Religious Education Commons^™

Book Review: Sustainable Children's Ministry: From Last-Minute Scrambling To Long-Term Solutions, Ron Bruner

Discernment: Theology and the Practice of Ministry

Sustainable Children’s Ministry: From Last‐Minute Scrambling to Long‐Term Solutions, by Mark DeVries and Annette Safstrom. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2018. 234 pages, $16.99.

Shaped By Love: Family Catechesis And The Crisis Of Disaffiliation In The Catholic Church, Jessica Adrians

Master of Theological Studies Honors Theses

There is currently a crisis of disaffiliation within the Catholic Church, particularly among youth and young adults. One of the proposed solutions for the crisis of disaffiliation is implementing the family catechesis model at the parish level as a means of effectively transmitting the Catholic faith. This paper examines the data of two studies: Going, Going, Gone: The Dynamics of Disaffiliation in Young Catholics conducted by St. Mary’s Press and Ask Your Father and He Will Tell You: A Report on American Cahotlic Religious Parenting produced by the McGrath Institute in order to discern if the conditions that lead to …

Care For God’S Creation And A Vegan Diet, Teresa M. Kochaver

Master of Theological Studies Honors Theses

This paper will address the relationship between a vegan diet and the Catholic Social Teaching Principle of Caring for God’s Creation. These two topics will be examined to set forth how the actions and outcomes associated with a vegan diet support and encourage a key theme of Catholic Social Teaching, Care of and for God’s Creation.

This paper may also be a source of learning for anyone seeking a greater understanding of Catholic Social Teaching and information about a vegan diet.

“With Strong Hand And With Outstretched Arm” (Deuteronomy 4:34); “With Outstretched Hand And With Strong Arm” (Jeremiah 21:5): Chiasmus In Deuteronomy And Jeremiah, David Rolph Seely

BYU Studies

The title of this paper presents an example of a textual interplay between Deuteronomy and Jeremiah in which Jeremiah quotes a well-known formula from Deuteronomy “with strong hand and with outstretched arm” (Deut 4:34) in an inverted form “With outstretched hand and with strong arm” (Jer 21:5). Images of the “strong hand” and “outstretched arm” are found in various Egyptian and Mesopotamian textual traditions as well as iconography.1 These images appear separately in various biblical sources but appear as a combination first in Deuteronomy (4:34; 5:15; 7:19; 11:2; 26:8) and then later in deuteronomistic literature (1 Kgs 8:42; Jer 32:21; …

Narrating Homicide Chiastically, John W. Welch

BYU Studies

The truth be known, murder is an ugly, awful subject. Even when packaged in beautifully crafted literature, first-degree homicide is to be universally assailed as vile, horrible, and most terrible. Murder is disruptive to the very fabric of human life. It instills in the community anxieties, horror, fear, chaos, vengeance, and blood feuds. It throws the normal boundaries of human powers in the world into personal turmoil, into metaphysical uncertainty, and into cosmic imbalance.

Rethinking The Structure Of The “Farewell Discourse” (John 13–17) Through A Chiastic Lens, Wayne Brouwer

BYU Studies

Briefly stated, my thesis is this: although it is very difficult to read the mind of the Evangelist, or the redactor who brought elements of previously written material into the shape of the gospel as we have it today, it appears that the repetitive and reflexive elements of the Johannine farewell discourse fit together into a large chiasm1 bounded by expressions of spiritual intimacy with God on either end (the foot washing episode of ch. 13 and the prayer of ch. 17) and channeled toward the challenge to “abide” in Jesus at the center (15:1–17). In outline, it could be …

At The Intersection Of Scribal Training And Theological Profundity: Chiasm As An Editorial Technique In The Primeval History And Deuteronomy, Bernard M. Levinson

BYU Studies

There can be little doubt that ancient Near Eastern scribes, including those in ancient Israel, were well-trained in a wide range of technical devices associated with the composition, copying, transmission, editing, collation, revision, reworking, and interpretation of texts.1 My focus in the present study will be on one of the most interesting of these devices, the literary chiasm, in which textual content is ordered in an ABC::CʹBʹAʹ chiastic, or “x-shaped,” pattern. In many cases, once this pattern is recognized within a chapter or literary unit, an ostensibly haphazard or difficult to follow textual sequence gains a sense of order, as …

Index Of Scriptures And Other Sources

BYU Studies

No abstract provided.

Selected Bibliography On Chiasmus, 1980–2020

BYU Studies

No abstract provided.

From “Linguistic Turn” And Hebrews Scholarship To Anadiplosis Iterata: The Enigma Of A Structure, Gabriella Gelardini

BYU Studies

In 1963, when the “linguistic turn” had evidently taken hold of New Testament studies, Albert Vanhoye, a linguistically trained Catholic priest, published a monograph entitled La structure littéraire de l’épître aux Hébreux.¹ The manifold reactions to his refined literary-rhetorical approach and conclusions in favor of a concentric structure oscillated between euphoric approval and offensive disapproval. Along with its translation into German (1979/1980) and a decade later into English (1989), Vanhoye’s study influenced and stimulated Hebrews scholarship like none other in the twentieth century.

Introduction, Donald W. Parry, John W. Welch

BYU Studies

This book comprises fourteen of the papers presented at “Chiasmus: An Open Conference on the State of the Art,” held at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, on August 15–16, 2017. That date marked the fiftieth anniversary of events in Germany and Austria which soon grew into the publication of Chiasmus in Antiquity: Structures, Analyses, Exegesis (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1981), edited by John W. Welch. Generated forty years ago, that widely-cited volume with a preface by David Noel Freedman featured contributions by authors including Yehuda T. Radday, Jonah Frankel, Bezael Porten, Wilford G. E. Watson, John W. Welch, and Robert F. Smith, …

Chiastic Structuring Of The Genesis Flood Story: The Art Of Using Chiasm As An Effective Compositional Tool For Combining Earlier Chiastic Narratives, Steven R. Scott

BYU Studies

The story of the flood is perhaps one of the best-known stories of the Bible, and its chiastic nature has long been recognized by scholars, most prominently by Yehuda T. Radday and Gordon Wenham.¹ These scholars’ theses will briefly be discussed before proceeding to a detailed analysis of the text, which will demonstrate that the biblical flood story is two chiasms combined—one by author “J” and another by author “P.”

Chiasmus In The Text Of Isaiah: Mt Isaiah Versus The Great Isaiah Scroll (1qisaa), Donald W. Parry

BYU Studies

The Isaiah scrolls are significant finds, signaling one of the most remarkable archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century. The Qumran caves, located near the northwestern area of the Dead Sea, yielded twenty-one copies of the book of Isaiah—two from cave 1, eighteen from cave 4, and one from cave 5. An additional copy (making a total of twenty-two copies) of Isaiah was discovered south of Qumran in a cave at Wadi Murabba‘at. Scholars have labeled these scrolls as follows: 1QIsa^a, 1QIsa^b (1Q8), 4QIsa^a-r (4Q55–4Q69b), and 5QIsa (5Q3). All twenty-two copies of Isaiah are written in Hebrew. …

Chiastic Structuring Of Large Texts: 2 Nephi As A Case Study, Noel B. Reynolds

BYU Studies

In 1967, John W. Welch was serving as a missionary in Germany and noticed a scholar’s explanation of chiasmus as a rhetorical structure that recurs in various parts of the Bible. While the penchant for parallelism that characterized Old Testament writers was widely recognized by that time, the discovery that reverse parallelism was also commonly used by New Testament writers was relatively recent and not yet widely accepted. Welch was no ordinary missionary in terms of his scholarly and scriptural preparation, and he immediately saw the possibility that Nephi and his successors may have been familiar with that rhetorical pattern …

Chiasmus Criteria In Review, Neal Rappleye

BYU Studies

As in all academic fields, the discipline of chiastic studies has had to grapple with persistent questions related to method. Understanding how these questions have been dealt with in the past is critical in knowing how to proceed in the future. In that spirit, I offer a historical review of the criteria or standards scholars have used to judge the merits of chiastic proposals. Of course, space ensures this will be far from comprehensive, and I make no pretensions of being able to resolve the issues that have plagued the study of chiasmus for the last seventy-five years. In reviewing …

Truth Or Cherry Picking: A Statistical Approach To Chiastic Intentionality, Boyd R. Edwards

BYU Studies

Chiasmus is an ancient inverted-parallel literary form that states a number of literary elements and then restates these elements in reverse order. For example, Matt 10:39 is a simple two-element chiasm:

Jesus And The Roman Centurion (Matthew 8:5–13), H. Douglas Buckwalter

BYU Studies

At the time I was doing my post-graduate work in New Testament studies at Kings College at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, my wife gave birth to our second child, a son. Under the National Healthcare System that was provided, we were periodically visited at home by a district nurse. As our son grew a little older, she began to bring colored toy blocks for him to play with. At first, she would randomly pick out any colored block, say a blue block, and see if he could associate color and pick out the same colored block. In time …

Full Issue

BYU Studies

No abstract provided.

Exegesis Or Eisegesis: Does Chiastic Analysis Help Us To Understand Leviticus 20?, Jonathan Burnside

BYU Studies

Chiastic studies have been vulnerable, on occasion, over the past fifty years to the charge that their existence may be more a matter of eisegesis rather than exegesis. This paper contends that it is possible to have objective, textual grounds for the existence of a chiasmus which can, in turn, be key to exegesis. In particular, it proposes that chiastic analysis helps us to understand the complexities of Lev 20 and, furthermore, that this text should be held up as an example of a well-developed chiasmus in biblical law.¹ Towards the end of the paper I speculate on some …

Front Matter

BYU Studies

No abstract provided.

Chiasmus In The Book Of Genesis, Gary A. Rendsburg

BYU Studies

Since I have published a detailed discussion on the subject announced in the title of this article, the present essay will provide only a summary of my earlier work, with ample key illustrations. My earlier treatment may be found in chapters 2, 3, and 5 of my book The Redaction of Genesis (1st ed., 1986; 2d ed., 2014).¹ As indicated, in what follows, I rehearse that material here, though for the sake of simplicity, I do not footnote each individual discussion.

Mirrored Poeticity: Chiastic Structuring In Mayan Languages, Kerry Hull

BYU Studies

The last quarter century has seen a marked shift in Maya hieroglyphic studies in recognition of the presence of poetic language in the script. Poetics in indigenous Mesoamerican tradition is based primarily upon the principle of parallelism, most often in the form of coupleted discourse. Chiasmus, a rhetorical feature fully dependent upon parallelism, was one such poetic device used by ancient Maya scribes and colonial period indigenous authors, and it is still found among modern ritual specialists in some Maya communities. In this study, I explore the use and forms of chiasmus over time among various Maya groups and languages. …

The Roles Of Words, Phrases, And Ideas In Macro-Chiasms, Stephen Kent Ehat

BYU Studies

What roles do words, phrases, and ideas play in large-scale chiasms and in the analysis of their form? Just as words and phrases play different roles in language generally, so too they may play different roles in their contributions to chiastic forms. In the analysis of the criteria used in evaluating a text for the presence of phrase-based chiasms and conceptual, idea-based chiasms, the analyst may see different roles played by words and phrases, depending on whether the pattern is a word-based or clause-based chiasm or a conceptual, idea-based chiasm. Analysis of texts in light of the general criteria …

Increasing State Restrictions On Russian Protestant Seminaries, Mark R. Elliott

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

"In sum, Russian Protestant seminaries are presently undergoing a trial by state inspection that threatens their very existence. Academics Perry Glanzer and Konstantin Petrenko are correct in asserting that the Russian state’s “power to license and accredit” is “the power of life and death” over any educational institution.

State justifications for close oversight of Protestant seminaries appear overstated at best and lack credibility at worst. As regards state concerns for quality control, should not the Russian constitution’s requirement for separation of church and state take precedence over a secular government’s presumption to instruct believers on how best to train their …

Religious Motivations Can Only Get You So Far: The Impacts And Limitations Of Lutheran Educational Reforms, Abigail Schipper

Young Historians Conference

Education was once reserved strictly for the few, the rich, the Catholic, and the male. Along with reforming many of the theological and political practices of 16th century Europe, the Protestant Reformation also introduced educational reforms that would enhance the literacy of the Germany States, instituted compulsory education laws, and extended said compulsory education to girls. However, these reforms were hindered by that which motivated the reforms in the first place: The reformers’ primary goal was to spread a religion, not to educate a populace. Because of this, the educational reforms mainly impacted only the upper classes and failed to …

Inconceivable: An Analysis Of Assisted Reproductive Technology For The Church, Mary Elizabeth Gresham

Senior Honors Theses

Infertility pushes the boundaries of emotional and physical health, which is why many couples inside and outside the church turn to Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) for a solution. Despite what has seemed like silence from the Church, some individuals have braved the biological confusion and ethical dilemmas to evaluate the technology. Three major ethical viewpoints have emerged that each prioritize something over medical technology, namely community, order, or human dignity. This paper serves to educate pastors and church leaders on the ever-changing biology of ART as well as give voice to Christians that have spoken out on this issue. At …

An Analysis Of The Debate Over Creation, Evolution, And The Timeline Of The Universe At An Ecumenical Christian University, Mason Pohlman

Honors Scholars Collaborative Projects

Throughout a significant portion of history and within modern culture, the fields of science and religion appear to be competing for the same holds in a person’s belief system. Universities are where academics and the sciences are the prevailing held truth, while in churches, the Bible reigns as supreme authority. However, in a Christian academic setting, the predominate school of thought in belief systems might turn into a little more of a melting pot. By analyzing gathered personal data (via surveys and interviews), one can begin to piece together the predominate thoughts on the apparent conflict between religion and science …

Defending "The Principle": Orson Pratt And The Rhetoric Of Plural Marriage, Jake D. Simmonds

Theses and Dissertations

In 1852, the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints made the pivotal decision to publicize the doctrine and practice of plural marriage—something they had worked to keep out of the public eye for years. This decision came in response to federal and social pressures. They quickly moved to announce and defend plural marriage among Church members as well as broader society, including those in the federal government. Orson Pratt was chosen by Brigham Young to be the face and the voice of the Church concerning plural marriage, both in Salt Lake City among members and in …

How Governor Thomas Ford's Background, Choices, And Actions Influenced The Martyrdom Of Joseph Smith In Carthage Jail, Stuart Rulan Black

Theses and Dissertations

Thomas Ford was the governor of Illinois at the time of Joseph and Hyrum Smiths’ martyrdoms in Carthage Jail in 1844. Before his tenure as governor, Ford’s professional life included service as an attorney and judge throughout Illinois. His background in the legal field gave him a unique perspective which may have influenced his career as governor of Illinois from 1842-1846. Although Governor Ford is relatively well-known for his association with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its history, his background and the bearing it had on the martyrdom of the Smiths has received relatively little attention …

Touro Torah Volume 4 Issue 11, Lander College For Women

Yearbooks and Newsletters

Divrei Torah Newsletter, Nissan Edition 5780