Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Social Ontological Account Of Alienation And Its Place In The History Of Alienation Theory, Philip William Bauchan

Dissertations

Alienation is a sociological term that has found itself severely out of favor as an analytical concept due to what are perceived as inextricable theoretical shortcomings despite having once enjoyed a time when it was taken to be essential for a robust and critical analysis of society. This dissertation looks to contribute to a revitalization of alienation theory by offering an understanding of alienation that is grounded in the framework of social ontology as forwarded in the works of John Searle. This social ontological account conceives of alienation as a fallout fact that arises when there is a performative contradiction …

Play On; Give Me Excess Of It: Intercorporeality And Musical Definitions, Abram Basil Soucy Capone

Dissertations

Philosophy of music, especially in the 20th and 21st centuries, presides over a relatively narrow range of field-specific ontological and metaphysical questions. I claim that a focus on classical music and a reliance on analogies to the plastic arts constitutes an unhelpful (but pervasive) methodology in philosophy of music, one that stands in tension with its purported aim of accurately accounting for “the ways we talk, think, and act” in relation to music and musical works (Rohrbaugh 2003, 179). While philosophers of music explicitly aim to describe praxis, a significant gap exists between existing theory and ordinary musical experiences. To …

Between Script And Scripture: Performance Criticism And Mark's Character(Ization) Of The Disciples, Zechariah Eberhart

Dissertations

This project reimagines a first-century reception of the Gospel of Mark within a historically reconstructed (yet hypothetical) performance event. In particular, it considers the disciples' character and characterization through the lens of performance criticism. Questions concerning the characterization of the disciples have been relatively one-sided in New Testament scholarship, in favor of their negative characterization. This project demonstrates why such assumptions need not be necessary when we (re-)consider the oral/aural milieu in which the Gospel of Mark was first composed and received by its earliest audiences. In this project, I demonstrate that despite its "relative" newness, the primary tenets of …

Queer(Ly) Lingering In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Emily Datskou

Dissertations

This dissertation is a critical critique of Queer Theory as an academic field. It argues that queer theory’s establishment as an academic discipline and as a periodizing and historicizing force through the bibliographies that make up its canon has upheld and supported the very normative models of temporality and progression that the field claims to resist. As a result, I argue, queer theory has focused most heavily on modernism and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and has positioned the nineteenth century as the precursor to the queer strategies and representations that we see more fully fleshed out in the twentieth …

Belonging In The Borderlands: Questioning Catholic Ethics, Molly Greening

Dissertations

If colonialism is a structure, not an event, then special attention must be paid to the pastas well as the legacies of colonial domination that continue into the present. While Pope Francis has recently called for “overcoming colonizing mentalities” through the lens of what he calls “integral ecology,” crucial aspects of the colonial paradigm remain neglected or underexamined in this approach: sexuality, gender, and the negotiation of religious difference. After reviewing the theological-ethical negotiations that occurred at the beginning of colonization of the Americas, this dissertation proposes a narrative ethical model of reflection that brings Catholic ethics into conversation with …

The Forgotten Minority—The Experiences Of Somali-Jareer Bantu Students In Higher Education: “I Don’T Even Exist At This Institution. I’M Barely Recognized As A Human Being”., Arli Mohamed

Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine how students of Somali-Jareer Bantu descent experience education, particularly how they navigate higher education in the United States and how they make meaning of their experiences. Grounded in a descriptive phenomenological approach, the design method includes semi-structured individual and focus group interviews, with a holistic interpretative phenomenological analysis as a method of data analysis. This study utilizes descriptive phenomenology to investigate how Somali-Jareer Bantu students experience higher education in the U.S. and make meaning of their multiple identities as they navigate higher education environments. Using this methodological approach, the following questions guide …

Past And Progress: Producing History At Chicago's 1933-34 World's Fair, Cate Liabraaten

Dissertations

During the country’s worst economic crisis, the Great Depression, Chicago hosted an event that presented a vision for the future. The 1933-34 Century of Progress Exposition was Chicago’s second world’s fair, important for revitalizing the local economy as well as encouraging optimism for a better future. While the fair’s theme officially focused on scientific and technological progress and was intended to be forward-looking, several exhibits dwelt on the past.

Study of these historic-themed exhibits reveals that by featuring Abraham Lincoln, Fort Dearborn, Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable, and a replica colonial village, Americans looked to their shared past to make …

Artapanus And Greek Colonial Poetics, Scott Harris

Dissertations

The fragments of Artapanus have proven to be enigmatic for most scholars over the years and as such have not been treated in significant detail. Most scholarship has been restricted to two separate lines of enquiry: genre and ethnicity. I suggest that the resonance between Greek colonial poetics sheds new light on Artapanus's literary agenda: namely, that Artapanus is constructing and representing the memory of Jewish cultural and political foundations using broader Greek poetics which were used to describe the civic, cultic and geographic foundation of a colony. In this way, Artapanus is no longer an outlier within the Hellenistic …

“The Saloon Is Their Palace”: Race, Immigration, And Politics In The Woman’S Christian Temperance Union, 1874–1933, Ella Wagner

Dissertations

immigration, prohibition, race, suffrage, temperance, women's history

Toward An Eco-Cosmopolitanism: Wendell Berry And Ecowomanism In Conversation, Wade Casey

Dissertations

Agriculture, Alice Walker, bell hooks, Ecology, Theology, Wendell Berry

A Feminist Political Theological Ethics Of Formation: Being And Becoming Christian In The Face Of American Christian Nationalism, Sara Wilhelm Garbers

Dissertations

Feminism, Formation, New Political Theology, Political Theology, Preaching, Theological Ethics

A Past Not Present: Memory, Christianity, And Indian Removal Mission Sites In The Great Lakes And The South, Sean Thomas Jacobson

Dissertations

American Indians, cemeteries, Christianity, historic preservation, memory, public history

Reclaiming The Patria: Sinarquismo In The United States, 1936-1966, Nathan Ellstrand

Dissertations

This dissertation examines the rise and fall of the Catholic, nationalist, and anti-communist Mexican Unión Nacional Sinarquista (UNS or National Synarchist Union) in the U.S. between 1936 and the 1960s. Whereas most scholars study the UNS as a Mexico-specific movement, I examine the organization as a transnational one. This project not only adds to the literature on the UNS, but in Mexican American, Western, and postrevolutionary Mexican history. The individuals that became sinarquistas found refuge from the Mexican church-state conflict in the U.S. in places such as Texas, California, and Chicagoland. The organization’s leadership therefore envisioned an expanded Mexico wherever …

An Ethics Of Doctrinal Emergence: Reading Newman With Augustine And Contemporary Information Theory, Jeffrey John Campbell

Dissertations

Jeffrey J. CampbellLoyola University Chicago AN ETHICS OF DOCTRINAL EMERGENCE: READING NEWMAN WITH AUGUSTINE AND CONTEMPORARY INFORMATION THEORY The aim of this essay is to begin the process of a reconfiguration of the theological category of doctrinal development and to integrate an “emergent doctrinal ethics of belief” as an inextricable dimension of this category. Most scholarly writing on doctrinal development has taken place in the wake of the Enlightenment with its focus on epistemology, and doctrine is conceived of as “referencing” a quasi-metaphysical “res.” I attempt to “update” the guiding metaphors of doctrinal development with the goal of moving discussions …

White Enigma: Opacity, Perspective, And The Theological Formation Of White Subjectivity, Nathan David Pederson

Dissertations

I argue that examining the concept of “opacity” can hold together a growing tension in a contemporary phenomenology of whiteness: on the one hand, an insistence that whiteness is subjective and habitual; on the other, the insistence that whiteness is also an active, objective world horizon or ontologizing force that shapes the subject. In making this argument, I explain how the notion of opacity shapes a hermeneutical phenomenology of whiteness that can wrestle with how whiteness hides itself as benign through utilizing a symbolism of evil within theological discourse, even as it can come to function more concretely in the …

Detrimental Influences: Chicago And The Home Owners' Loan Corporation, 1933-1940, Matthew Amyx

Dissertations

This dissertation chronicles and analyzes the record of the Chicago chapter of the Home Owners' Loan Corporation in Chicago during the New Deal.

Soul As Paraphrase: The Formalism And Minority Of Prayer, Kimberly Matheson

Dissertations

Philosophical and theological treatments of Christian prayer regularly overlook its formal stakes. As a type of limit-speech, prayer can be thought alongside the class of logical dilemmas generated whenever an element of a total set refers to the very totality of which it is a part. These dilemmas are grouped together in what Graham Priest calls the “inclosure schema” and, moreover, exhibit a non-self-identical structure that is also the hallmark of robust metaphysical materialisms (i.e., the structure by which matter constitutively fails to coincide with itself). This dissertation sketches an immanent materialist account of Christian prayer by bringing these two …

Deep Deification: Soteriology For A World In Ecological Crisis, Kathleen Mcnutt

Dissertations

What might an adequate soteriology look like for a world in ecological crisis? This dissertation constructively addresses this problem at the intersection of contemporary ecofeminist theology and Patristic soteriologies of theosis or deification. I examine ecofeminist soteriologies, drawing on the work of Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sallie McFague, and Elizabeth Johnson in particular, and deification soteriologies, especially that of Maximus the Confessor, arguing that each of these trajectories offers both fruitful possibilities for a reconstruction of soteriology but that each also raises some problems. In bringing these two trajectories into conversation, I suggest directions for a constructive theology of salvation that …

Knowledge And Political Interest: Politico-Epistemic Injustice In The United States Under Capitalist Democracy, Philipa Friedman

Dissertations

This dissertation examines the relationship between knowledge and politics in the United States under capitalist democracy. Incorporating political theory, epistemology (the study of knowledge), political science, and economics, it examines ways in which the economic inequality endemic to the United States privileges political knowledge contributions to policy debates by wealthy individuals and depresses knowledge contributions by middle- and lower-income communities. This occurs during public debate, in voting, at the level of mass media, and during official legislative debate. Economically marginalized people are less likely to see their needs and interests reflected in policy debates and in policies themselves because our …

Turn Not Thine Eyes: Holy Faces, Saving Gazes, And The Theology Of Attention, Jacob W. Torbeck

Dissertations

Jacob W. TorbeckLoyola University Chicago TURN NOT THINE EYES: HOLY FACES, SAVING GAZES, AND THE THEOLOGY OF ATTENTION Theoretical Theologies and Practical Theologies have historically been contrasted with one another as distinct but connected disciplines, a contrast with roots in the figures of Plato and Aristotle, or Mary and Martha. Over the centuries, with the increasing ability of theologians to specialize, theoretical theologians have accused practical theologians as ignoring spiritual realities, while practical theologians have accused theoretical theologians of ignoring material realities. This dissertation puts forward a theological exposition of the notion of contemplative attention that demonstrates the unity and …

Political Justificationism: A More Realistic Epistemology Of Political Disagreement, Randolph Jay Carlson

Dissertations

Disagreement is probably the most salient feature of our contemporary political environment. This project aims to examine political disagreements from the perspective of the recent discussions of the epistemology of disagreement more generally. Some, known as conciliationists, argue that when confronted with a disagreement with someone who is equally knowledgeable and well-informed as you are on the issue (known as an "epistemic peer"), one should become substantially less confident in that antecedently held belief. While some have tried to straightforwardly apply the conciliationist approach to political disagreements, I argue that such an approach makes us vulnerable to significant cognitive biases …

William Of Auxerre And Thomas Aquinas On Simultaneous Faith And Knowledge, Jacob Joseph Andrews

Dissertations

In this dissertation I will consider how two 13th century theologians, William of Auxerre (1156-1231) and St. Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274), explored the question, "Whether the same thing can be known (demonstratively) and (believed by faith)" (utrum idem sit scitum et creditum). Both denied that this was possible, but they differed in the relative epistemic priority of faith and knowledge. Aquinas thought that demonstrative knowledge has epistemic priority over faith: for example, if someone knows a proof for God's existence, then they know that God exists, and it is impossible for them to have faith that God exists. Aquinas is a …

The Upstart Peril In The Nineteenth-Century English Novel, Lydia Craig

Dissertations

Responding to the French Revolution (1789-1799) with his widely read text Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), conservative Whig politician Edmund Burke influentially accused an ambitious bourgeoisie of inciting the lower classes to revolt against the aristocracy and Bourbon dynasty. He also insinuated that only the class hierarchy and feudal respect prevented a similar upstart peril in England from occasioning revolution. For the English middle classes, this demonization of upstarts, or parvenus posed an ideological challenge to their public consolidation as a political and cultural force. Bourgeois authors from Jane Austen to Charles Dickens utilized an upstart rivalry device …

Finding The Child: Exploration Into Pedagogical Foundations In The Roman Catholic Church, Erica L. Saccucci

Dissertations

Children are important members of society. Their membership as participants in humanity has gotten lost at times throughout history. Children have a particular type of dependency in relationships with the adults around them. This means that adults need to understand children in a different light; from the perspective of the child. In Roman Catholic social ethics, children are always understood as under the authority of their parents. Rarely are children understood in a way that gives them dignity in their subjectivity. This work provides a historical review of the theological ethics of child in the Roman Catholic Church from both …

Environmental Reforestation And Social Justice In Cameroon: A Test Case For Pope Francis' Concept Of 'Integral Ecology' In Laudato Sí, Augustin Vondou

Dissertations

The following quotation from Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato Sí is one of the most quoted parts of his well-known encyclical: We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental. Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature (139).

This is a very challenging statement. Not everyone accepts this idea of an ‘integral ecology’; that is, the notion that the condition of human society is directly linked to the …

An Eco-Theology For Korean American Presbyterian Churches, Yale Park

Dissertations

Although Asian perspectives and philosophical heritage may carry ecological values, the Korean American Protestant Churches (KAPC) seem uncaring the current global climate crisis. Nor have their theological views on nature been developed adequately. I hypothesize that one of the reasons for the disinterest is KAPC’s anthropocentric views on humans. The Korean American immigrant churches, taught by traditional and conservative theology, recognize humans as disconnected from the rest of creation. Humans are treated and emphasized almost as the telos of God’s whole creation. The worthlessness of humans before God is affirmed, but ironically humans are always seen higher than any other …

Slavery, The Enslaved, And The Gospel Of Matthew: A Narrative, Social-Scientific Study, Jonathan Hatter

Dissertations

This project combines social-science methodology with a narrative critical reading strategy in order to explore the use of slave language in the Gospel of Matthew. I argue that the core of Matthew's slave metaphors is not the rendering of service (to God or to others) or “slave” as an honorific title but rather "slavery" serves primarily as a metaphor for obedience and radical humility. Adopting sociologist Orlando Patterson's definition for slavery as a base model, I show that Matthew's portrayal of enslaved characters tends to conform to the prevailing views of the larger Hellenized Roman world (that is, slavery is …

Reading Ethics: Modernism, Narrative, Violence, Katie Dyson

Dissertations

Reading Ethics hinges on the relationship between its two central terms, tracing how modernist narrative innovations reimagined reading as an ethical practice. To ask how we read is to return to a core question for the discipline. Building on recent reevaluations of reading methodologies by Rita Felski, Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best, and other scholars, I argue that modernist narrative forms foreground the ethical dynamics between text, reader, and world, asking readers to rethink how we understand the world even as they work to build new ones. Focusing on British and American modernist and meta-modernist fiction from writers such as …

The Genre Of A Meal: The Prototypical Instantiation Of The Lord's Supper In 1 Corinthians 11: 17-34, Paul Olatubosun Adaja

Dissertations

1 Corinthians 11:17-34 contains the earliest reference to the celebration of the official meal of the early Christians, commonly known today as the Lord's Supper or the Eucharist. In this passage, Paul addresses what he considered to amount to abuses of this Christian practice (1 Cor 11: 17-22). The idea that the Lord's Supper as it was celebrated in the city of Corinth is a variant of the Greco-Roman meal tradition is a well-established position among scholars today. It is also a position I agree with, but only partially. The contribution of this dissertation to scholarship in this field will …

Reams, Radicals And Revolutionaries: The 'Illinois Staats-Zeitung' And The German-American Milieu In Chicago, 1847-1877, Sebastian Peter Wuepper

Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes how a large, German-language newspaper, the Illinois Staats-Zeitung served the German-American immigrant community in Chicago in the second half of the nineteenth century. The German diaspora in the United States was not a secluded, separated, and isolated entity, but a node in a transnational network of cultural exchange that crossed national and natural boundaries. Newspapers contributed significantly to the creation and maintenance of this cultural sphere. The editors of the Staats-Zeitung were refugees of the failed 1848 democratic revolutions in Germany. In Germany they had been academics, intellectuals, lawyers and journalists. They brought their political convictions with …