Thesiss

Communities are powerful, not just as physical or social gathering places, but as idiographs and rhetorical creations; they can bring together many diverse populations. Historically, communities were physically defined; today they can be designated as sites where local rhetoric,…

In the summer of 2020, The Wild Goose Meeting House, a café in downtown Colorado Springs, Colorado, crafted a series of conversations on racial justice called “The Goose Talks.” Over the course of twelve weeks, the café hosted sixteen events in order to engage the local communit…

This thesis, which was completed as part of the requirements for the Doctor of Ministry degree program at New Brunswick Theological Seminary in New Brunswick, NJ, describes a study done in a small, rural, Vermont United Church of Christ congregation comparing the use of spoken g…

In this paper, I explored the impact of relational gathering over transactional action in mobilizing communities for the common through conversations between the First Baptist Church of Madison and the Presbyterian Church of Chatham Township. Our dialogues moved towards more rel…

We live in a time of unprecedented risk to human life on earth as a result of human-made climate change, and we face enormous and growing social, political, and international challenges and threats. At the same time, we are struggling to cope with a technological landscape that …

In contemporary international relations, many regional organizations engage in ‘community-building,’ practices that construct, promote, and sustain a sense of collective identity among their member states. The international relations literature (e.g. Adler and Barnett, 1998; Wen…