When digitally marketing an online educational program, degree or course, an institution must realize the target market which it is trying to reach. However, the demographics of the online student is extremely diverse, making marketing efforts difficult. With such a demographically diverse online student population to attract, it is important to understand what attributes make current online students satisfied or dissatisfied with the online education experience. Once these attributes are understood, organizations can effectively formulate digital marketing strategy to attract future students. While the efforts to understand satisfaction and dissatisfaction of the online student have been numerous, these studies have mainly centered upon secular organizations. Therefore, to contribute to the literature, this study identifies which attributes make online students satisfied or dissatisfied within the faith-based online educational environment. The results of the study may help organizations and educational institutions with a faith-based mission be more effective in their digital marketing efforts to attract and enroll online students. While the efforts to understand satisfaction and dissatisfaction of the online student have been numerous, these studies have mainly centered upon secular organizations. Therefore, to contribute to the literature, this study identifies which attributes make online students satisfied or dissatisfied within the faith-based online educational environment. The results of the study may help organizations and educational institutions with a faith-based mission be more effective in their digital marketing efforts to attract and enroll online students.

Online doctoral education enrollment continues to rise, and the number of academic institutions who offer the degrees are increasing proportionately. Various types of institutions are involved in this growth, including those that are faith-based. Due to the competitive nature of all online doctoral degrees, including faith-based and secular programs, it is imperative to understand the needs and concerns of the students who enroll in such programs. Students enrolled in a faith-based university online doctoral program were surveyed regarding their concerns about online doctoral education. The results revealed three main themes of concerns/non-concerns, and these results could be beneficial to faith-based institutions who offer online doctoral education or plan to do so in the future.

The size of a raindrop is a middle-grade novel about a dandelion named Sterling and a little girl named Arianna who has a kidney disease which modern medicine and contemporary medical practices are failing to cure. The story examines a variety of political themes rising to the surface in our world today—race, gender, discrimination, colonialism and imperialism, genocide, healthcare, and more. It also explores existentialism through questions of life, purpose, and worth—questions which, ultimately are the real questions behind the political skirmishes of our time.

While the great poet, James Whitcomb Riley, a native poet from my hometown of Greenfield, has a strong sense of Indiana and his Hoosier-ness. I compare myself to Whitcomb Riley, only in the sense of place, because my understanding of poetry was shaped around his work growing up in Hancock County. I am personally influenced by other poets such as Sylvia Plath, Walt Whitman, and James Wright in style and in content. My poetry contains a mixture of confessionalism and pastoral poems and doesn’t shy away from critiquing every aspect of place, family, and mental illness. These intersecting ideals and styles (confessional and pastoral in fixed forms/free-verse) place me at a crossroads of my own, where navigating my position within these frameworks alters my view of the Midwest and how a mental illness may, in fact, be worse off because of the isolation, dissociation, and perception.

Religious accommodation in the workplace has been a growing issue in the business community, partly as a result of an increasing number of religious discrimination cases in the United States. The focus of this qualitative phenomenological study was to investigate Muslims' perceptions concerning religious accommodation using pluralism and religious pluralism as the theoretical frameworks. Data were collected via an online survey of Muslims from different regions throughout the United States with a sample size of 28 participants. Data from the online survey were analyzed using the Moustakas method of phenomenological analysis, which consists of epoché, phenomenological reduction, imaginative variation, and the synthesis of meanings and essences. Results showed the Muslim employees perceived there was a severe lack of religious accommodation provided by their companies. A plurality of the respondents stated their companies did not take any action toward providing them with religious accommodation. Findings also showed prayer to be one of the most important forms of religious expression in the workplace. The implications for positive social change are that companies begin to communicate more effectively with their Muslim employees. With the hope that leaders and public policymakers will implement changes that are beneficial to American society.

Thesis (PhD)--University of Limpopo, 2010. / The role of indigenous healers and spiritual faith healers in managing various conditions of ill-health has been studied and debated. The aim of this study was to determine how indigenous healers and spiritual faith healers understand and define HIV/AIDS stigma and to explore the role that indigenous healers and faith healers play in reducing or reinforcing HIV/AIDS stigma in their communities. In this study, a qualitative approach and in particular, the grounded theory methodology was used. Grounded theory is described as a research method in which theory is developed from data, rather than the other way round. The application of this methodology included personal interviews with thirty-nine practising indigenous healers and spiritual faith healers in the Limpopo Province, while additional information was gleaned from the literature review. The researcher focused on the participants‟ conceptualisation of HIV stigma, from the context of the African world view in order to gain insight into their roles as healers. The findings indicate that indigenous healers‟ cultural beliefs prevented them from having a deeper understanding of HIV stigma when compared to the faith healers. Indigenous healers were generally found to have a positive attitude towards People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWA), while spiritual faith healers showed a less positive attitude towards PLWA. The study further found that „HIV secrecy clause‟ contained in the South African National Policy on HIV/AIDS for Learners and Educators (August 1999) prevents traditional and spiritual faith healers, the affected and infected, the family and society at large from disclosing the HIV status of those infected. It is suggested that the tendency not to disclose has the potential to encourage stigmatization and discrimination whilst at the same time hindering efforts to find solutions to the problem. The study is concluded by suggesting that HIV testing must be compulsory for every person who consults in a hospital. Such a policy move could contribute positively in terms of health promotion. / Medical Research Council

Although F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby has received extensive critical attention since the middle of the century, there remains an unaddressed and unanswered question that demands further exploration: what makes Gatsby "great?" It seems that the source of Gatsby's greatness, for narrator Nick Carraway, is that Gatsby has a quality that sets him apart from others: it is not a "flabby impressionability," but a "heightened sensitivity to the promises of life" and "an extraordinary gift for hope" that Nick has never seen before, nor does he expect to see again (6). I contend that what Nick sees as Gatsby's belief and hope in the possibilities of life are embodied in what Kierkegaard discusses in his works Either/Or and Fear and Trembling as choosing to live an ethical existence free from the pain of the material world. Gatsby makes this choice (of living ethically) when the young James Gatz chooses to become Jay Gatsby and free himself from the pain of losing Daisy. Through this choice, according to Kierkegaard, the ethical individual is inducted into the knighthood as a knight of infinity. If the knight makes one more movement, he becomes a knight of faith who believes, "Nevertheless I have faith that I will get her--that is, by virtue of the absurd, by virtue of the fact that for God all things are possible" (Fear and Trembling 46). Gatsby is a "son of God" that "sprang from his Platonic conception of himself"; he is a Kierkegaardian knight who has chosen an ethical existence; he is a knight who has the ability to look impossibility in the eye and still have faith to the point of absurdity, even if a reunion with his love (Daisy) is not possible. This is Gatsby's "extraordinary gift for hope," which Kierkegaard attributes to "the only great one," the knight of faith. Thus, Nick's narrative is not only a canonization of his "great" knight, but an imaginative recollection that traces the movements of his knight, Gatsby, down the same path Kierkegaard imaginatively follows and observes his great knight of faith in Fear and Trembling.

Magister Legum - LLM / Good faith is an open ended concept which refers to fair and honest dealings. The function of this concept is to give expression to the community’s sense of what is fair, just and reasonable. The concept of good faith has and continues to acquire a meaning wider than mere honesty or the absence of subjective bad faith. It is an objective concept that includes other abstract values such as justice, reasonableness, fairness and equity. There is competition between the two underlying values or cornerstones of the law of contract, namely that of sanctity of contract (pacta sunt servanda) and fairness.

The best interest test is the legal mechanism which governs decision making on behalf of adults who lack the capacity to make their own health care treatment decisions. The test has attracted considerable criticism from health professionals, academics, judges and lawyers for being ill-defined and non-specific. The question of what is meant by 'best interests' remains largely unanswered. As a consequence, the test gives medical and legal decision makers considerable discretion to apply their personal value judgements within supposedly value-free philosophical frameworks - unreasoned and opaque decision making processes are the inevitable result. Because of the dominance of supposedly value-free philosophical frameworks, the place of values in decision making is not always fully understood. Reasoning is not possible without values, which stem from our emotions and passions, our upbringing, our religion, our cultures, our processes of socialisation and from our life experiences. Values help us make sense of our daily lives. I argue that law - like any other social institution - is essentially a human, values based construct. I put forward a theory of values-based law which argues for the recognition that laws, rules and conventions are based on, and contain, individual values. Currently, medical and legal decision makers justify grave decisions on behalf of society's most vulnerable citizens without revealing, or even acknowledging the values which drive and inform their decisions. Any opportunities to scrutinise or debate the values driving decisions are lost. Ultimately, values-based law argues that values underlying best interest determinations must be exposed to facilitate honest, transparent and fulsome decision making on behalf of adults who lack capacity. By applying the theory of values-based law, supposedly value-free decision making processes are exposed as insufficient to facilitate fulsome, honest and transparent legal reasoning.

This study was undertaken to investigate and to propose a solution to the pastoral dilemma that faced the Catholic Church in Australia the 1990’s. The pastoral dilemma contrasted two opposing pastoral responses to the significant changes in Catholic life since the Second Vatican Council. One response reacted to the changes by interpreting them as “crises of faith”. This response determined that the decline in mass attendance, the fewer vocations to the priesthood and religious life and the disregard of the teaching authority of the Church was the result of a loss of faith. Consequently, it prescribed a return to previous values and behaviour. The other response was more difficult to determine and has been the principle work of this thesis. The second pastoral response was identified in the search for the sacred in the daily lives of the people. This search linked the changes in Catholic life to the ongoing journey of faith that has taken place. A pastoral response based on this understanding of the changes in Catholic life was seen to provide an opportunity for “all who invoked the name of Christ” to enter a deeper relationship with him and each other. This response embraced the spirit of renewal proposed by the Council. A review of religious literature published in Australia since the Council was conducted to provide an overview of the journey of Catholic life. It identified four categories of literature that displayed the most interest in the changes. Whilst the review had a particular focus on Catholics, it included other traditions. Of the four categories initially sociology of religion which attracted most interest, followed later by theological reflections and interpretations, and ultimately an interest in spirituality, or the “spirituality revolution”. The historical and biographical studies reviewed recounted the changes in Church life and remained at a lesser, but constant expression of interest. An examination of the research of sociology of religion in Australia established that the changes in religious belief and practice were influenced by environmental factors and, for Catholics, the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. The methods of sociology identified the significant areas of change, but their limited explanations of the changes did little to assist church authorities to resolve the tensions and difficulties. The limitations of statistical information about religion contributed to the pastoral dilemma. The findings of sociology increased interest in theological reflection about the influence of the changing context of society on Catholic life. These reflections endeavoured to explain the reforms of the Council, the relationship to the changes to the reforms and led to “contextual” theology which was embraced by the “Discovery of an Australian Theology”. Spirituality by the 1990s had become a popular response that purported to take the place of “organised religion” in the community. The interest in spirituality also became the key factor in the Catholic search for deeper values, and inspired a renewed sense of the spiritual in ordinary everyday life. The popular interest in spirituality was located in the tradition of Christian spirituality, and the thesis concluded that this tradition embraced the personal experience of God, as expressed in the lives of Catholics in Australia. Such personal experiences were identified and discerned to benefit of the individual and through dialogue transformed the community. The transformation, thus begun, continued in further dialogue, engaged the community, and inspired others beyond the community of the Church to believe. Therefore, the personal experience of the spiritual was authenticated by its place in the developing tradition of the Church. The Council called for individuals and communities in the Church to identify the “signs of the times” as the opportunities for renewal, and personal renewal was closely linked to communal renewal. The “search for a soul” expressed an Australian “sign of the times”. The search provided the opportunity for many people to embark on a journey that led to personal and communal renewal or transformation. Consequently, pastoral responses to renewal based on rule and regulation, or expectations of the past, lacked the personal spiritual dimension. Thus, the title of the thesis figuratively describes the spiritual journey of Catholics from a devotional religious experience to one that seeks to find the sacred in the core values and experiences of life.