This dissertation engages the question "what is the substance of the philosophical teachings that women may have known in the Pauline communities of the Greek East, and how does this knowledge inform their understanding of 1 Corinthians?" The involvement of women in philosophy indicates that some women in the Corinthian church could have the philosophical background required to interact with selected teachings in 1 Corinthians which are already located in Greco-Roman philosophy: friendship and patronage, self-sufficiency and the agon motif, and teachings concerning marriage and family that Paul applies to worship regulations. These widely known teachings in popular philosophy are investigated from the perspective of two philosophically educated women, Sophia and Fortuna, who read Paul in light of their social location as wealthy widows and intellectual background.

Scholars use widely accepted criteria for reconstructing source texts within the gospels in order to "get behind the text" for the sake of historical inquiry. As these reconstructed sources are relied upon with greater frequency, sound scholarship needs a model that helps scholars assess the <bold>reliability</bold> of a text that has been reconstructed from presumably independent witnesses that used it as a source. This study reconstructs a text of Mark based upon the evidence in Matthew and Luke in triple tradition pericopes. The aim is to create a hypothetical, parallel situation that the gospel sayings source Q survived instead of Mark. So then, the task at hand is to identify all the places where Matthew and Luke share material that they did not get from Q. Furthermore, the present approach achieves the best possible reconstruction of Mark, one that benefits from the privileged position of knowledge of Mark's canonical text, in order to amplify the significance of the differences found when comparing this reconstructed text with the canonical form of Mark. Examination of the resulting text, including a comprehensive comparative stylographic statistical analysis between the reconstructed Mark and canonical Mark, will provide a means for evaluating the reconstruction process. Assessing what is lost in the reconstruction, what is introduced, and what is changed in relation to canonical Mark, highlights what limits may also apply to the study and use of a reconstructed text of Q. Among the conclusions are the determinations that a reconstructed text will lack features pervasive in the real text it is approximating, a reconstructed text will bear its own characteristics that have no correlation to the historical text, and that a reconstructed narrative text will contain more sayings material than did the historical original.

The mission of this thesis is to study how differing notions of divine transcendence , in the theologies of Clement of Alexandria and James Hal Cone, were read against the prevailing cultural milieus of their historical contexts for the purpose of resisting hegemony. Because God as Wholly Other chooses to share space with planetary creatures through the Incarnation of the Word as well as the glorious indwelling of God's image in humankind, I will put forward a few possible contours for a U.S. Black postcolonial model of divine transcendence. It is in the hopes of opposing reductionist accounts of cultures and individual persons that a postcolonial doctrine of divine transcendence can function as a way to undermine imperial structures and ideologies. This rough sketch may give license for Womanist and Black liberationist theologians to remain in dialogue with early Christianities and as well as the Nicene-Chalcedonian creedal formulas all the while maintaining a commitment to emancipating ourselves from racist ideologies and institutions. It is in the encounter of the Lord who comes from Beyond that humanity is confronted for the purpose of fellowship in the presence of both the divine and human Other.

This dissertation offers the reader, for the first time in any language, an up-to-date and critical introduction and commentary to the second century early Christian text entitled the Acts of Paul and Thecla. The introduction offers an overview of several of the key discussions concerning the text. In particular, the relationship of the ancient Christian novel to the broader ancient novel is explored, specifically considering the text of the Acts of Paul and Thecla as an ancient novel. In addition, other issues such as date, authorship, the Acts of Paul and the New Testament, and other such issues are considered in the Introduction. This is followed by the critical commentary that provides an English translation based off of the earliest Greek, Coptic, and Latin manuscripts of the Acts of Paul and Thecla.

Narratives of nation invoke feelings of longing for community and displacement of identity in the people. Through their narratives, nationalist writers consciously forge a community to configure such displacement out of diverse and contending cultural elements, traditions, and people. In resonance with such narration of nation, the writer(s) of the Gospel of John imagined a community of the disciples that was an alternative to the dominant Roman Empire. The Gospel, as many nationalist discourses under colonialism, is an enabling discourse for the colonized community, and thus, is a decolonizing text. In search of a community, however, the Gospel coercively forged many contending discourses into one, bearing resemblance with a colonizing discourse of the Empire. In doing so, even though the Gospel is a displacement narrative of the colonized, it manifests marginalization and lack of awareness of Other within its own construction of identity. The Gospel of John, therefore, is a de/colonizing text. The Gospel forcefully destabilizes, excludes, and marginalizes the voices of Other in its narratives. These marginal voices are represented by the claims of Ioudaioi and Samaritans that simultaneously enable and contend the Gospel's essentialist articulation of communal identity and boundary. Interpreting a discourse of margins such as the Gospel of John alerts one to the critical notion and reality of the ambivalent marginality that contains both danger and promise. Reading the Gospel of John for decolonization, in that case reading the Bible, therefore, requires a constant critique that destabilizes rigid binary pattern of thought, time, or axis of power by continually asking a question -- who are the receiving ends of this newly forged discourse of power or interpretation.

While adult Korean adoptees suffer from injustice that occurs out of sexism and racism, and that impacts ethnic identity formation destructively, this dissertation argues that expressing human agency through the action of responses to relationship is essential in constructing a healthy ethnic identity. Integrating the thought of Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki and John Shotter, this project maintains that an expression of human agency involves resistance against injustice and participation in new possibilities that take place in each moment in relationship. To live as persons who express human responsibility requires making choices and reconstructing ethnic identities.

Research shows that ethnic minorities access hospice care less often than Caucasians. In part this issue has been attributed to the lack of cultural competence among hospice staff. The purpose of this pastoral theological study is to examine how pastoral caregivers can work more effectively by attending to cultural context of Hispanics in the United States. The project examines the meaning attached to the stories of hope for six Roman Catholic Hispanic hospice patients in the Fort Worth area in order to find out how their belief system about the future has an impact on their anticipatory grief or waiting experience. In order to establish the context, this project introduces the pastoral challenge by identifying the Hispanic population in the United States and the cultural problems they face at the end-of-life. Second, the project describes the pastoral theological method and research design proposed by James and Evelyn Whitehead, who suggest three stages of the theological method (attending, assertion, and action) and three sources of information (experience, tradition and culture). Third, a dialogue between the three sources of information proposed by the Whiteheads and the experience of the participant patients. The written project is organized according to how the patients experience and interpret their stories of hope in three different ways: as fullness of life, as ambiguous-multiple future stories with limited life, and as future stories with no life. This project concludes by suggesting that the use of narrative theory is a helpful approach for pastoral caregivers in order to maintain culturally sensitive conversations with Hispanic patients at the end-of-life while being mindful of how their future stories have an impact on hope during the waiting experience

How do chaplains and pastoral counselors form their identities as "pastoral" caregivers in challenging clinical contexts such as institutional, interdisciplinary, postmodern, inter-cultural, and multi-faith work environments? Previous studies on pastoral identity have focused on an individual interiority of pastoral practitioners and have emphasized mainly the caregivers' perceptions and practices from a developmental and training perspective. Grounded in an empirical study of active pastoral care providers, this project presents pastoral identity as a relational and interactional property, socially constructed among pastoral care partners, culture, and God. Findings of the empirical study support contemporary theological and social psychological discourses: identity is embedded in and embodied by relationships. Empirical data from my study suggest that pastoral caregivers construct their pastoral identity in the midst of interacting with their clients and that, within this interaction, both caregivers and seekers find their renewed identities. From a symbolic interactionist perspective, social interactors (here caregivers and care-seekers), as self-reflexive agents, do social acts (bringing problems and seeking to find a solution) by interpreting each other's symbolic meanings of the acts (care-giving and receiving). In these social interactions, caregivers and seekers see themselves in the others and find their identities through their relationships with the others. Moreover, a theological perspective of <i>perichoresis</i>--usually known as a trinitarian concept that explains both the oneness and the diversity of the Trinity--sheds light on such interactional and constructive identity that embraces both self and community within pastoral care-giving. Informed by a recent social psychological approach to identity, this project explores the possibility for an interactional, intersubjective, and constructive paradigm of pastoral identity. Adapting to and working to change contemporary cultural contexts and structural powers, pastoral caregivers construct their identities interactionally with care-seekers by interweaving God's providential calling and clients' specific callings for help. Such constructions result in an embracing of multiple pastoral identities, including spiritual representatives, fellow humans, pastors, and divine partakers. The data that form the basis of this study consist of 20 interviews and 63 surveys of chaplains and pastoral counselors and reflective memos of the collected information. The strategies of grounded theory provided the methods for collecting and analyzing the data. Furthermore, the theological perspective of <italic>perichoresis</italic> helps us look at pastoral care-giving as agentive self-enhancing and other-containing communion that caregivers and seekers form in their relationships and that allows the care partners to construct their unique identities. Accordingly, this dissertation redefines pastoral identity as a property of interaction among the caregiver, care-seekers, context, and God--a pastoral identity the interactions and relationships continuously transform.

This project proposes that focusing on hospitality that emphasizes LGBTQ perspectives within Open & Affirming churches will enable those congregations to more adequately engage LGBTQ people to whom it extends welcome. The research applies a spirituality of hospitality model to ecclesiology, attempting to bridge disconnections between hetero and queer people sharing one congregational setting. From 11 interviews with LGBTQ people in the Austin and Bryan-College Station areas and priestly listening by an ONA church, this project draws practical, visionary, and ongoing conclusions about how ONA congregations move from merely welcoming LGBTQ people to being affirming and hospitable toward LGBTQ people.

On June 28, 2009, mere minutes after the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, police in Fort Worth raided a local gay bar know as the Rainbow Lounge. When one of the patrons was critically injured that night, the anger that erupted among the LGBT communities raced through the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, eventually reaching around the nation. In the climate that followed the police raid, a new voice emerged among the protestors: that of the prophetic. The purpose of this paper is twofold: (1) to provide an historical account of events at the Rainbow Lounge on the night of June 28, 2009 and the following months, and (2) to examine the inherently queer nature of the prophetic tradition by considering the words and actions of individuals and institutions, both queer and straight, in the aftermath of the raid of the Rainbow Lounge. Composed of four primary sections, this paper begins with an introductory account of events at the Rainbow Lounge immediately prior to and during the police action. The second part engages in a consideration of what it means to be "prophetic," with the idea that the prophetic is inherently queer being explored in the third segment. In the final section, supporting examples of the words and deeds of ministers and theologians following the raid are considered.