Religion Commons^™

Intimations Of A Spiritual New Age: Iii. Martin Heidegger’S Phenomenology Of Numinous/Being Experience And The “Other Beginning” Of A Futural Planetary Spirituality, Harry T. Hunt

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

The phenomenology of numinous or Being-experience in the later Heidegger is the focus in this third in a series of papers on a group of independent figures— also including Jung, Reich, Toynbee, Teilhard de Chardin, and Simone Weil—who beginning in the crisis years of the 1930s envisioned versions of a futural “New Age” spirituality to address a globalizing materialism and its disenchantments—and so also creating a context for much of contemporary transpersonal and consciousness studies. A preliminary consideration of Heidegger in the contexts of transpersonal psychology, religious studies, the macro-histories of Toynbee and Sorokin, James on “pure experience,” and spirituality …

The Castrated Gods And Their Castration Cults: Revenge, Punishment, And Spiritual Supremacy, Jenny Wade

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

Voluntary castration has existed as a religious practice up to the present day, openly in India and secretively in other parts of the world. Gods in a number of different cultures were castrated, a mutilation that paradoxically tended to increase rather than diminish their powers. This cross-cultural examination of the eunuch gods examines the meaning associated with divine emasculation in Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece, the Roman Empire, India, and northern Europe to the degree that these meanings can be read from the wording of myths, early accounts, and the castration cults for some of these gods. Three distinct patterns of …

Meaning-Making Among Intentionally Childless Women, Christine Brooks

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

This paper is a summary of a qualitative research project that focused upon meaningmaking processes as described by intentionally childless women. A grounded theory exploration, it involved semi-structured interviews with 30 cisgendered women aged 27–61 who chose childlessness early in life. Based on principles inherent to social constructivism and feminist theories, the subjective voices of the participants were analyzed as normative expressions of female identity. The main category that accompanied intentional childlessness was a sense of freedom. In addition, two additional thematic categories focused on ways the women view their contributions to their communities and experience belonging and a sense …

Introduction To The Special Topic Section On Transpersonal Sexuality: Bringing Sexy Back To Transpersonal Studies, Samuel A. Malkemus, Marie I. Thouin-Savard

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

N/A

Amigeist: A New Extreme Love Phenomenon, Jeffrey Sundberg

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

Falling in love may begin with an inescapable, uncontrollable, transformative experience of intense emotions and intrusive thoughts, such as limerence. Romantic love researchers have tended to lump extreme love into pathology. Transpersonal psychology was chosen as the lens to examine an extreme occurrence of falling in love for its transformational and spiritual potential using a phenomenological approach. Twenty-five U.S. born participants, age 30 or older, reported experiencing a highly intense and deeply significant romantic love occurrence. Results revealed a unique experience with limited correlations to limerence. The new phenomenon is called amigeist, characterized by immediate, intense soul-mate bonding, such as …

Theorizing About The Self In Panpsychism And The Extended Mind Using The Dao De Jing (道德經) And Zhuangzi (莊子), Ryan Lemasters

The Hilltop Review

In this paper, I begin by briefly showing how the problem of self has been understood and approached historically in Western philosophy. I follow this by focusing on some of the recent literature in the philosophy of mind that suggests that the self is extended, meaning it is not solely located within the boundaries of the brain (Clark and Chalmers 1998). It will be evident that this is in conflict with the traditional Western understanding of the self. Since it seems to be the case that there are strong arguments for endorsing the view that the self is extended (to …

Is Ai Intelligent, Really?, Bruce D. Baker

SPU Works

The question of intelligence opens up a bouquet of interrelated questions:

Suppose that some future AGI systems (on-screen or robots) equaled human performance. Would they have real intelligence, real understanding, real creativity? Would they have selves, moral standing, free choice? Would they be conscious? And without consciousness, could they have any of those other properties?[1]

The only way out of the morass is to recognize that truth claims do not stand on their own, aloof and cut off from the sea of meaning which grants epistemic access. In other words, truth presumes access to: (1) a way of knowing, …

Setting The Stage And Building Homes: Architecture Metaphors And Space In Donne's First Caroline Sermon, Alexander S. Laws

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Through his use of "foundation" and "house" metaphors in his "First Sermon Preached to King Charles at St. James, 3 April 1625," John Donne discreetly presents his ideologies and principles before the new king, while simultaneously criticizing his contemporaries' misguided bickering over religio-political factions. This essay seeks to unpack the history surrounding, as well as the casuistical logic found within Donne's first sermon preached during the Caroline period, which both explicitly and implicitly addresses the foremost anxieties of the people of the changing age.

Exorcising Mythicism’S Sky-Demons: A Response To Raphael Lataster’S “Questioning Jesus’ Historicity.”, James F. Mcgrath

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

No abstract provided.

Wholeheartedness And Acquaintance With God, Sarah Naomi Dannemiller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I demonstrate that wholeheartedness is a constitutive intellectual virtue. Wholeheartedness consists of a definite and unified volitional structure in which one’s desires are integrated around union with God and which contributes to one’s personal intellectual worth by positively orienting her toward acquaintance with God. Since wholeheartedness consists of a hierarchy of the will that prioritizes a desire for union with God, wholeheartedness aims towards the epistemic good of acquaintance. By desiring that one have a will that wills union with God, she cooperates with God toward wholeheartedness. As one becomes aware of her volitional structure changing, she …

Divine Simplicity As A Necessary Condition For Affirming Creation Ex Nihilo, Chance Juliano

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Proponents of the Doctrine of Divine Simplicity (DDS) have frequently argued that God must lack any temporal, physical, or metaphysical composition on the grounds that God’s existence would be dependent upon God’s parts. This avenue of discourse has been tried and trod so often that most detractors of DDS find it insufficient to demonstrate DDS. Additionally, objectors to DDS have often rejected the doctrine on the count of the heap of metaphysical (often Aristotelian or Neoplatonist) assumptions that one must make before one can even arrive at DDS. Within this essay I will offer an argument for DDS that is …

Abelard's Affective Intentionalism, Lillian M. King

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The work contained within this dissertation is a textual exegesis of Abelard’s ethics. The goal is to elucidate Abelard’s sort of intentionalism given his use of “intention” within his wider corpus, the grammatical and syntactical patterns in his prose, and Abelard’s own interests, biography, and situation as a twelfth-century monastic figure. As a result, this project should be understood as a history of philosophy dissertation. I am not attempting to build upon Abelard’s ideas but to clarify them. This is not to say that building upon Abelard’s ideas is not a worthwhile project. It is merely to say that doing …

Amigeist: A New Extreme Love Phenomenon, Jeffrey Sundberg

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Advance Publication Archive

Falling in love may begin with an inescapable, uncontrollable, transformative experience of intense emotions and intrusive thoughts, such as limerence. Romantic love researchers have tended to lump extreme love into pathology. Transpersonal psychology was chosen as the lens to examine an extreme occurrence of falling in love for its transformational and spiritual potential using a phenomenological approach. Twenty-five U.S. born participants, age 30 or older, reported experiencing a highly intense and deeply significant romantic love occurrence. Results revealed a unique experience with limited correlations to limerence. The new phenomenon is called amigeist, characterized by immediate, intense soul-mate bonding, such as …

Intimations Of A Spiritual New Age: Ii. Wilhelm Reich As Transpersonal Psychologist Part 2: The Futural Promise Of Reich’S Naturalistic Bio-Energetic Spirituality, Harry T. Hunt

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Advance Publication Archive

This is the second part of a consideration of the later Wilhelm Reich as anticipating a future planetary-wide “New Age” form of this-worldly spirituality in ways overlapping with figures from the same era of Western crisis from the 1930s through the 1950s, including Jung, Toynbee, Bergson, Heidegger, Teilhard de Chardin, and Simone Weil. Where the first part of this treatment of Reich as transpersonal psychologist traced his evolution from his bio-energetic psychotherapy to a Weberian this-worldly mysticism of a universal life energy, his cosmic orgone, with its attendant features of conflicted “spiritual emergency,” this second paper seeks to further develop …

Intimations Of A Spiritual New Age: Ii. Wilhelm Reich As Transpersonal Psychologist. Part I: Context, Development, And Crisis In Reich’S Bio-Energetic Spiritual Psychology, Harry T. Hunt

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Advance Publication Archive

Wilhelm Reich is the focus of this second in a series of papers on a group of independent figures from the 1930s into the 1950s—also including Jung, the later Heidegger, Toynbee, Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, and Simone Weil—who in the context of those years of crisis articulated overlapping visions of a future “New Age” spirituality that might in some more distant future serve to balance and even transform a globalizing materialism and disenchantment with traditional religion. The later Reich developed a highly original version of a “vitalistic” transpersonal psychology, as his “religion for the children of the future,” which needs …

Imperiled Destinies: The Daoist Quest For Deliverance In Medieval China, Alan Kam Leung Chan

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This is a work of considerable erudition, reflecting decades of research into the Daoist tradition. Imperiled Destinies offers a close reading of “the evolution of Daoist beliefs about human liability and redemption, and procedures for rescuing an ill-starred destiny” (p. 324), from the second century CE to the tenth century. More specifically, it focuses on three main phases of development in Daoist redemptive rituals. Divided into three parts, of four chapters each, it discusses in turn the “petition” (zhang) rituals in Heavenly Master Daoism (Tianshi dao), the “retreat” (zhai) rituals in Lingbao (Sacred Jewel) Daoism that gained currency during the …

From Meaningful Work To Good Work: Reexamining The Moral Foundation Of The Calling Orientation, Garrett W. Potts

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The calling orientation to work represents the seed that has germinated into the exponentially growing ‘work as a calling’ literature. It was first articulated by Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton within Habits of the Heart in the 1980s. The following critical analysis of the ‘work as a calling’ literature, and of the moral foundation of the calling orientation more specifically, is intended for two particular audiences.

The first audience broadly includes an interdisciplinary group of scholars working within business ethics, management, organizational psychology, and vocational psychology, among other fields of study. Amidst these scholars’ …

Carrying Buddha Into The Streets: Buddhist Socialist Thought In Meiji Japan, James Mark Shields

Faculty Contributions to Books

No abstract provided.

Erotic Devotional Poetry: Resisting Neoplatonism In Protestant Christianity, Sarah M. Pruis

Honors Projects

A genre best known for its appearance in Eastern religions, erotic devotional poetry uses sensual imagery to access an experience of the divine. Historically, many Christian traditions, excluding the mystical ones, have pushed back against such literature, seeing it as an impure model that degrades divinity by association with the physical, especially in the specific physical ritual of sex. This stance is a hallmark of Protestant Christianity. The idea of a dichotomy and hierarchy between soul and body, though, comes not from theology but from the introduction theologians made between Western philosophy, particularly Platonic Dualism, and Christianity, which was then …

A Revised Land Ethic: Sustainable And Spiritual Agriculture, Brooke Maitlan Parrett

Student Theses 2015-Present

This paper proposes a return to the land and reconnection of spiritual practices through ethical teachings. Such a land ethic would involve answering the woes of industrial agriculture and providing a framework for farmers, consumers, and policymakers based on sustainable and spiritual considerations of the land. I analyze the loss of spiritual literacy and traditional ecological knowledge in the United States and discuss the spiritual history of agriculture in order to analyze contemporary religious perspectives on farming and agricultural ethics and thereby develop my own recommendations. The land ethic I propose combines sustainability and spirituality to develop intrinsic respect for …

Unpresentable Members: The Theology And Radical Phenomenology Of The Sexual Flesh, Justin Pearl

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Unpresentable Members begins with a wager: that a proper account of the flesh and its sexual character may not only prove philosophically fertile within its own limited domain, but may also provide insight into the theological question of the proper role and place of gender and sexual difference within communities, particularly Christian religious communities. In this regard, this dissertation has two distinct goals: one phenomenological and one theological. Phenomenologically, it offers an account of the manifestation of concrete sexual determinations not only as they objectively appear across the “body-object” (Körper, le corps) but with equal importance as …

The Singular Voice Of Being [Table Of Contents], Andrew Lazella

Philosophy & Theory

The Singular Voice of Being reconsiders John Duns Scotus’s well-covered theory of the univocity of being in light of his less explored discussions of ultimate difference. Ultimate difference is a notion introduced by Aristotle and known by the Aristotelian tradition, but one that, the book argues, Scotus radically retrofits to buttress his doctrine of univocity. Ultimate difference for Aristotle meant the last difference in a line of specific differences whereby all the preceding differences would be united into a single substance rather than remain a heapish multiplicity. LaZella argues that Scotus both broadens and deepens the term such that, in …

Quaker Virtue Ethics: Religious Life Without Creeds, Dave Nagaji

Senior Theses

Beliefs are conventionally understood to guide people’s actions. Put another way, the actions which people take are understood to be products of what they believe. However, these claims are challenged by the fact that many Quakers hold that they do not have a creed. This feature of Quakerism creates a tension with the theory that actions must follow from beliefs. That tension prompts a question: How can Quakers make ethical decisions in a clear and decisive manner when they lack a creed? The answer to such a question is significant for two reasons. First, it provides insights into the specific …

A Theology Of Failure [Table Of Contents], Marika Rose

Religion

“This is the best work I have ever read on Žižek in relation to theology, maybe the best such work possible. Rose’s prose style is clear and engaging, and her project significantly advances our understanding of Christian apophaticism, of Žižek’s project, and of the potential future stakes of theology for a secular world.”— Adam Kotsko, author of Neoliberalism’s Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital

Everyone agrees that theology has failed; but the question of how to respond to this failure is contested. Against both radical orthodoxy and deconstructive theology, Rose proposes that Christian identity is constituted by, not …

Potentials, Actuals, And The Logical Problem Of Evil, Stephen Thomas Irby

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

J.L. Schellenberg has recently formulated a new logical problem of evil that is claimed to avoid Alvin Plantinga’s Free Will Defence. I begin my argument against this new formulation by analyzing the grounding for some of God’s maximal perfections. God’s maximal moral perfection, for example, is grounded in virtuous potentialities that are disposed to the actualization of virtuous actions. From this account, I argue that Schellenberg’s logical problem of evil fails due to one of the following two reasons. First, some good actualizations of good potentialities require evil but compose the best worlds. Second, both (1) good actualizations that require …

An Evaluation Of A Biometric Enabled Credit Card For Providing High Authenticity Identity Proofing During The Transaction Authentication Process, Laura F. Poe

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Credit card fraud has continued to grow despite efforts to protect financial data from data breaches of financial institutions. Data breaches of financial transactional records over the past decade have impacted millions of U.S. consumers, resulting in decreased consumer confidence in security. Banking institutions losing money due to fraud are forced to raise interest rates and increase fees to their cardholders. The costs of fraud are passed to the banking institution’s customers to offset the losses. The requisite to detect and eliminate fraud before it occurs is mutually beneficial to both the banking institution and cardholders. Credit card companies continue …

Will-Independent Mereological Trinity Monotheism: A Defense Of The Logical Coherence Of, A Priori Motivation For, And A Particular Model Concerning The Doctrine Of The Trinity, Andrew Kirschner

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The doctrine posits that God is one being, but three persons. The orthodox parameters for affirming the Trinity are found in the early Ecumenical Creeds of Christendom, especially the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds. Four primary affirmations emerge as a summary of the essential content of the doctrine: (ONE): There is one God; (THREE): The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct divine persons; (FATHERSOURCE): The Father is the source of the Son and the Holy Spirit (perhaps with the Son, perhaps not); and (EQUALITY): The three persons in the Trinity are ontologically equal; none is greater than any of the …

2019: Religious Freedom Laws, C. J. Rhodes, Eleanor Ruffner, Richard Howorth, Sarah Moses, Matthew Hall, Amy Mcdowell

Policy Talks

The common reading resource (see additional documents below) for this event is the Honors thesis of Religion major Samuel Brassell, "The Baptist Tradition and Religious Freedom: Recent Trajectories." This 2019 thesis provides an analysis of religious freedom laws in the state of Mississippi. We encourage all attendees to read this common reading resource prior to the event for a more focused conversation during the Q and A session and during the reception.

The Moral Argument, Existential Problems Of Evil, And A Non-Existential Alternative, Jonathan Smith

Senior Honors Theses

Within this paper, it is shown that certain ethical assumptions are implicit within the claim that certain kinds of evil exist. When taken in tandem with the moral argument for the existence of God, these assumptions can be arranged in such a way as to provide a contradiction. To avoid this contradiction, I posit a non-existential alternative to direct inductive arguments from evil, but the non-existential alternative gives rise to novel objections. When considering their respective ethical implications, both the existential and non-existential variations of direct inductive arguments fail. Since any direct inductive problem of evil must be either existential …

Anthropology Embedded In Worldview Studies: Modernity’S Failure And The Response Of Christian Philosophy Of Life In A Postmodern Age Of Expressivism, Nathan Sexten

Senior Honors Theses

This thesis examines two divergent streams of thought in Christian philosophy of life represented by the works of Francis Schaeffer and James K. A. Smith in an effort to help Christians live in a postmodern culture. Schaeffer and Smith ultimately address differing, but complementary, realms of anthropology and the human experience. To see how these two authors might complement each other effectively, this thesis will analyze each author’s work and then explore whether or not the application of Smith's liturgical anthropology and utilization of phenomenology can improve Schaeffer’s system of thought and the worldview concept.