Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Techno-Theology: A Theological Algorithm For Being Human In A Technological Age, Daniel Passini

Doctor of Ministry

In a world with rapidly changing technology that challenges our understanding of what it means to be human, our dealings with the biosphere, and our social interactions, many pastors and Christians do not have an adequate theology of technology. Our current narraphors have been influenced by our linguistics, popular culture, and an escapism theology that prevents us from interacting with technology in a theological way. Technotheology is the algorithm necessary to understand humanity’s role in a technological age through the matrix of the imago Dei. Using humanity’s ability to reason, their regency over creation, and their ability to be in …

A Neo-Free Methodism: Shadow-Work As A Model For Racial Justice, Liz Simmons

Doctor of Ministry

The increase of racial and ethnic minorities in the United States is on a trajectory to shift the demographic of the Church over time to majority non-white. Because of the abolitionist spirit of its genesis, Free Methodist church contexts have the historical and theological foundations to become hosts for multicultural communities and culturally engaging conversations leading to racial justice. The homogeneous demographic of many Free Methodist churches today, however, results in blindness toward privilege and resistance toward social engagement, reinforcing an insulated identity narrative.

Particularly in rural and suburban areas where the surrounding demographic is shifting at a slower rate, …

The Commodification Of The Table: The Journey Toward The Forgotten Body And Blood Of Jesus, Guy L. Taylor

Doctor of Ministry

Bread and wine are metaphors for the broken body and spilled blood of Jesus the Christ. Jesus himself stated that these two metaphors are to represent his sacrifice for humans, yet these metaphors have lost much of their importance in present-day Christianity. Pentecostal churches specifically seem to have forgotten what the bread and wine symbolize. Due to cultural influences, these churches no longer place emphasis on celebrating what they call Communion.

Many Pentecostal Christians today attend a service that is convenient, efficient, and that meets all their spiritual needs at one stop—like a Super Walmart of Worship due to the …

Scriptural Contextualization: Understanding Chinese Philosophical Narratives, Gregory Appleby

Doctor of Ministry

Whether one is overseas or within their own home culture, when working cross-culturally scriptural contextualization is necessary to reduce confusion. When developing Chinese leaders, differing world views have caused conflict and confusion especially concerning an understanding of Scripture and the person of Christ. Westerners teaching, working, and living in a Chinese context participate in either widening or narrowing the philosophical gap between the East and the West concerning their understanding of Scripture. My hope is that Western leaders will see the value in alternative interpretations and understanding of the Scripture based on Chinese foundational narratives. Misunderstandings of cultural differences have …

Thriving Holistically As A Woman Married To A Minister: A Spiritual Formation Model To Support Women In The United States In The Role Of Pastor's Wife, Elisa Renae Ashley

Doctor of Ministry

While women married to ministers are blessed by God in many ways through their role as pastor’s wife, the role also presents many particular stressors. These stressors impact the systems of self, family, and church. A majority of clergy wives struggle to some degree with interpersonal loneliness, with finding confidants, and creating spiritual community wherein they can be authentically vulnerable. These struggles negatively impact the spiritual, physical, and psycho-emotional health of the women in this role. In order for them to deepen their spirituality and thrive holistically as they navigate the challenges of this role, a tailored spiritual formation model …

Exvangelical: Why Millennials And Generation Z Are Leaving The Constraints Of White Evangelicalism, Colleen Batchelder

Doctor of Ministry

This research presents the argument that Millennials and Generation Z are not leaving the church; they are reconstructing their faith and distancing themselves from fundamentalism. When exploring the history of evangelicalism, church history, and generational distinctives, one is given the opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of generational dynamics in regard to faith, theology, and praxis.

Chapter 1 explores the various distinctions and biases that encompass each generation. It also provides background for how generational influence shaped the narrative of the church, faith, and purpose.

Chapter 2 tackles the generational shift in ecclesiology and gives readers a glimpse into the …

The Hispanic-Serving Designation And Educator Preparation, Patricia Alvarez Mchatton, Janine M. Schall, Eugenio Longoria Sáenz

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications

The creation of the Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) designation resulted from decades of advocacy efforts to ensure access to resources and recognition as institutions that served many Latinx students. Texas was at the forefront of efforts to create the HSI designation due to long-term lack of access to quality education, and negative stereotypes about the Latinx population, and an expectation for individuals from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds to assimilate into the dominant culture. Given that institutions of higher education achieve the HSI designation based on meeting a predetermined threshold, HSIs are highly diverse and serve a variety of missions. In …

Building Meaning For An Hscoe Designation: Learnings And Proximations, Patricia Alvarez Mchatton, Eugenio Longoria Sáenz, Janine M. Schall

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications

G. Furman furthered R. J. Starratt’s work on ethical leadership, which called for an ethic of care, an ethic of justice, and an ethic of critique as necessary for authentic leadership in PK-12 settings. While essential, she found them insufficient in that they focused on the individual. The Hispanic-Serving College of Education community as a whole includes all our students, faculty, and staff, but people also belong to communities in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) beyond the university. Transforming the education of Latinx students has importance beyond the RGV. Along with the moral imperative of providing all students with a …

Language And Literacy Practices Of Bilingual Education Preservice Teachers At A Hispanic-Serving College Of Education, Elena M. Venegas, Veronica L. Estrada, Janine Schall, Leticia De Leon

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications

This chapter focuses on an exploratory study of the language and literacy practices of undergraduate students within our Hispanic-Serving College of Education (HSCOE). HSCOEs must first understand and approach the language and literacy practices of bilingual education preservice teachers from an asset-based perspective. Language and literacy practices shape people’s identities and how they exist in the world. Language and literacy development also have an essential role in adult success since reading allows people to access, analyze, synthesize, and use knowledge to understand the world and learn new things. Much of the literature related to language and literacy practices at the …

Bilingual Teacher Educators At An Hsi: A Border Pedagogy For Latinx Teacher Development, Alcione N. Ostorga, Christian E. Zúñiga, Kip Austin Hinton

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications

As a borderlands’ institution, we are developing a mission and vision for our HSI identity in the college of education, as well as in our university. We envision pedagogical practices embedded in our teacher preparation that are context specific to our bilingual, biliterate, and bicultural community; one that not only prepares PTs to effectively teach all students, but also promotes strong values for equity and social justice. For our Latinx PTs, this aim has two purposes: 1) to tailor our educational practices capitalizing on their unique strengths and addressing possible challenges in their professional development, and 2) preparing them to …

Cultural Narratives And Counterstories: Examining Representation In “Prietita Y La Llorona”, Christian E. Zúñiga

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications

Stories can be a powerful medium through which to simultaneously reinforce and counter oppressive discourse. This article examines Gloria Anzaldúa’s children’s book, Prietita y La Llorona, as a counterstory method within the larger genre of Latinx children’s literature. Counterstories are a powerful method used by Critical Race and feminist theorists to center the delegitimized experiences of marginalized communities. Drawing on theories around discourse, representation, and intersectionality, the article explores the ways in which Anzaldúa counters cultural narratives that diminish community cultural wealth and women’s positions as agents of knowledge through the characters of Doña Lola and La Llorona.

A View Of Scientific Methodology As A Source Of Ignorance In Controversies About Genetically Engineered Crops, Hugh Lacey

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

The Hispanic-Serving College Of Education Special Interest Research Group Initiative: Building A Community Around A Question, Janine M. Schall, Patricia Alvarez Mchatton, Eugenio Longoria Sáenz

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications

This chapter aims to establish Hispanic-Serving Institution Special Interest Research Group (HSI SIRG) initiative as one way to become consciously skilled at addressing the question of what it means to be an Hispanic-Serving College of Education. While a fundamental component of the SIRG initiative was the need for accountability, the opportunity to provide various kinds of support was equally important. One common issue was overambitious research plans, with SIRGs proposing projects that would realistically take several years to complete. Other SIRGs realized that their proposed projects only shallowly addressed the focus of the SIRG initiative and more tightly aligned their …

Engl 101 Discussion Questions On “Seeing” By Annie Dillard From Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, Susan Lago, Alison Cimino, Ilse Schrynemakers, Susan Jacobowitz

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Great Books: Teaching Anne Carson’S Translation Of Sappho, Susan Lago, Alison Cimino, Susan Jacobowitz, Ilse Schrynemakers

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Demographic Changes And Faithful Response: Helping Presbyterian Churches Flourish Into The Future, David G. Watermulder

Doctor of Ministry

The problem that this dissertation seeks to address is that in an increasingly diverse society, Presbyterian Church (USA) (PCUSA) churches do not reflect the true racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of the changing context in which they are located. This paper explores how PCUSA churches in American suburban areas can better understand themselves in order to be equipped to engage with an increasingly multicultural and globalized environment. The future health and witness of PCUSA churches will be enhanced and deepened through actively learning about cultural differences and preparing members and leaders to do ministry faithfully into the years ahead.

Section …

Frontmatter (Volume 40, No.1), Paul B. Mojzes

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

No abstract provided.

Recording Studios Since 1970, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

Like many other specialty, purpose-built spaces, we tend to think of recording studios in instrumental terms, meaning that the space is defined in relation to the nominal type of work that the space is instrumental towards. While audio recordings have been made in spaces since 1877, not all of these spaces tend to be regarded as recording studios, partly since so many recordings were made in environments designed for other types of work; indeed, much of the first seventy years of US and UK recorded music history transpired at radio stations, concert halls and lightly treated mixed-use commercial spaces (e.g. …

Binaural: Trauma And Disability Representation In Cinema, Joshua Grossberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the year 2019, the film business is undergoing profound change. Streaming services like Netflix and Amazon have become major distribution outlets, threatening the hegemony of traditional Hollywood studios and altering the kinds of movies that receive a theatrical release. Gone is the middle budget film, replaced by franchises like Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Fast and the Furious and Star Wars based on already popular intellectual property. But that's not all. In the wake of the fallout of the #OscarsSoWhite controversy and the #MeToo Movement, for the first time serious efforts are being made both outside and inside the industry …

Ethical Validity: An Ethical Validity Claim For Discourse Ethics, Jamie B. Lindsay

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Discourse ethicists generally are anti-realists about moral rightness, in that the rightness of moral norms is a matter of discursive justification, and is not grounded in or by any objective feature of the world. Put differently, the position is that rightness is wholly constructed by our moral practices. Further, discourse ethics and liberal theories of justice more broadly generally rely on a distinction between goods that are generalizable, and goods that are in some way context-bound and particularistic. Jürgen Habermas’ discourse ethics makes the distinction wholly formal, abstaining from any theoretical commitment to which goods are generalizable and leaving this …

In Support Of Abstraction: Physical Interiority Beyond Postmodern Dance, Irene Hultman Monti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I investigate how speculative philosophy informs critical thinking about dance and its performance, encompassing both the act of creating and the action of executing. Speculative thinking augments and draws out new experiences and realities in the artistic body. I will argue that speculative theories widen the understanding and implementation of dance and its performance through a combination of human and nonhuman forces. This broadened understanding encourages progress, transformation, and evolution within the field of dance. I discuss the human (that which is experienced through sensibilities, therefore tangible and understandable on a cognitive and practical level) and the nonhuman (forces beyond …

The Cinematic Treatment Of Tableaux Vivants In D.W. Griffith’S Broken Blossoms, Sheikh Deen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

D.W. Griffith's (January 22, 1875–July 23, 1948), one of the iconic American film directors of early silent cinema, felt his film Broken Blossoms (1919) to be his one art film and is considered to be an exemplary film in Tableaux Vivants[1] usage. When this Tableau skillfully employed, the effect can be dramatic, for it bridges the gap between theatre, sculpture, literature, and poetry. To better understand how Tableau works in Broken Blossoms, this study intends to analyze several scenes by showing how Griffith employs innovative film techniques within scenes through bodily gestures, motifs, and poetic stanzas to skillfully …

Feminist Theology And The Fantastic In Jewish Poetics And Children's Literature (1960s–Present), Meira S. Levinson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces the development of Jewish fantasy rhetoric in post-WWII British and American literature, focusing on three genres: kabbalistic Beat poetry, children’s fantasy, and graphic novels/comics. Despite increasing scholarly attention to all these areas, little work has focused on fantasy rhetoric or issues of gender and sexuality within non-canonical Jewish literature, or on interplays of religion and fantasy in children’s literature. Jewish kabbalistic poetry and children’s fantasy speak to each other in their mutual engagements with the otherworldly, mystical and monstrous, interrogations of gender, and complex portrayals of feminist theological potentialities. I identify and analyze Jewish-hermeneutic themes and methodologies …

African American Existential Heroes: Narrative Struggles For Authenticity, Michael Cotto

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

African American Existential Heroes: Narrative Struggles for Authenticity argues for the development of existential authenticities and their impact on African American self-identity constructions in three African American literary classics:

Richard Wright’s The Outsider, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. For that purpose, the introduction puts forward the aforementioned topic; defines the major terms, authenticity, existentialism, and African Americanness; identifies the three texts to be studied; explicates its methodology; studies the anagnorisis of each text in relation to the existential crisis; accounts for the existential philosophers used, Martin …

A Heavy Rain Has Fallen Upon My People: Sindhi Sufi Poetry Performance, Emotion, And Islamic Knowledge In Kachchh, Gujarat, Brian E. Bond

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a study of the use and contestation of Sindhi-language Sufi poetry performance as a means of Islamic knowledge transmission and ethical self-formation in rural Muslim communities in Kachchh, a border district in the western Indian state of Gujarat adjacent to Sindh, Pakistan. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic research with Muslim performers and enthusiasts of Sindhi poetry between 2014-2018, I first examine an ecology of performative and interpretive practices revolving around the musico-poetic repertoire of the poet-saint Shāh ʿAbdul Lat̤īf Bhiṭā’ī (1689-1752 CE). I argue that the pedagogical efficacy of Sufi poetry performance is undergirded by its …

Lo Visible, Lo Invisible Y Lo Imaginable: Neoliberalismo Y Ciudad En Las Producciones Culturales De Posguerra En Centroamérica, Maria A. Leon Umana

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project researches the radical change that the peace treaty of the 1990s brought to Central American societies in connection with economic models. Specifically, it examines the way in which the implementation of neoliberal policies has transformed the cities concerning the spatial and the social; consequently, resulting in an important urban shift in regard to postwar cultural productions. I build a theoretical model organizes the investigation in three representative examples of Central American urban imaginaries (The Visible, The Invisible, and the Imaginable) so as to enlighten and/or enrich the analysis of the region’s urban social realities—examined in detail in a …

Outlandish People: Gypsies, Race, And Fantasies Of National Identity In Early Modern England, Sydnee Wagner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the arrival of Romani people in England in the 16th century, the figure of the Gypsy has been a staple of English literature and culture. My dissertation, Outlandish People: Gypsies, Race, and Fantasies of National Identity in Early Modern England, argues that representations of Gypsies, from Shakespeare’s Othello and Antony and Cleopatra to Ben Jonson’s The Gypsies Metamorphosed, served as a foil for English writers to create a distinctly white early modern English subject. By investigating the racialization of the Gypsy, this project considers technologies of race that lie within the parameters of England itself. Though the English …

Metaethical Intentionalism And The Intersubjectivity Of Morals, Kyle Ferguson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I defend a thesis called metaethical intentionalism, according to which deontic moral judgments (“ought” judgments) are intersubjective intentions or verbal expressions of intersubjective intentions. They have the form, “We shall any of us do A in C,” or are derivable from such practical commitments. They are universalizable by virtue of their content (“… any of us …”) and sharable by virtue of their form (“We …”). My account of the moral “ought” is inspired by the moral writings of Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989). While I draw on his work and offer interpretations, my primary aim is to develop and refine Sellars’s …

The Zine Union Catalog, Lauren S. Kehoe, Jenna Freedman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Lauren Kehoe and Jenna Freedman have been working on the Zine Union Catalog, aka ZineCat or ZUC, since their Introduction to Digital Humanities course in Spring, 2017: MALS 75500, Digital Humanities Methods and Practices. ZineCat is the home of a union catalog dedicated to zines. A union catalog is a resource where libraries and other cultural institutions that collect materials can share cataloging and holdings information from their individual collections. The most familiar union catalog is probably WorldCat which is used to locate books, journals, CDs, DVDs, and other materials in the world’s libraries. ZineCat facilitates researchers' discovery of zine …

Finding Love: A Relational Psychoanalytic Reading Of Charlotte Bronte's "Villette," George Eliot's "Middlemarch," And Virginia Woolf's "To The Lighthouse", Jerry B. Finkel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I apply contemporary relational psychoanalytic, trauma and field theories to three novels, Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and offer a new psychoanalytic understanding of the relationship between fictional characters, author and reader useful for literary criticism. These theories are based on the assumption that the primary human motivation is the desire for relatedness and intimacy, a co-constructed, intersubjectivity characterized by mutuality, recognition and respect. The dissertation reviews core concepts of these theories including the phenomena of dissociation, enactments and intersubjectivity. In my analysis of the novels I demonstrate the …