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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

The Sate Of Israel, Mythology, And The Valorized Bible, Gregory Jeffers Dec 2017

The Sate Of Israel, Mythology, And The Valorized Bible, Gregory Jeffers

Conversations: A Graduate Student Journal of the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Theology

I argue that the Christian Neo-conservatives (like many before them, including the Medieval crusaders) read the bible mythologically, and thus uproot the the bible from its traditional moral, theological, historical, and grammatical anchors in service to a specific eschatological vision. This shift is rhetorical in nature in that those receiving the biblical text now are not the same as those who originally received it, nor are they the same as the scholars, theologians, and historians who have been careful to read the text with integrity. The shift in audience is a shift in interpretive communities and thus a shift in …


Attachment, Trauma, And Intimacy With God, Jodie Kathleen Gardner Dec 2017

Attachment, Trauma, And Intimacy With God, Jodie Kathleen Gardner

Conversations: A Graduate Student Journal of the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Theology

Attachment theory provides a robust framework for understanding spiritual development and perceptions of God. An integration of research from attachment theory, affective neuroscience, emotional information processing, and trauma, is clarifying the competing research findings involving compensation and correspondence in spiritual development. Empirical evidence suggests the distinction between explicit theological beliefs and implicit perception of God as an attachment figure may explain the discrepancy between compensatory practices and correspondence, and how one interacts with God, and copes with negative life events. Studies of post-traumatic stress disorder suggest specific association between the extreme stress of trauma and alterations in emotional processing. Trauma …


Oppression And Resistance: Socialist Theory And Christianity In The Lord Of The Rings, Gregory Jeffers Dec 2017

Oppression And Resistance: Socialist Theory And Christianity In The Lord Of The Rings, Gregory Jeffers

Conversations: A Graduate Student Journal of the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Theology

I have applied the work of Iris Marion Young (socialist theorist and political philosopher) and Walter Wink (New Testament scholar and Peace activist) to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, arguing that although Young and Wink provide similar descriptions of oppression, their forms of resistance are largely divergent because Wink's, while far more radical and compelling as a story, requires the existence of the Christian God to work. I have read their prescriptions forresistance through de Certeau’s concepts of strategy (concerted and active resistance) and tactic (reactionary resistance). The Lord of the Rings demonstrates the way that Wink and …