. In their view, theology is at best an artifact, like ritual or religious art and not an academic discipline. Conversely, I use the work of Paul Tillich, John Dunne, …

When Corporate Policies And Consumer Values Collide: Examining The Relationship Between Religion And Controversial Business Decisions, Krist R. G. Swimberghe

Doctoral Dissertations

Religion appears to play a very important role in people's lives in the United States. Some companies, however, continue to make business decisions which appear to be contrary to the value systems of a majority of consumers in the United States. Although past descriptive research has confirmed that religiousness influences consumers' and marketing managers' ethical judgments of their own behavior, this research has not explored the influence of religion in the buyer-seller dyad. To fill this gap in the consumer behavior literature, this study uses the Hunt-Vitell theory of ethics to help explain how consumers' religiosity influences their ethical judgments …

Caesar's Faith: Limited Government And Freedom Of Religion In Bruker V. Marcovitz, F C. Decoste

Dalhousie Law Journal

The Supreme Court of Canada has long pursued the view that our law is somehow an expression and repository of what it terms "Canada 's fundamental values." In Bruker v. Marcovitz, the Court added to the catalogue of these judicially decreed and enforced values one concerning religion, namely, the protection of Canadians against the arbitrary disadvantages of their religions. This comment argues that the Court's judgment in this regard constitutes a fundamental threat to religious liberty inasmuch as it subordinates religious beliefand practice to state values by making the legal acceptability of the former turn on their conformity to the …

Broadening The Spectrum: The Religious Dimensions Of The Rainbow Gatherings, Seth M. Walker

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to specifically address the religious dimensions of the Rainbow Gatherings. The fundamental question directing this analysis is: "Are the Rainbow Gatherings religious in character?" This thesis specifically asks whether or not the Rainbow Gatherings satisfy certain identifiable features of religion, and if doing so, do they qualify as a form of religion? I engage this question by analyzing the Rainbow Gatherings in terms of two particular definitions of religion: Clifford Geertz's "functional" definition and Bryan R. Wilson's "substantive" definition. This allows me to analyze the Rainbow Gatherings from the perspective of the two major …

Notes On The Impossibility Of Religious Freedom And Toleration In A Secular Age, Matthew Scherer

Schmooze 'tickets'

No abstract provided.

Like A Hole In The Head, Lief H. Carter

Schmooze 'tickets'

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Faith And Dynamic Stability: Thoughts On Religion, Constitutions, And Transitions To Democracy, David C. Gray

Faculty Scholarship

This essay, written for the 2009 Constitutional Schmooze, explores the complex role of religion as a source of both stability and instability. Drawing on a broader body of work in transitional justice, this essay argues that religion has an important role to play in the complex web of overlapping associations and oppositions constitutive of a dynamically stable society and further contends that constitutional protections which encourage a diversity of religions provide the best hope of harnessing that potential while limiting the dangers of religion evidenced in numerous cases of mass atrocity.

The Spirit Of Stuff: What I Learned When I Sold (Almost) Everything, Rachel Tamsen Perry Schrank

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The following document is a report submitted in conjunction with a video project. The video is a personal documentary, filmed in Denver, Colorado and Mexico City, Mexico, which explores the spiritual connection that people have with their material objects. The report is comprised of a project proposal and a post-production report. The proposal discusses the theoretical underpinnings of the project, and offers a plan for the film's production. The post-production report discusses my filmmaking process in retrospect, reviews production problems and solutions, and includes a final schedule and budget.

Please visit my website at http://www.upupintothesky.com, or contact the author at …

Legal Theology: Law, Modernity And The Sacred, Peter Fitzpatrick

Seattle University Law Review

This article argues that there is both sameness and difference as between the secular and the religious, and that law, modern law, is constituently enmeshed within this sameness and difference. That combination of sameness and difference, along with the integral part of law, is traced in a cumulation of three historicities, the first being the creation of the world's imperium, of the modern world-system, in the sixteenth century. Then, with the second historicity we have the time of revolutions, seen here as almost revolutions, of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And finally, with the third historicity we have the time …

Toward A New Mystical Poetics Of God In The Post-Mortem Age : From God As The Supreme Being To God As The One-And-Only Being, John Francis O'Neill

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

At certain axial moments in history new religious worldviews emerge to replace prior perspectives that are no longer adequate or persuasive. A new worldview opens new possibilities for the human religious quest for meaning, being, and salvation. A fundamental conviction underlying this dissertation is that we are living in a "post-mortem age" - that is, an era defined by profound challenges to the centuries-long dominant religious worldview, culminating in the twentieth century experience of the "death of God." While disturbing and disruptive for many, this historical condition can also be seen as a liberating and even providential event, opening the …

Standing, Spending, And Separation: How The No-Establishment Rule Does (And Does Not) Protect Conscience, Richard W. Garnett

Journal Articles

The First Amendment’s “Establishment Clause” is widely thought to protect “conscience.” Does it? If so, how? It is proposed in this paper that the no-establishment rule does indeed promote and protect religious liberty, and does safeguard conscience, but not (or, at least, not only) in the way most people think it does, namely, by sparing those who object from the asserted injury to their conscience caused by public funding of religious activity.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Hein v. Freedom from Religion Foundation - a case in which the Justices limited taxpayer standing to bring Establishment Clause claims - reminds …

Science Versus Religion: Protestant Dominance And Cultural Discrimination In Public Schools, Melissa Marie Brock

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This research offers a critical analysis of the current controversy concerning religion. The study explores the establishment of the public school system under Protestant dominance and use of this dominance to assert authority over minority groups. Legislation and court action have created a position of opposing policy; placing science as the opposite of religion, and Atheists and Christian activists are using curriculum as an ideological battle field. Currently, since 9/11, religious discrimination and hate crimes are on the rise. In order to investigate this controversy, this study explores literature, published surveys, and government documents. The American public school systems are …

Toward A More Wholly Communion: Cultivating Ecological Enlightenment And Sustainable Action In Christians, Cary Hauptman Gaunt

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Increasingly, environmental, scientific, and religious organizations and leaders are calling for people of faith to wake up to the global climate and other environmental crises and step up their ecological responsibility by leading more sustainable lives. Yet only a few seem to hear the calls and even fewer are responding in substantive ways. Many have commented on the gap between the religious theory for environmental care and the actual practice of living ecologically sustainable lives. Exploring how to bridge this gap is increasingly important as environmental regulatory, policy, and technology efforts fall short of goals and environmental professionals, including regulators, …

Shaping Attitudes About Homosexuality: The Role Of Religion And Cultural Context, Amy Adamczyk, Pitt Cassidy

Publications and Research

Across the globe, the debate over homosexuality continues, with great variation in public opinion about the acceptability of homosexuality, laws regulating same-sex unions and penalties for homosexual sex behaviors. Religion is often seen as an important predictor of attitudes about homosexuality. However, cross-national differences in cultural orientations suggest that the role religion has in explaining homosexual attitudes may depend on a nation’s cultural context. In this study, we merge ideas from cultural sociology and religious contextual effects to explain cross-national variation in public opinion about homosexuality. Using data from the fourth wave of the World Values Survey and Hierarchical Modeling …

Inter-Religious Marriage And Migration, Maggie Y. Bohm

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This study analyzes the influence of 1) inter-religious marriage and 2) differing levels of church attendance within a married couple on migration behavior. The study draws from previous research on inter-racial marriage for a framework to examine whether there is reason to expect a relationship between migration and inter-religious marriage. We hypothesize that the propensity for migration is higher for inter-religious couples than for couples constituted by individuals of the same religion and for couples who attend church at different frequencies. To examine the hypotheses, this study uses age, education, and length of residence as controls in logistic models.

Theories …

Korean Immigrants And Their Mission : Exploring The Missional Identity Of Korean Immigrant Churches In North America, Sinyil Kim

ATS Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Religion And Science At The Turn Of The Century, Calvin Jongsma

Pro Rege

This article was published in the 2007 issue of the online Journal of the ACMS (Association of Christians in the Mathematical Sciences).

Bogle, Amy Lyn (Fa 270), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid and full-text scan of paper (Click on “Additional Files” below) for Folklife Archives Project 270. Paper: "A Conflict Between Academic and Folk Medicine" written by Amy Lynn Bogle for a Western Kentucky University folk studies class.