Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Self-Referential Features In Sacred Texts, Donald Haase

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines a specific type of instance that bridges the divide between seeing sacred texts as merely vehicles for content and as objects themselves: self-reference. Doing so yielded a heuristic system of categories of self-reference in sacred texts based on the way the text self-describes: Inlibration, Necessity, and Untranslatability.

I provide examples of these self-referential features as found in various sacred texts: the Vedas, Āgamas, Papyrus of Ani, Torah, Quran, Sri Guru Granth Sahib, and the Book of Mormon. I then examine how different theories of sacredness interact with them. What do Durkheim, Otto, Freud, or Levinas say about …

What Did God Say? A Critical Analysis Of Dynamic Equivalence Theory, Katelyn R. Fisher

Linguistics Senior Research Projects

This paper is a critical analysis of Eugene A. Nida’s theory of dynamic equivalence as it relates to Bible translation, largely through a comparative study of select passages from the biblical genres of poetry, proverbs, and Pauline epistles. In addition, a brief survey distributed to 72 students at Cedarville University provides both qualitative and quantitative data regarding which English Bible version they prefer and why. Identifying Nida’s contributions to translation studies and analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of his theory in practice serves to provide implications for believers who are seeking to discern which English version is the most accurate, …

Golden Palimpsests: America, Cervantes, And The Invention Of Modernity/Coloniality, Antonia Carcelen-Estrada

Doctoral Dissertations

While many theories of colonial discourse emphasize an imperial power imposing its way of thinking and modes of expression onto colonial cultures and peoples, in this dissertation I consider that this imposition affects members of the colonies and the metropolis in different but related ways. In core and periphery alike, the subjects of Spanish colonialism produced documents in which we recognize overlapping, conflicting narratives. I call this strategy for narrative resistance “golden palimpsests” because, as the epigraph suggests, they appear to tell the story of donkeys covered in gold, while in fact they hide the true story of noble horses …