Digital Commons Network^™

A Shaded View Of Worship, Doug Herbek

Obsculta

Saint John's Abbey Church

The Incomprehensible God Who Wants To Reveal: Exodus 40 And Sirach 24, Gilbert Perez

Obsculta

God's transcendence above everything is present in many theological traditions, who recognize and answer in a diverse number of ways the question of how to approach the incomprehensible. Using the Historical Critical Method of exegesis with examples from the works of the recently deceased Walter Brueggemann, two completely different contexts in the Old Testament: Exodus 40 and Sirach 24, are presented to show how scripture itself often responded to the question of how God is made comprehensible.

The Boardwalk, Myrissa Donaldson

Obsculta

No abstract provided.

I Cry At Night Before You: Theologies Of Depression In The Psalms, Travis Spillum Osb

Obsculta

This work looks to the Psalms to discover theologies that resonate with experiences of depression. If one struggling with depression feels as if God is angry with them, that their condition is oppressing them, that loved ones have abandoned them, or that God's love for them is wavering, they can utilize the psalmist's words to voice their feelings and express their anguish in prayer to a God who is seemingly deaf to their groaning.

Humans Rule? Development Of Stewardship Mindsets Among Religious Undergraduates, Jamie Jensen, J Robert Nielson

ScholarsArchive Data

Two cohorts of students enrolled in a non-major introductory biology course were surveyed in 2020 and 2025 using the Revised New Ecological Paradigm (R-NEP) instrument. Open-ended student responses concerning their definition of ‘rule’ as a human prerogative were also analyzed using qualitative coding.

Row Your Boat, Erin Werneke

Obsculta

Summer camp opportunity

A Holistic Framework For Enhancing Machine Learning Reliability: From Model Architecture And Algorithm Design To Human Interpretability, Kyle Naddeo

Theses and Dissertations

Modern machine learning systems can perform well on benchmarks yet fail in ways that are difficult for users to anticipate, interpret, or manage. This dissertation treats reliability as more than accuracy: a reliable system performs when it can, signals when it should not be trusted, and supports abstention, fallback, escalation, or human review. Unlike robustness, which emphasizes performance under shift, corruption, adversarial perturbation, or drift, reliability also requires recognizing limited competence, preserving useful semantic structure when fine-grained certainty is unjustified, and exposing mechanisms that make failures understandable. The dissertation develops this view through four contributions. Uncertainty-aware decision heads provide portable …

Fulfilled In Your Hearing: What Has Been Fulfilled; What Remains To Be Heard, William Skudlarek Osb

Obsculta

This article reflects on the enduring legacy and contemporary relevance of Fulfilled in Your Hearing, the 1982 U.S. bishops’ official statement on the Sunday homily. Written by the document’s principal drafter, the piece explores the text’s revolutionary methodological shift: moving the starting point of preaching away from the preacher or the isolated text and toward the assembly gathered for Eucharist. The author argues that the homily is not an exegetical lecture or a discourse on morality but a sacramental interpretation of human existence through the lens of Scripture that calls the assembled worshippers to conversion, thanksgiving, and service. Central to …

Paul: A Man Called To Reform Status: The Radical Practice Of “One In Christ”, Garrett S. "Faustino" Miller

Obsculta

This paper explores Saint Paul's ministerial pedagogy as he challenged Roman social hierarchies by calling believers to a radical unity as "one in Christ." By examining what this radical practice means, and what it is rooted in, this paper also urges readers toward the same radical and transformative vision of Christian oneness; a vision that seeks to build bridges rather than walls in the world today.

St. John's Leaves In The Fall, Myrissa Donaldson

Obsculta

No abstract provided.

Lights Of The Lake, Garrett S. "Faustino" Miller Oblsb

Obsculta

No abstract provided.

Theology As A Form Of Prayer, Melissa Tovar-Guerrero

Obsculta

This piece reflects on the essential tasks of theology to foster practical expressions of prayer, to establish a fruitful and transformative dialogue with the Trinity through Christian meditation.

All Guests Are To Be Welcomed As Christ, Doug Herbek

Obsculta

In Saint John's Abbey Guesthouse

Chapel Walk, Stepping Logs, Barbara Marincel

Obsculta

Photograph taken in October on a walk out to the Stella Maris Chapel at Saint John's University

Tree That Bites, Garrett S. "Faustino" Miller Oblsb

Obsculta

No abstract provided.

Non-Euclidean Geometries And Fairness Constraints In Advanced Clustering, Arnab Seal

Master’s Dissertations

A fundamental challenge in modern unsupervised learning is adapting classical clustering algorithms to handle complex, real-world data constraints. Traditional models often assume data resides in a flat, Euclidean space and optimize strictly for cluster cohesion, thereby failing to capture intrinsic hierarchical structures and ignoring sociotechnical demographic biases. This thesis addresses these critical limitations by extending generalized mean-shift dynamics into two novel clustering frameworks. First, to natively accommodate data with tree-like structures (e.g., taxonomies and social networks), we propose Hyperbolic Gaussian Blurring Mean Shift (HypeGBMS). By projecting data into the Poincar´e ball model and utilizing M¨obius vector space operations, HypeGBMS successfully …

Leveraging Spatial Statistics For Domain Adaptation Of Vision Language Models In Medical Vqa, Himanshu Raj

Master’s Dissertations

Recent advances in Vision–Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in Medical Visual Question Answering (Medical VQA) task. Although they perform very well within their domains, these models often experience issues with their generalization ability on unknown clinical distribution data because of different imaging technologies and patient groups used in various medical facilities. Generalization problems faced by these models make their practical application in the field of VLM-based medical VQA systems rather difficult. To overcome this limitation we proposed our method named Spatial Semantics Aware Domain Adaptation (SSADA), which is an integrated framework that combines both finetuning and prompt-based in-context …

Efficient Performance Recovery Of Pruned Llms For End Devices, Paul Vardhan Bethapudi

Master’s Dissertations

Large Language Models have shown strong performance across reasoning, language understanding, and generation tasks, but their computational and memory requirements make deployment on low resource devices difficult. This dissertation studies efficient performance recovery of pruned LLMs, focusing on whether a pruned model can regain useful task performance through parameter-efficient fine-tuning while preserving the benefits of compression. The work uses Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct as the dense reference model and applies activationaware Wanda pruning at multiple sparsity levels(20%, 30% and 50%). The pruned models are evaluated on language modeling and reasoning tasks using WikiText-2 perplexity and GSM8K (Grade School Math 8000 problems) accuracy. Adaptation …

Can We Add A New Language Of Love? Freedom…, Essraa Nawar

Library Articles and Research

"

More than thirty years later, the Five Love Languages remain part of our everyday vocabulary. We ask spouses, friends, and family members, 'What’s your love language?' We have learned that people experience love differently and that meaningful relationships require understanding how others feel seen, valued, and appreciated.

The framework has helped millions.

Yet I wonder whether the conversation is incomplete.

Can we add a new language of love?

I believe we can. I believe there is a sixth language.

Its name is Freedom."

Michael Trently V. Usa

2026 Decisions

USDC for the Middle District of Pennsylvania

Assessing The Needs Of A Church’S Older Adults To Promote Their Flourishing, Royston Terrell Booker Iii

DMin Project Theses

The purpose of this project was to lay the groundwork for creating a holistic Senior Adult Ministry to support the flourishing of older adults through the activities of God’s people, the church. This approach to help older adults’ well-being is best accomplished through holistic support to enhance well-being, but many churches have not considered a holistic approach or developed a supportive capability. To create a holistic Senior Adult Ministry, I assessed the needs of senior adults in the Brentwood Hills Church of Christ (BHCC) in Nashville, Tennessee, within the United States. The findings and conclusions of this dissertation provide a …

The Parent Trip, Jessie Daniels

Publications and Research

This one-hour solo show propels the audience from 1970s Texas to 1990s New York City. In this hilarious and heartbreaking story, Jessie Daniels tells what it means to be raised to become a 'nice white lady.' When she rejects that to embrace the magic of queerness under a disco ball, she decides to write about it, and nearly loses everything.

Lagrange College At Florence, Alabama Exhibition Of The Junior Class, Lagrange College

Documents

1855 Junior Class Exhibition Program, LaGrange College (Florence, Alabama)

Strengthening Ecological Literacy Through Forest-Themed National Literature: Conservation-Oriented Awareness In Rural Malaysia, Nurul Haniza Samsudin, Nurul Asmaa' Akmal Md Din, Awang Azman Awang Pawi, Mardian Shah Omar, Tengku Intan Marlina Tengku Mohd Ali, Nur Azimah Mohd Bukhari, Akhmad Mansur

Forest and Society

This study examines how Malaysian national literature with forest themes may strengthen ecological literacy, conservation ethics, and restoration-oriented consciousness in rural education. Responding to the ecological orientation of Forest and Society, the article shifts the emphasis from literacy restoration as an educational outcome to ecological literacy as a cultural and pedagogical pathway for cultivating environmental awareness, stewardship, and responsibility toward forest environments. Using a descriptive qualitative design and an ecologically oriented literary text analysis approach, the study analyses two Malaysian novels, Seorang Tua di Kaki Gunung by Azizi Haji Abdullah and Kudup Hijau Tropika by Husna Nazri. These texts were …

Florence Wesleyan University Oratorical Exhibition By The Second Division Of The Junior Class, 1860, Barr Brothers, "Gazette," Office

Documents

Florence Weselyan University Oratorical Exhibition of Junior Class Program, 1860.

Florence Wesleyan University Sophomore Prize Declamation, Florence Gazette Print

Documents

Florence Wesleyan University Sophomore Prize Declamation, 1857.

The Effects Of Wearable Fitness Trackers And Fitness Education On Physical Activity Participation, Physical Competence, And General Self-Efficacy In Inactive And Sedentary College Students, Tiffany Lough

Doctorate in Kinesiology

This study examined the combined effects of wearable fitness trackers and structured fitness education on physical activity participation, perceived physical competence, and general self-efficacy among inactive and sedentary college students. A six-week randomized pretest-posttest design was used. Undergraduate students aged 18–24 who were not meeting recommended physical activity guidelines were recruited from a private liberal arts university and randomly assigned to either an experimental group or a control group. Participants in the experimental group received a wearable fitness tracker along with fitness education sessions integrating Social Cognitive Theory based behavior change techniques including self-monitoring, observational learning, mastery experiences, and goal …

Different Dimensions Of Social Support On Social Media And Leisure-Time Physical Activity Intentions Among Chinese College Students Applying The Theory Of Planned Behavior: A Cross-Sectional Study, Ni Zhang, Carolyn Madison Chang, Yu Zhang, Lu Guo, Qizhi Xu

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Background:

Leisure-time physical activity (LTPA) participation among Chinese college students remains insufficient despite growing public health concerns regarding sedentary lifestyles and obesity. Social media platforms have increasingly become important channels for delivering social support related to physical activity (PA); however, different dimensions of social support on social media may exert distinct psychological influences on exercise intentions.

Objective:

Guided by the theory of planned behavior, this study aimed to examine the direct and indirect relationships between different dimensions of social support on social media and Chinese college students’ intentions to engage in LTPA.

Methods:

A cross-sectional online survey was conducted among …

Re: Conditional Approval Letter For Butte Priority Soils Operable Unit Draft Final Leak Detection Monitoring Plan (Dated May 13, 2026), Emma Rott

Silver Bow Creek/Butte Area Superfund Site

No abstract provided.

June 23, 2026 Ereporter, University Of Alabama At Birmingham

eReporter (campus newsletter)

No abstract provided.