Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Muzzle For The Lamb: A Novel, Scott Beggs

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The Prism, Darrah Melita Ellis

Graduate Thesis Collection

"The Prism" is a magical-girl-themed fantasy light novel series about four best friends who finally graduated junior high school. Miya, Teresa, Liana, and Destiny are anxious to start their new high school lives (for better or worse) in their rough, monotone, and corrupt urban town of Quaint Village. Their plans are interrupted, however, by the opening of a brand new private school. Then, for the first time ever, all four girls end up in the same program. They're ready to make great memories together and spend much more time with each other.

Unbeknownst to them, their new school is nothing …

House Of Grief, Megan Eralie

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This collection of essays examines how I house the grief for the losses of my religion and my grandfather. My first essay, “Body of Feathers,” looks at my body as a house of shame and how I transformed my body into something that could be mine instead. It explores a series of moments from my life where I felt disconnected from my body, usually because of rules or expectations set by someone other than me. In the essay, I move from feeling like I had no control of my body, to taking back control and experiencing my body as mine …

Kept Things, Caroline J. Tuss

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

The things that occupy our lives tell human stories. They often go beyond literal interpretation, leaving space for places, people, desires, dreams, and ideologies to be signified and examined. Personal history is a well-traveled source of inspiration, and it provides significant, meaningful symbols for the concepts I’m engaging with in my newest collection. My project, titled Kept Things, is a collection of three nonfiction pieces examining why and how things are kept, lost, and discarded, whether we have a choice in the matter or not. The significance of symbols to identity and memory acts as a through-line between each …

God Damn, Robi Mahan

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

God Damn is a poetic collection that delves into the complex relationship between a daughter and her father, who has recently suffered from a stroke. As her father grapples with Aphasia, a neurological disorder which has rendered him with a uniquely limited vocabulary, the author must confront her beliefs about life, death, and the great beyond. The collection recounts the authors childhood with her father, an outspoken atheist from a small town, and how the ideals he has taught her influence the way she navigates life with a man who has lost his ability to speak.

Mother/God, Sarah Johnson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My collection, Mother/God, attempts to look at my own growing up and how it has affected my beliefs and self in the presence, while also looking at the choices my mother made in raising me. The central thread throughout the collection is my relationship with my mother and the love that's endured those hardships. It explores my mother's past up until the hardest parts of motherhood in section one, The Mother. Then, section two titled The Daughter focuses on my own rebellion of how I was raised and an exploration of existentialism that was, in a lot of ways, …

A Mormon Missionary's Guide To Conversion Therapy Addiction Recovery, Shaun M. Anderson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This collection of essays explores my experience as a gay Mormon missionary, when I studied the Mormon Church's Addiction Recovery Program in an attempt to alter my sexuality. The initial four essays take place during the two years that I lived in Southern California as a Mormon missionary from 2011-2013. They present the text of the LDS Family Services Addiction Recovery Program workbook, with my own thoughts, experiences, and stories driven into the margins. Through these four essays, I demonstrate the hope, anguish, and longing of a gay man who desperately wants to live the model of a righteous Mormon …

West West West, Michael Blackmon

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

The Divine Double Voice: How Female Christian Rhetors Found Rhetorical Agency Through The Voice Of God, Cara Ryfun

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

This piece discusses the ways in which three specific Christian female rhetors--Teresa de Avila, Frances Willard, and Maria W. Stewart--utilized the voice of God through biblical scriptures and divine revelations in order to empower themselves. Through the voice of God, these women found agency for their own beliefs and messages, and utilized a variety of rhetorical maneuvers in order to share their messages and quietly subvert patriarchal constructs within the church. These women found agency for their feminist messages within their Christian patriarchal constructs, and they set precedents for Christian feminist rhetors to follow.

New Bruises, Katelyn Aquilo

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The following manuscript is a collection of poetry based on experiences. Religious hypocrisy and abuse thread throughout the collection with both first hand experiences and fictional ones. It is divided into three parts: the hometown, the bodily abuse, and then, finally, the religion.

Tangled, Shannon Marie Ashley

MSU Graduate Theses

This thesis is a collection of poems. Much of my poetry is influenced by ideas of identity, particularly religious and sexual identity, and the ways identity affects relationships. As someone raised in a Catholic church from birth, religion has had a major impact on my life and perspective. I am no longer practicing but still consistently find myself considering the morals of the Church in my actions in a positive way. Catholicism will also always affect my relationship with my mother, who is still practicing. Much of my current poetry concerns my relationship with my mother, especially regarding religion and …

Food Transitions: How Food Symbolizes Another Chapter, Josiah Peralta

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Through critical self-analysis of my life, I intend to answer the question, “How does food help us transition from one chapter of our life to another?” My purpose is to provide a personal viewpoint about related topics associated with food, like class, origin of food, religion or lack of, culture and tradition, obesity, food choice, and love. Through this viewpoint, I will demonstrate how food associations can encapsulate our past, memories, and identity in a way that moves us from the past to the present, and, hopefully, the future.

Capstone theme: Food, Ethics, and Politics

The Neon Gods We Made, Max Funk

Honors Projects

The Neon Gods We Made is a collection of 3 plays and 21 poems. In this collection I explore the concept of religion as an ideology, or as a body of knowledge that has some specific function in society as a whole—while I focus primarily on culture of the United States, there are broader trends in the use of ideology that are applicable to other countries/cultures as well. With this project, I am primarily interested in the links between organized religion, personal spirituality, and the influence of culture on both the more formal and informal aspects of one’s spirituality. Primarily, …

Healthy Living And Other Electives, Lamar Giles

English Theses & Dissertations

Healthy Living and Other Electives is an excerpt of a young adult novel that follows a sixteen-year-old boy, Del Rainey, as he pursues a romantic relationship with a member of his church’s Purity Pledge class. In addition to romance, Del also seeks a better understanding of manhood through interactions with his peers and father. Along the way, we discover how messily intertwined the church, school system, and lives of teenagers are in Del’s small Virginia town. The novel examines themes of religion, bureaucracy, and toxic masculinity.

The White Church: A Young Adult Novel, Jenna Kaye Fox

Undergraduate University Honors Capstones

I'm not going to lie; I still have nightmares. One moment Robert was kissing me, and the next he looked at [his wife] Shirley in the eyes and pulled the trigger. I saw the white church, the willow tree, and Shirley's grave. I heard Robert whisper, ‘devour’ against my hearing aid. It was all my fault. I blamed myself over and over.... Kate writes this wrenching confession in her diary. Her experiences with her pedophilic confirmation teacher had been haunting her until she finally gathered courage to fill blank pages with her thoughts and emotions. The young adult, epistolary novel …

The Scripture Of Helices, Jessica M. Ramer

Master's Theses

This thesis comprises poems written during my two years of study for the Master of Arts Degree in English with a creative writing emphasis. The majority of the poems are written in either a received or contemporary form, although a substantial minority are written in free verse. Many of the poems deal with extreme circumstances such as combat and imprisonment. Others address family stresses due to birth, death, remarriage, and clashes of values. Some poems have a religious emphasis while others are firmly rooted in the natural world. All, however, are explorations of human nature.

The Fallen Female: A Testimony, Husney Farwa Naqvi

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a collection of thematically related nonfiction works that offers a cultural critique of the author’s three cultures – Pakistani, American, and Muslim – through a feminist lens. The author attempts to offer an intersectional feminist’s insight based on her lived experiences as a Pakistani American woman – born in Karachi, raised in Louisiana and the Rio Grande Valley in Deep South Texas. It explores feminist theory, focusing heavily on rape culture (“Shame and Regrets,” “Bollywood’s Rape Fetish”) and religious influences (“Infallible,” “The Hijab”). It also details the author’s experience as a Muslim woman who chose to observe …

Of Mist And Memory, Francine Theresa Fitzsimons

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

"Of Mist And Memory" is an exploration of what it means to be Irish, catholic and female. The content aims to articulate in poetic language the controls both internal and external that govern an individual. It is a journey from cradle to grave, birth to death that focuses primarily on topics that are the domain of women. However it does not exclude the male gender rather it draws the comparison of how a man can be equally controlled. The poems reflect the Irish landscape, its traditions and the impact religion has on daily life. It strives to find connections, form …

T.S. Eliot: A Never-Ending Exploration, Kristina Krupilnitskaya

Honors Thesis

The following thesis explores the work of T.S. Eliot before and after his conversion to the Anglican Church. While the paper explores the stylistic qualities of Eliot's poetry, the main focus of the essay lies in bridging the pre and post conversion works together in order to show that both of the periods were significant in the poet's life. While many critics viewed Eliot's early poetry as a lot more exploratory and challenging, calling his later poetry banal and bland, my essay aims to show that even though the poetry had shifted in its content, its significance, complexity, and experimentality …

“Combustible Sinners” And Other Stories, Myra Ivette Infante

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This is a collection of six short stories with a critical introduction. The characters in the short stories are all connected (sometimes remotely) to a small, Mexican, Pentecostal church in South Texas. The critical introduction explores the religious background and evolution as a Chicana writer of Myra Ivette Infante.

The Sleepy Hero: Romantic & Spiritual Sleep In The Gawain-Poet, Erin Kathleen Turner Hepner

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

This thesis examines two accepted styles of writing in the Middle Ages, the romance and religious genres, and what purpose they perform in the Gawain-poet’s religious poem, Patience, and his romance poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK). One recently popular line of research among medieval scholars is examining the way medieval authors, such as the Gawain-poet, combine elements of romance and spiritual writings. By funneling the Gawain-poet’s intermingling of the medieval romance and religious genres through the specific lens of sleep, which is represented differently in medieval romance texts than in medieval religious …

The Concept Of God In The Poetry Of The American Negro, Mary H. Jones

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation

No abstract provided.