Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Hospitality As Companionship And Justice, Laura Stivers

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

My work has not been in direct ministry to people who are homeless but instead I have been involved in writing, teaching, and organizing to do the work of justice. . .to end homelessness as this homeless poet asks us to do. Organizing for justice through structural change (e.g. affordable housing, good work for all, universal healthcare, no wars, etc.) is of paramount importance. It is our fight. The problem of homelessness is less about the individuals who find themselves without a place to sleep and more about our collective identity as a people and a society. Organizing for justice, …

Atoning For The Sins Of The Fatherland: The Gendered Nationalism Of The Ecumenical Sisterhood Of Mary, George Faithful

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

In my book, Mothering the Fatherland, forthcoming from Oxford University Press, I analyze how the penitential practices of a group of Protestant nuns in Germany were rooted in their understanding of collective German national guilt in the aftermath of the Third Reich. Those with some prior familiarity with the group may know them as the Evangelical or Evangelische Sisterhood of Mary. I will refer to them throughout by their original name, the Ecumenical Sisterhood of Mary. While the book discusses the sisters’ gender and nationalism separately in the context of the sisters’ repentance and theology of collective national guilt, I …

Salvation From Illusion, Salvation By Illusion: The Gospel According To Christopher Nolan, George Faithful

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

You are not really paying attention to reality. Nor should you, according to screenwriter and director Christopher Nolan. You do not need to know the truth. What you need is the perfect lie. Therein lies your hope of salvation. The perfect lie will save you from lesser lies but will also protect you from the destructive austerity of the truth. That has been a consistent theme in Nolan’s cinematic corpus.

While this article will limit itself to his science fiction works – The Prestige, Inception, and his Batman trilogy – the theme of salvation from and by illusion is significant …

Stories That Shape Us, Mojgan Behmand

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

[Review] Stories From The Street: A Theology Of Homelessness. David Nixon, Laura Stivers

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

David Nixon in his book Stories from the Street: A Theology of Homelessness places stories of people who are homeless in dialogue with Christian scriptures, Church tradition, and particular theologies to construct a “theology of homelessness” (7). Drawing on liberation theology, Nixon argues that stories told by poor people can offer a deeper sense of the meaning of God and relationship, can reinvigorate the Christian story, and can in fact, change the world. Nixon shares a number of life histories of homeless people and teases out biographical and emotional themes from their stories in relation to spirituality. He also recounts …

Uprooting Where Others Sowed? Presbyterian And Moravian Missionaries In Russian Orthodox Alaska, George Faithful

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

The arrival in Native Alaskan communities of Russians in the mid-18th century and Americans in the mid-19th century brought lasting change. What that change constituted is a matter of debate. This paper will attempt to look at multiple sides of the story, considering the perspectives of Russians and Americans, and, most importantly, that of the indigenous Alaskans themselves, as well as that of ethno-historians. By disentangling the layers of polemic and hagiography left by Presbyterian and Moravian missionaries, I will demonstrate their corrosive impact at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century on the cultures and …

Model Minority On The Modernization Project: Images Of Chinese Religiosity In America, Emily Wu

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

As the stereotypical model minority in the United States, Chinese Americans are rarely considered as religiously threatening. Those Chinese Americans who already were or became converted to mainstream Christianity are seen as cases of successful Americanization. Buddhism, another popular religious affiliation among the Chinese ethnics, is understood as a benign and respectable source of wisdom. Few Chinese ethnics identify themselves strictly as Daoist or Confucian, but there is a wide range of religious and spiritual practices that are diffused into their daily lives. Without specific religious affiliations or congregational headcount, eclectic practices such as ancestral worship, temple visits, home rituals, …

The Dominican Big History Summer Institute: A Story Of Collective Learning, Mojgan Behmand

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

[Review] Earth-Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics In A New Key. Larry Rasmussen, Laura Stivers

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Larry Rasmussen’s new book, Earth-Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key, like his last environmental ethics masterpiece Earth Community Earth Ethics (won the 1997 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion), is eloquently written and incorporates a multitude of interdisciplinary sources to argue for Creation justice.

Constellation Translation: A Canadian Noh Play, Judy Halebsky

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Daphne Marlatt’s play, The Gull, explores the form and structure of traditional Japanese Noh theatre to expand the possibilities of translating Noh for a Canadian audience. Marlatt developed the play out of her 1974 collection of poems, Steveston, which touches on the experience of Japanese-Canadian residents of the fishing community of Steveston, BC, who were evacuated and interned during World War II. In 2006, under the direction of Heidi Specht, Pangaea Arts staged The Gull through collaboration among Japanese Noh master Akira Matsui, Noh professionals from Tokyo, and Canadian actors. This research demonstrates that the emphasis on maintaining …

Depth Of The Surface, Marianne Rogoff

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

"Painter Melinda Cootsona chose the title 'A Sense of Place' for her September 2013 show at The Studio Shop long before “Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years” opened at San Francisco’s DeYoung Museum and art historians launched a series of lectures on his sense of place, though perhaps this is no coincidence. Cootsona expresses a clear love for the work of Diebenkorn and shares his figurative/abstract aesthetic and love of color. The paintings in Cootsona’s newest body of works offer similarly sensuous appreciation for the particular pleasures of California sunlight, but the “sense of place” she depicts may reflect a more …