Teaching Religion and Literature provides a practical engagement with the pedagogical possibilities of teaching religion courses using literature, teaching literature classes using religion, and teaching Religion and Literature as a discipline. Featuring chapters written by awar…
“Mainline Decline” has led major American religious organizations to quiver with fear of their own demise, and has left church members and leaders yearning for the halcyon days when church buildings were bursting with people. Floods of books and articles present ways to turn the…
This dissertation examines the philosophy and poetry of three major British Romantic writers (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth) to contest a popular narrative promulgated by literary scholars and intellectual historians that identifies the Ro…
Most Christians spend most of their waking hours working. Too often, there is a gap between what happens on Sunday worship and Monday work. Churches may fail to address the working needs of church members, including how they bear witness regarding their Christianity at work. Chr…
The fragility characterizing the faith of young believers is nothing new to Christianity. Doubts as to whether or not Christianity is actually true continue to pose challenges to Christian youth as they grow into adulthood in an increasingly secularized culture. This study explo…
The problem is Christian school principals, teachers, and parents perceived the implementation of Christian practices by the principal based on the school’s mission statement to achieve an authentic Christian school culture differently. The purpose of this qualitative explorator…
In this dissertation I articulate the affinities between the agonistic political philosophy of William Connolly and the educational philosophy of John Dewey in order to develop terms for a philosophy of education for agonistic democracy. I argue both that Dewey offers a needed a…
The pipe organ, a musical instrument historically, culturally, and conceptually associated with Christian worship, is being negatively affected in terms of condition and continued use in the United States by rising rates of secularity, declining mainline Protestant and Catholic …
This thesis seeks to demonstrate the extent to which secularizing tendencies are present in Russian vitae of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to examine what role these tendencies play in the evolution of sacred life-writing and also consider how they reflect changing pe…
The dissertation explores and defends the theory and practice of a Western-Islamic public sphere (which is secular but not secularist and which is Islamic but not Islamist), within which a critical Islamic intellectual universe can unfold, dealing hermeneutically with texts and …
This dissertation study explored the campus climate of Penn State University for religious, secular, and spiritual identities through use of Strange and Banning’s Educating by Design theoretical framework. Specifically, it employed use of case study methodology to qualitatively …
The project director selected a strategy model to equip a select group of members of First Baptist Church to evangelize the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival with the gospel. The project director examined demographic information revealing the need for a contextualized approach to…
Recent studies have suggested the transformative potential of “theological” inquiry and discourse in religious studies, particularly, in furthering religious literacy and peace building initiatives through greater understanding of “other”. Yet, “theology” is a relatively new aca…
The autonomy of the shari ` a courts in Ottoman-Egypt during the 16th and 17th centuries, is the subject of this thesis. Specifically, it pursues the question of formalization (the incorporation of courts and their functionaries into the civil apparatus of the state) and, relate…
The study sought to determine the relationship between both positive and negative religious beliefs and adjustment to chronic pain, as measured by pain severity, disability, depression, anger, and positive and negative affect. This study also sought to identify specific secular …
In recent years struggles have taken place in a number of states concerning the presence of religion, particularly Islam, in the public sphere. This dissertation investigates the emergence of the presence of religion in the public sphere as a problem, not in order to offer a for…
The Assemblies of God (AG) in Europe, specifically in Spain, currently struggles to reach families from a secular background. This study seeks to develop a description of the main competencies of children’s ministry needed to empower the Spanish Assemblies of God to evangelize a…
Although heritage language teachers' processes of identity formation have been studied in recent years (e.g., Milner, 2007), much of the work on heritage languages has explored foreign language teachers' beliefs (e.g., Nespor, 1987; Pajares, 1992; Williams & Burden, 1997) and pe…
For secular Jews living in the United States, the question of what makes up Jewish identity has become an important area of study as non-religious Jews rely on cultural factors to determine their Jewish identification. Because Orthodox Jews have performed the majority of studies…