This thesis concerns the ideas of ‘dialogue’ and ‘fragment’ in the work of the American liberal Roman Catholic theologian David Tracy (bn. 1939). Dialogue (or ‘conversation’) established itself as a dominant idea for Tracy in the 1980s, whereas the centrality of fragments first emerged for Tracy in the late 1990s, to complicate and refine his earlier thinking. Despite this historical sequence, however, the organisation of this thesis is thematic rather than essentially chronological. The first three chapters focus on how in the later 1970s and 1980s Tracy adapted his ideas of conversation-dialogue from the thought of the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. Chapter Four examines some serious objections to Tracy’s concept of dialogic reason, before defending his basic choices and gesturing towards his more recent work as perhaps resolving real previous difficulties. Chapter Five explores the ‘ontological`’ thinking of Martin Heidegger, valuable for evaluating Tracy despite the latter’s determination to put his own thinking on a more empirical and pluralistic footing. Chapter Six tackles this theme of Tracy’s ongoingly ‘empirical’ sensibility, as well as the importance he has attached to the experiencing human ‘self.’ Tracy’s ideas of human experience and selfhood owe much to William James and to Bernard Lonergan. Chapter Seven examines ‘correlational’ concepts that Tracy has forged to facilitate Christian theology over the course of his career since Blessed Rage for Order (1975). As Tracy became philosophically and theologically uncomfortable with theism as the supposed essential horizon for theology (around 1990), so the idea of the ‘mystical-prophetic’ emerged to open a door into new horizons of thinking. Chapter Eight highlights an easily overlooked antecedent of the hermeneutical negativity that Tracy’s recent ideas of ‘fragments’ imply: in Gadamer’s sense of the Christina negative ‘sign’ of the Ecce Homo. Chapter Nine then focuses on Tracy’s ideas of thinking through fragments: their adequacy and possible consequences.

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'When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi he put this question to his disciples, "Who do people say the Son of man is?" And they said, "Some say John the Baptist, some Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the Prophets." "But you," he said, "who do you, say I am?" Then Simon Peter spoke up and said, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." (Matthew, 16: 13-16)'. This thesis reports the findings of an empirical study conducted in England investigating young people's conceptions of Jesus. The study, which adopted a qualitative approach, employed an open ended questionnaire completed by over five hundred students, and follow up semi-structured interviews with twenty four of those students. Findings from this study confirmed those of previous studies in the field (Alves, 1968; Astley & Francis, 1996; Claerhout & Declercq, 1970; Cox, 1967; Francis & Astley, 1997; Hyde, 1965; Loukes, 1961; Madge, 1965, 1971; Savin-Williams, 1977). As in previous research, the majority of young people in this sample expressed generally favourable views towards Jesus; emphasised Jesus’ humanity rather than his divinity; and expressed reservations regarding the miracles of Jesus and the reliability of the Gospel accounts. In addition, this study extended the findings of previous studies by demonstrating that the conceptions of Jesus held by participants were largely determined by their predominantly scientific and positivist world-views. Moreover, responses from young people participating in this study indicated that students were often unaware that the views they held were contingent and grounded in particular ontological and epistemological assumptions. So whilst religious beliefs were subject to critical scrutiny, the assumptions underpinning the students’ own positions were not. Consequently, this thesis argues that to engage fully with the beliefs of others, students need to be more cognisant of the principles underlying their own beliefs, religious or otherwise. Furthermore, drawing upon the hermeneutical framework of Hans-George Gadamer (2004), this thesis proposes that commitment to genuine dialogue should be at the heart of contemporary religious education. Finally, this thesis concludes by making recommendations for future research in religious education.

This dissertation examines the impact of contemporary narrative homiletics on interpretation and preaching. Chapter 1 provides the groundwork for the study by laying out the thesis and methodology to be followed. Chapter 2 defines hermeneutics and homiletics from a traditional, historical perspective. The goal of this chapter is not an in-depth study of these fields but the basic presuppositions underlying each as they have historically worked together. Chapter 3 builds on the historical relationship between hermeneutics and homiletics in traditional methods of preaching. Chapter 4 examines the shift in homiletical methods which became known as the New Homiletic. Specifically, this chapter examines the foundational work of Fred B. Craddock in setting forth a predominant model for preaching in mainline preaching today. Chapter 5 defines narrative homiletics according to three current narrative homiletical streams. Chapter 6 offers a conclusion for the study, stating the impact of narrative homiletics on interpretation, preaching, and the church. Finally, suggestions for the future use of narrative elements in traditional homiletics are offered. / This item is only available to students and faculty of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. If you are not associated with SBTS, this dissertation may be purchased from <a href="http://disexpress.umi.com/dxweb">http://disexpress.umi.com/dxweb</a> or downloaded through ProQuest's Dissertation and Theses database if your institution subscribes to that service.

A SURVEY AND ANALYSIS OF CONTEMPORARY EVANGELICAL HERMENEUTICAL APPROACHES TO UNDERSTANDING MESSIAH IN THE OLD TESTAMENT Jason Alan Motte, Ph.D. The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015 Chair: Dr. T. J. Betts There is great diversity among evangelicals about how to understand messiah in the Old Testament. Many of the differences are largely related to hermeneutical choices. This study examines evangelical hermeneutical approaches to this issue from the time of Sigmund Mowinckel (1956) to the present. It identifies various positions represented by evangelicals, and lists major, relative works within each category. Then it analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. Based on such analysis, in the final chapter, a brief hermeneutical model for understanding messiah in the Old Testament is presented. This study concludes that the best hermeneutical model for understanding messiah in the Old Testament is one that is grounded in historical grammatical exegesis of Old Testament passages, and that allows for the inspired, progressive development of the concept of messiah from the Old Testament to its ultimate fulfillment in the New Testament.

This project documents my process of visual and hermeneutic enquiry centred on the Tswaing meteorite impact crater, north of Pretoria. In my visual investigation I attempt to apprehend the landscape through a cyclical process which involves walking within it, photographing it in 360° ‘visualisations’, editing the imagery and returning, often frustrated, to repeat both encounter and process. The cycle of reflection leads me to consider my circular process itself as a dialogical mode of interpretation and response to the primeval, circular landscape of the impact crater. Informed by Gadamer’s (1975) notion of a hermeneutic circle which extends interpretation and understanding, the reflexive process is extended and enriched through dialogue with the work of pertinent scientists, artists, poets and writers. Landscape is considered as an artefact of deep time, challenging entrenched traditions and notions while considering significant contemporary responses. The dissertation attempts to demonstrate the layered accretion of concept and meaning contained within the visual and theoretical components of the investigation

Thesis advisor: Patrick H. Byrne / It has been held in philosophical practice that some matters of reflection have more import than others, and that some are so significant that they may be termed "first philosophy." In contemporary Continental philosophy, the term "event" has become a watchword for a profound change in the orientation of philosophic thought. Indeed, one may say that the discourse surrounding events marks the first decisive development in philosophy since Martin Heidegger penned Being and Time. This is not to say, however, that any consensus has emerged concerning either the character of events, or more importantly what they entail for the meaning of human historical consciousness. To provide such statements, ones that have at least a relative superiority with respect to their rivals, might thus be considered the basic task for first philosophy today. It is to accomplish this double aim that the present work is devoted. These two tasks, articulating the character of events and their significance for human historical consciousness, are here assayed by a movement that is itself double, by a movement of suspicion and affirmation. In the specific case, the present work undertakes a retrieval of Heidegger's understanding of "Ereignis" (or event) after passing through a hermeneutics of suspicion, posed by the criticisms of the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou, and returning to an articulation of "Emergence" as a complementary hermeneutics of affirmation. The method by which I undertake this inquiry is what may be called an "infinite hermeneutics," which I intend to be opposed to "finite hermeneutics." By this latter program, "finite hermeneutics," I mean any form of philosophical hermeneutics that is committed to the thesis that human understanding (Verstehen) is finite, or that the objective of inquiry itself is finite, or both of these points. The thesis that human understanding is finite may be found in Kant's proposal that human knowing is distinct from divine knowledge in the respect that human knowing is dependent on receptive intuition, and thus finite, while infinite knowledge is founded on a productive intuition. In the relevant sense, I argue, it may also be found in Heidegger's own thought. One of the major points of the present investigation is to demonstrate in what way a commitment to finitude is highly problematic, and that human knowing, human comprehension, and even the very character of what is known is not finite in any relevant sense. The motivation for such a departure is provided by the criticisms of Badiou, which are here treated as a moment of suspicion. I begin the work with a "Prolegomenon," which reviews in detail the specific challenge Badiou has posed for phenomenological hermeneutics, or any other philosophical position that is committed to the notion that human thought or understanding is finite. As a "Prolegomenon," however, nothing positive for my own position is accomplished there; instead the net result of the study is to produce: (a) an argument against Heideggerian finite hermeneutics, (b) a summary critique of the Badiou's own position, and (c) a clear statement on the eight separate tasks that I set out to accomplish in the argument that follows. The positive aspect of the text, the beginning of the movement of affirmation, thus occurs in "Part I: Infinite Hermeneutics," in which I present a defense of phenomenological hermeneutics as a viable philosophical method. In chapter three I begin by drawing on the work of Paul Ricoeur. My argument is that he is both the very first philosopher to articulate an infinite hermeneutics, and that this account, suitably elaborated throughout his career, is able to meet most of the specific challenges Badiou poses. There does remain, however, three separate points that Ricoeur's thought does not fully explore. In order to remedy those deficiencies, and in order to demonstrate the relative advantage of my hermeneutical position with respect to its competitors, I thus move to produce a new model for hermeneutical thought. Articulating the conditions for this model is the task for chapter four. My task here resolves into three parts. First, I argue for a Galoisian Revolution in phenomenological study, which sets forth a new between hermeneutics and phenomenology study. This relation, second, requires a rearticulation of phenomenological method such that it is "impersonal," as Jean-Paul Sartre's early work suggests. Additionally this relation, third, requires that one be attentive to the structures of consciousness, which is what completes the Galoisian Revolution. In order to support my account of an impersonal phenomenology I engage the contemporary Anglo-American discussions in the philosophy of mind concerning the character of first-person consciousness. In order to specify what is intended by a structure of first-person consciousness, provide a provisional phenomenology of eros. In chapter five I move to articulate the structure of consciousness that serves as the third model for phenomenological hermeneutics. It is at this point that I engage with the work of Bernard Lonergan. My central contention in chapter five is that it is possible to retrieve Longergan's work on cognitional structure as a phenomenology of inquiry for hermeneutical purposes. Taken together, these points, the Ricoeurean defense of hermeneutics, the development of an impersonal phenomenology, and the retrieval of a phenomenology of inquiry, form the hard core of my proposal for infinite hermeneutics. "Part II: On Worlds" concerns the fruits that I can reap from the harvest sown in Part I. In particular, I aim to develop an ecological sense of worlds in response to Badiou's category-theoretic and Heidegger's (early) existential world. My argument moves from an ecological account of natural worlds (chapter six), through a signifying account human worlds (chapter seven), to an account of human historical consciousness and a consideration of catastrophes such as the Shoah and the Encounter (chapter eight). In each of these chapters I focus on developing an account of different kinds of Events, with the aim not only of providing a more serviceable account than my rivals, but also with the hopes of providing a new and better picture of world process. The final section, "Part III: The Metaphysics of Excess" expresses the central Metaphysical claims of the work, especially those concerning Events and the peculiar form I call Emergence. This chapter, in short, constitutes the moment of affirmation in response to the moment of suspicion occasioned by Badiou's criticism of phenomenological hermeneutics. Additionally, however, I produce an argument for the intelligible relation of cosmic space and time with human (lived) space and time, a statement on the new forms of causation entailed by the possibility of Events, and a new account of Truth (to rival Badiou and Heidegger's). The work closes with a summary review of what I have achieved and what yet remains to be accomplished. Though as the title of the conclusion suggests, its main aim is to provide a new statement on the world-view that I work to articulate over the course of the investigation. That world-view, and this is the justification for the subtitle of the present work, is the trans-modern condition, which articulates the existential character of our modern globalized world. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

Thesis advisor: Richard Kearney / This dissertation work examines culture as a condition, as a context, and, finally, as an achievement. The research objectives for this examination are both historical and philosophical. The historical objective is to retrace the appearance of the notion of culture in the works of Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005), and to demonstrate that Ricoeur adopts and adapts the term to his philosophical vocabulary. The accompanying philosophical objective, the proper task of this dissertation, is equally twofold. At the scholarly level this dissertation reconstructs - in the form of a hermeneutic of cultural recognition - Paul Ricoeur's cultural theory, and explicates why such a theory is necessary relative to Ricoeur's more openly-argued anthropological phenomenology of "being able." I maintain that all anthropological thought requires the support of cultural understanding, as no comprehensive anthropology is possible without the philosophical elaboration of the cultural condition that concerns human situatedness. The ultimate aim of this dissertation, however, is to go beyond this scholarly analysis and point out a subjective cultural hermeneutic process under the peculiar "dramatic" modality of this dissertation. This postcritical process is what I sum up with the term re-con-naissance. The reception of a cultural heritage is reaffirmed in the incessant task of acquiring a notion of one's self through hermeneutic reappropriation, or, as a perpetual task of freedom and the fulfillment of fundamental human possibilities in the interpretation of one's culture. Put differently, the matter of this dissertation is to recognize (reconnaître) this level of cultural hermeneutics that is unceasingly present; to expose a postcritical depth structure that takes place in the reader's own reconfigurative process as culturally enabled re-con-naissance. Since this hermeneutic concerns the postcritical interpretive reflection of a living, acting and struggling human subject - and is, therefore, not directly explainable - this reconfiguration can only be pointed at or suggested. In spite of its postcritical aim, therefore, the dissertation remains an academic work that functions at the level of critical explanation. The postcritical cultural hermeneutics has to be approached through the critical means that are exemplified by the scholarly analysis in this dissertation; our analysis stands for the critical and objectifying (academic) culture within which the reader reads this dissertation as a cultural and interpretive subject. After having propaedeutically explained the critical scholarly course and the ultimate postcritical task of this dissertation in part one, part two then breaks open the realm of cultural hermeneutics in the work of Paul Ricoeur by "letting it appear" through the critical analysis of the different perceptions concerning his last major work The Course of Recognition. This is the moment of "re-" or re-membering again the cultural condition. Ricoeur's post-Hegelian notion of "cultural objectification" necessitates, however, examining the synthetic moment of "con." Part three analyzes this "con" by pointing out a trajectory of Ricoeur's "post-Hegelian Kantian" though in his early works that runs from the condition of objectivity to cultural objectivity, and furthermore to a poetically constituted hermeneutic of culture. In turn, part four contrasts Ricoeur's thought with that of Martin Heidegger, focusing on Ricoeur's later works that propose an etho-poetics of culture that is manifested in institution. Part four, which closes off the scholarly analysis of Ricoeur's cultural hermeneutics, thereby displays the moment of "naissance," or "having-been-born-as-an-ethico-political-subject." The last part of this dissertation, part five, distances itself from the academic or scholarly mode by revealing the underlying "dramatic" structure of this dissertation. As a re-reading of the reading of Ricoeur's work in parts two, three, and four, part five exposes a new dimension to the whole of this work; namely, an experiential one that concerns the current reader of the work and his or her cultural re-con-naissance. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

Thesis advisor: Jeffrey Bloechl / In my dissertation I aim to reconstruct the basic principles of Heidegger’s fledgling attempt at a phenomenology of religion in his 1920 and 1921 courses on St. Paul and St. Augustine. In order to understand the parameters and the stakes of that project I consider it light of Husserlian phenomenology as well as broader German trends in “scientific” [Wissenschaftliche] philosophy, theology, and history of religions. The measure of Heidegger’s success is his account of “formal indication,” which endeavors to provide a reflective (i.e. philosophical) articulation of life without privileging a particular theoretical standpoint. This attempt leads him to reconceive phenomenology as a hermeneutics of factical life and to shift his emphasis from a phenomenology of religious consciousness to a phenomenology of religious life. What distinguishes this account is its focus on the “motivated” or “enacted” nature of meaning from out of life. After reconstructing and elaborating Heidegger’s account I note a problematic tendency toward over-formalization that focuses exclusively on the enactment sense (Vollzugsinn) at the expense of the content sense (Gehaltsinn). I enlist the aid of Kierkegaard, whom Heidegger is reading carefully at this point in time, to show why a focus on the appropriative nature of meaning does not require one to ignore its content. I conclude by suggesting some ways that a modified version of Heidegger’s formally indicative philosophy of religion still may prove useful to us today. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

Thesis advisor: James F. Keenan / For a variety of reasons, in the field of biblical ethics, Scripture scholars do not use much ethical theory, while theological ethicists do little actual exegesis. Even those recent attempts to bridge better Scripture with Christian ethics have either stressed the importance of the scriptural text or the importance of ethical hermeneutics. Throughout this entire work I advocate for a more integrated approach for a Scripture-based Christian theological ethics. In so doing I first propose using Allen Verhey's distinction of Scripture as 'scripted' and 'script': The former refers to exegesis and the latter to admonitions for ethical living. A more integrated approach will therefore treat Scripture as both 'scripted' and 'script', taking exegesis seriously and interpreting the text by using a sound hermeneutical framework. Subsequently, we can both acquire a more accurate understanding of the original meaning of the text and obtain a more complete and consistent interpretation of the text for today. From the perspective of Christian ethics, I further suggest virtue ethics as a worthy hermeneutical tool in treating Scripture as 'script'. Virtue ethics complements principle-based ethical theories by emphasizing practices and the importance of exemplary models. It also attends to the character formation and identity of both individuals and the moral community. Moreover, as I argue, there exists an explicit link between Scripture and virtue. Both the biblical link and the uniqueness of virtue ethics make it suitable as the hermeneutical tool for doing Scripture-based Christian ethics. In order to demonstrate concretely how the methodological shift into a more integrated scriptural ethics as such leads to actual benefits and improvements, I offer a three-step illustration. I begin with treating the Beatitudes in Matthew 5:3-12 as first `scripted'; that is, I exegete the text. Then I look at the text as 'script' through the hermeneutics of virtue ethics. I identify a new set of core virtues (and corresponding practices) not just for personal formation but also for the formation of the community and the larger society. Third, I then bring the fruits of this treatment forward by exploring the possible reception of the Beatitudes and its core virtues by the Confucian tradition. Methodologically speaking, Confucianism goes to its own texts in its search of ethical teachings; and Confucian ethics is primarily the fruit of careful interpretation of their 'sacred' texts. In other words, it is both text-based and interpretative, and shares a common methodological approach with the Scripture-based Christian ethics proposed here. Subsequently, we find significant parallel virtues in Confucian texts although dissimilarities (such as worldview) exist between the two traditions. As a whole, the proposed methodological shift into a Scripture-based Christian ethics produces a more accurate, complete and consistent interpretation of the biblical text for our contemporary audience and makes Christian ethics more explicable to Confucian society and more supportive of cross-cultural dialogue with Confucian ethics. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.