Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Belief In The Unbelievable: Yakov Druskin And Chinari Metaphysics, Patrick D. Powers

Honors Papers

This project focuses on the philosophy of Yakov Druskin and its applicability as a lens through which to examine the metaphysical and religious elements of chinari literature. Formed in Leningrad at the dawn of the Soviet Union, the group of authors and philosophers known as the chinari has long been recognized as an important component of the Russian avant-garde. However, the role of religion and spirituality in their works remains under-examined, despite the fact that the group featured a prolific religious philosopher, Yakov Druskin. By exploring a selection of Druskin’s philosophical concepts and applying them to major chinari texts—Daniil Kharms’ …

The Rise And Fall Of Qigong, William J. Cramer

Honors Papers

This capstone engages the history qigong, a Chinese method of spiritual and bodily cultivation. Although similar Daoist practices have existed for thousands of years, the term qigong was invented by the Chinese military in the 1950s. Qigong exploded in popularity in China from the early 1980s to the late 90s. The Chinese state promoted, appropriated, regulated, and ultimately suppressed qigong. On one hand, the Chinese Communist Party wanted to measure and order qigong according to orthodox scientific and political principles, thus processing and controlling the explosion of spirituality known as “Qigong Fever.” Yet on the other hand, both within and …

Virtue Of Attunement: Contributions Of Yuasa Yasuo's Embodied Self-Cultivation Practices To Ted Toadvine's Ecophenomenology Of Difference, Pailyn Brown

Honors Papers

I argue that Ted Toadvine’s Ecophenomenology presents a concept of difference that is totalizing and has a concept of the body that is a-historical and universal. By using Yuasa Yasuo’s ideas that the body is culturally constructed and can be reconstituted through repeated bodily practices, I revise Toadvine’s totalizing difference, emphasizing that we can use our bodies to increasingly learn about difference. I call this a Virtue of Attunement.

Highway Religion: Truckstop Chapels, Evangelism, And Lived Religion On The Road, David Brett Greenberg

Honors Papers

This study examines manifestations of Christian faith found along the highways of the United States, particularly in the form of truckstop chapels. Through ethnographic research and social-historical/theoretical analysis, this study seeks to explore the ways in which Evangelical Christianity, when combined with certain cultural and social particulars of the trucking profession, may be markedly re-contextualized, giving rise to distinctive approaches to ministry, worship, and religious life.

By identifying widespread and often codified specializations among trucking ministries and examining the ways in which the trucking-specific evangelism of such ministries may be applied and lived out by individual drivers of faith, this …

History Of Jews At Oberlin College: A Mirror Of Change, Andrea R. Meyer

Honors Papers

In searching for the first Jewish student at Oberlin College, I discovered and subsequently researched the life of, 1920 graduate Marion Benjamin Roth who started the Oberlin branch of the Menorah Society, a Jewish literary and cultural group. Mrs. Roth, whom I interviewed, started the group because she was concerned about the environment for Jewish students. In letters to Rabbi Wolsey in Cleveland she discussed her perceptions of life for Jewish students at Oberlin soon after her arrival.

Marion Benjamin later reflected that Jewish students needed to have "some place that they could get together if they wanted; to discuss …

The Voodoo Gospel And The Christian Gospel, William Dewitt Burton

Honors Papers

When on September 4, 1950 I went to the Republic of Haiti as a missionary for the Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Mission Convention, U.S.A., I found Voodoo to be far more prevalent there than I had been led to believe, and I was very ill-prepared to cope with it in the rural area where I was assigned to work. I knew also that after two years I was to go to Liberia, ' West Africa, where I would find a similar situation. I then set about to learn all that I could about Voodoo.

Two main reasons, then, led me …

The Christian Minister Protagonist Of Social Justice, Ellsworth N. Escott

Honors Papers

The thesis to be elaborated in this paper is that the Christian minister has a responsibility of profound import in the great common enterprise of achieving social justice. By social justice we mean the greatest possible realization by the individual and by society of abundance of life by way of the most complete practical coordination of individual attitudes, social relationships, economic arrangements and ethical motives. In the development of this thesis we shall be under necessity of employing a number of technical terms, such as democracy, dictatorship, capitalism, profit economy, acquisitive society, economic imperialism, which are in current use. We …

The Theology And Psychology Of The Negroes' Religion Prior To 1860 As Shown Particularly In The Spirituals: A Thesis, Norman Gregg Long

Honors Papers

In this thesis the writer has endeavored to treat the distinctive religion of the American Negroes so as to make evident, as far as he is able, the circumstances of its origin, its early development, the changes which have conditioned it, the theology in which it has been formulated, and the psychological motives which have been expressed in it. This study is made with the following specific objectives in view:

1. To study the Negro Spirituals as a body of musical literature in which the Negroes' religion prior to 1861 is embodied.

2. To point out the most outstanding features …