Atonement theologies of salvation are problematic for suffering victims, which calls for a change in how we imagine God and view salvation today. A distorted image of God and God's salvation deprives those in distress of finding consolation, healing, and agency through their faith. I apply a feminist critical hermeneutic of liberation that reveals that the application of CDH can accommodate violence and other forms of evil against the marginalized, women, and the natural world. It is necessary to find metaphors for God that can offer spiritual sustenance to those who suffer and reimagine an alternate idea of God's salvation. Understanding God's deliverance as accompaniment, mediated through a loving community, is one pastoral approach to responding to the suffering in our world today.

Many current theories (e.g., individualism, materialism, relativism, etc.) exalt individual freedom as an absolute. They ignore the voice of universal truth as a principle of conscience and instead place conscience underneath individual choice. The concept of individual freedom in this way is influencing the conscience of many young Vietnam people to make decisions that destroy and jeopardize moral human life (e.g., abortion, transgender, same-sex marriage, murder, etc.). Educating young people to see themselves as God’s children by forming their conscience is an urgent obligation for the Vietnamese Catholic Church. Thus, my PSP is to follow past practices of the Church’s faith tradition as well as developing new resources that specially address the situation of the younger generation in Vietnam. To accomplish this, I intend to work with the presbyterate to cultivate a culture of reconciliation to help young people restore a sensitivity of guilt within one’s conscience. I also intend to work with the parents within my diocese to cultivate a culture of love where the younger generation can first flourish before tackling social and cultural challenges.

While exploring the history of liberation theology themes appearing in Black musician’s work (in Dr. Daniel Smith-Christopher’s class Bible and the Blues), it came to my attention that there are many more contemporary artists whose work also touches on these themes, such as Lauryn Hill. My thesis argues with the help of Black and Womanist scholars that the naming of one’s reality through musical lamentations is a healing act. Further, musical lamentation is an act to carry forth communities and provide them with healing because the act of acknowledging and lamenting the suffering of a marginalized community is liberating in and of itself. This act of lamenting serves, then, as an act of truth-telling, that refuses to deny the pain that is caused by systems of oppression such as racism and sexism. Lauryn Hill’s album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill then expresses a theology of lament in which the lamentation itself serves a healing purpose for those listening.

No description available.

Following developments in the last decades in the philosophical and theological studies of film, this study investigates film noir from the classic Hollywood era (1940-1959) from this perspective. It presents the key ideas behind the fields of film-philosophy and film-theology. Turning more specifically to film noir, the study addresses themes that come to the fore in these films, focusing especially on the depiction of human existence as characterized by a need for escape, that is at the same time impossible. The set of questions that arises with this starting point is developed through readings of a number of films, most lengthily Laura (directed by Otto Preminger, 1944) and Criss Cross (Robert Siodmak, 1949). It is suggested that film noir in interesting ways problematizes the persistent post-Enlightenment view of the subject as first and foremost rational and autonomous, and further, that film noir can be seen as following the Christian doctrine of original sin in seeing human existence as standing in need of redemption, while holding that it is at best uncertain if such redemption is possible.

This dissertation develops a public practical theology of education. It argues that education is a practice that “schools the imagination,” forming individuals and communities to operate within social imaginaries that have been shaped by a latent, anti-material, and individualistic worldview. This project aims to show that public education is a viable site for theological reflection and that the results of that reflection can generate proposals for the transformation of both religion and education. It considers how the American social imaginary is maintained by educational practices and the ways these practices influence conceptions of knowledge and human purpose. The assumption is that the shaping influence of the imaginary is not manifested so much in the content of school curricula, but tacitly exists in pedagogical processes and the explicit and implicit goals of the US educational enterprise. Using a qualitative and quantitative mixed-method approach, the project develops the construct of conscientização natal, a pedagogy of birth with utopian anthropological dimensions. Grace Jantzen’s theology and philosophy of religion and the liberative pedagogical insights of Paulo Freire are central to the constructive work. Jantzen and Freire provide a way to interpret the telos and practice of American public education with their respective analyses of “necrophilic imagination” and “objectivizing worldviews.” Additional insights are drawn from educational sociology and history, as well as Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice and Cornelius Castoriadis’ concept of the social imaginary. The dissertation begins by developing a theology of education, doing so with practical theological methods informed by liberation and public theologies. It proceeds to provide historical and cultural-sociological studies drawn from educational literature, amplified by a quantitative study of 125 survey participants on their understandings of the relationship between education and spirituality. The primary discoveries in these three studies are analyzed, then reflected upon theologically, yielding proposals for the transformation of practice and theory in both education and religion. For practical theologians, the project develops a robust understanding of practice that links patterns of action to social imaginaries, providing an example of how practical theology might consider issues of broad public concern.

This Capstone Research Project aims to address the certain aspects of Roman Catholic moral teaching. Throughout this project I argue that when it comes to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual and Queer (LGBTQ+) Catholics, the moral teaching is essentially corrupt. This paper begins by providing an overview of current Catholic teaching relevant to LGBTQ+ persons. In the second section I focus on the lived experience on the Latinx LGBTQ+ community in the United States to demonstrate several flaws in Catholic moral tradition. I place a special emphasis on the Latinx LGBTQ+ community in Florida as I base my argument on the tragic attack against LGBTQ+ people at Pulse Nightclub and I rely on the insights of a social scientific study conducted among LGBTQ+ youth in Florida. In the third and final section of my research project, I engage with the theological anthropologies of M. Shawn Copeland and Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz to create a framework from which a theological corrective action may emerge to remedy the harm done by the deeply corrupt and erroneous Catholic moral teaching.

This dissertation concerns the sculptural representation of divinity in Hellenistic Central Italy, ca. 200 BCE-100 BCE. In so doing, it tackles the question of the role images played in Roman religion as well as the question of the relationship between Aegean Greek and Central Italian sculpture. Recent publications related to Roman divine images have respectively: a) suggested that the form of images was incidental to their functioning as sacred sculpture; b) proposed that images were not a necessary part of Roman religion; and c) considered the divine images themselves primarily significant as ideological statements on the part of their patrons. Furthermore, most scholarly treatments of sculpted images in Hellenistic Central Italy have to-date siloed architectural from freestanding sculpture, impoverishing the study of both categories of material. Most of these sculptures play little to no role in anglophone histories of ancient art. This project analyses the divine images of Hellenistic Central Italy through the lenses of scale, materiality, and body language. These analytical frames are used to show how the representation of the gods in freestanding and architectural sculpture was meaningfully differentiated from the appearance of sculpted images of mortal people. These differences, as well as the similarities, are highlighted in order to suggest patterns of response, and thereby to propose ways in which the category of ‘the divine’ was constructed in image form. The three lenses of scale, materiality, and body language likewise allow the significant differences, as well as the frequent points of similarity, between ‘Roman’ representations of the gods and the divine images of the Greek world to be elucidated. Chapter 1 presents the evidence from certain key sanctuaries, offering new reconstructions of fragmentary evidence and showing the interrelation between divine images of different kinds in these spaces. Chapter 2 compares divine images with sculpted representations of people through the lens of scale, showing that sculpted images of the gods were crafted at an intentionally ‘inhuman’ scale in Hellenistic Central Italy. Chapter 3 tackles the materiality of divine images, charting the new materials used to embody the gods in the second century BCE and, at the same time, stressing the ways that the use of materials differentiated divine from mortal images. A major theme, across media, is the production of composite, multi-material sculptures of the gods. Chapter 4 assesses the body language of divine images, showing the modifications made to existing sculptural types to make the bodies of the gods more dynamic and interactive to their viewers. The three key elements of divine body language exhibited by the sculpted representations of the gods are grandeur, ease, and engagement with a viewer. The results of this study demonstrate that images of the gods in Italy were constructed so as to differ significantly from the images of mortals. Through these means, images are shown to have embodied a ‘visual theology’, allowing conclusions to be drawn by their viewers about the nature and workings of the divine. In this way, images played an essential role in Roman religion, despite their non-appearance in ritual prescriptions. Further, Roman divine images are revealed to have been significantly different from the images of the gods in the Greek world. This project re-orients the study of the Central Italian images of the gods, focusing on the viewers of sculpture as well as the patrons. The conclusions reached reveal the central role of images in Roman religion in the Hellenistic Period and the value of visual evidence for anthropological approaches to the Roman world. These results regarding divine images provide as yet under-exploited evidence for the relationship between Greek and Roman sculpture.

Thesis advisor: Cathleen Kaveny / This dissertation examines current legal and moral debates about religious liberty and the sanctity of conscience in light of the Christian tradition’s understanding of both. It is important for strong respect for a pluralistic array of consciences to be grounded internally within the Christian tradition, not just based in secular public reason. This dissertation thus develops a Christian understanding of the conscience that can provide this justification, referred to as the “open communitarian conscience.” Specifically, the dissertation analyzes various understandings of the person within the Christian tradition, explores how these have affected political discussions about religious liberty, including sometimes giving support to an excessive individualism, and shows how there are contrasting understandings in the tradition which can be drawn on to better theorize the person’s relationship to her or his communities. It also develops a pneumatological understanding of the conscience to provide theological support for this personalist anthropology and explains how the conscience can be reconceived to better describe the relationship between a person and their moral actions. The dissertation includes a discussion of six key U.S. Supreme Court cases which address issues pertaining to religious liberty and the religious conscience, as well as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and suggests how an understanding of the open communitarian conscience might shift Christians’ understanding of how best to protect everyone’s rights of conscience while maintaining the First Amendment’s specific protection for rights of free exercise also. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Vom Studienfach Islamische Theologie, vor elf Jahren gegründet, erwartete man sich politisch die Ausbildung integrationsfördernder Imame. Die Autorin geht empirisch der Frage nach, wie die Studierenden mit diesen Erwartungen umgehen. Die Sinnzuschreibungen der Akteure, so zeigt sich, sind eng verknüpft mit dem Umgang des Staates mit Religion wie auch der akademischen Disziplin mit dem Islam. Im Ergebnis zeigt sich das Konzept der biographischen Islamizität, einer zentralen Erfahrungsweise von Muslimen in Minderheitsverhältnissen. Die Fachbeteiligten institutionalisieren das Bild eines pluralen Islams. Das Buch liefert einen religionssoziologischen Beitrag zum Verständnis religiös-säkularer Konstellationen in der Gesellschaft.