This manuscript focuses on performances of place and faith inside the Holy Land Experience (HLE), an edutainment complex nestled in the fantasy nexus of Orlando, Florida. A self-proclaimed living-history museum, the HLE includes animatronic Bible characters and musical dramas. The HLE enacts and embodies evangelical narratives of Christianity and Christian faith, and visitors to the park are asked to join the performances, blurring the distinctions between spectators and professional actors. I argue that visitors' performances of faith invest the space of the HLE with sacredness, while the location and design of the HLE infuses the space with elements of the secular. The HLE exemplifies the performative nature of the sacred and shows how sacredness is a process (a performance), not an inherent property. Through participant observation, interviews, and critical/cultural analysis, I engage the multiple meanings of the HLE with the intention of facilitating empathic understandings of the complex, embodied phenomenon of faith as it manifests in this hybrid space.

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Childhood trauma and stress can lead to widespread changes in brain function that can lead to lifelong learning and living difficulties and disability that impact parental stress levels. Increasingly, parents are turning to social media to find systems of support. This Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis explores the online talk of 17 participants to better understand how they make meaning out of their participation in an online, faith-based parenting community designed for parents raising children with complex trauma exposure. Findings based on the data analysis included five overarching main themes: a) A community of experts; b) The community dethrones the experts; c) The community empowers women to navigate status from victim to warrior; d) The community provides support for members to grieve what seems "irreparably broken;" and e) Participants express faith that God will "mend what is broken." The findings were overlayed on Bronfenbrenner's bioecological theory (Bronfenbrenner & Evans, 2000) to provide a construct for the professionals interacting with parents of children with trauma. Professionals, therapists and religious leaders interacting with parents of children with trauma may want to incorporate a pluralistic, multileveled perspective, recognizing parents' interpersonal conflicts or personal experiences exist in a broader more nuanced system, thus fostering a nuanced and individualized approach to providing support for parents of children with trauma.

Thesis advisor: Hosffman Ospino / The Catholic Church’s formal documents throughout the centuries have celebrated and affirmed the role of parents educating their children on faith matters in the context of the home. Nevertheless, the Church offers parents very little practical guidance as to how they can make their home a domestic church or what they can do to organically and consistently incorporate the faith into daily life. As the Church analyzes why presently 6 Catholics are disaffiliating for every new member that joins, it must reconsider the lack of attention the home has received as an authoritative space for religious transmission. The home, as a sacramental space, has the potential to call attention to the divinity that surrounds us and invites us to action and awakening. It is also the haven where we nurture our most important and loving relationships that initiate us into the faith. The home is also a space for negotiation, that is, where we learn to wrestle with mystery and ambiguity. Critical dialogues within the home are imperative to engaging the present world from a Catholic perspective. This dissertation conducted an ethnographic study of a group of Miami-based Cuban American Catholic women across two generations. The women were chosen based on their active involvement within the Catholic Church. The study found that 100% of the women were successful in transmitting their Catholic faith to their daughters due to four socialization practices. Faith modeling by extended kin, engagement in social justice vocations across the community, explicitly affirming the personalization of daily rituals such as prayer, and finally, ongoing intergenerational dialogues were found in the stories of all the women participants. Religious imagination is the glue that holds all of the moving pieces (home, women and socializing praxis) in this dissertation. I provide herein a midrash of Matthew 27:57-61 to illustrate how the physical and relational components of the Cuban-American home serve to negotiate a hermeneutic that is matriarchal, bottom-up, and interdisciplinary. The hermeneutic echoes the message of the women studied herein; namely, that a community working together in the midst of dislocation is already being liberated. Noting the psycho-social importance of a cohesive narrative identity and its impact on authentic faith transmission calls into question whether the pedestrian nature of the home has led to mistaken notions of this pedagogy being too simplistic. Nevertheless, in telling stories and (de/re)constructing life narratives, individuals are placed within the larger scheme of history, redemptive sequences are analyzed and building resilience, and the stories themselves become a safe space from which to discern larger questions. This dissertation proposes communal, home-based activities as an effective method for faith transmission as it fosters the necessary intimacy to share relevant and passionate stories that powerfully answer why being Catholic truly matters now and to our next generation. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry.

This thesis is concerned with seniors education in religious area. The text gives comprehensive information about problems of this life stage and point out the changes that these years bring and seniors have to deal with. It describes the importance of religion to cope with age and the constant need of being educated associated with it. This work outlines the learning opportunities and summary of activities helping with spiritual growth. The thesis includes practical demonstration of religious education cycle which is important part of care for elderly believers.

The present thesis "Religious literacy" describes the parish of Kyje and Černý Most first. Then it deals with the concept of literacy itself - starting from the basic ability to read and write, proceeding on to the importance of education in a number of spheres, and finally resulting in such competences that enable people an independent existence within the human society. The thesis then proceeds to focus on individual kinds of literacy and on the relationship between cultural literacy and education. The following part of the thesis is focused on religious literacy itself. Knowledge of other, non-Christian religions, is helpful in this respect. The thesis defines the subject matter and analyzes the circumstances which influence the development of religious literacy, namely from the viewpoint of universal principles of faith and from that of basic terms connected with the sacraments. The development of religious literacy can best be stimulated within the particular family and by an active parish community. The thesis then looks in particular at the development of religious literacy in the parish of Kyje and Černý Most. The core of the thesis is the general view of the parish and the way its religious literacy is intensified there. The religious and cultural literacy has been evaluated from a survey...

Magister Theologiae - MTh / This study focuses on the field of youth ministry as a sub-discipline of Practical Theology. It will offer a survey of current literature in the field of youth ministry in order to identify some of the current issues in this discourse as well as some of the approaches which may be followed in Christian ministry to the youth. This study focuses, more specifically, on an approach to youth ministry which seeks to integrate the role of families and family life in Christian ministry to young people

This dissertation critically reconsiders the dichotomy drawn in modern philosophy between faith and reason, especially as formalized by the German Idealists. The latter, I suggest, continue to influence how the philosophy of religion is conceived and what it is considered to be capable of accomplishing. Though originally used to reconcile religious faith with the philosophical reason that had animated forceful skepticism, this dichotomy also underscores a tension between the conceptualization of a rational public good and private religious values within pluralistic societies. I focus on the efforts of Kant, Hegel, and F.W.J. Schelling to develop a philosophy of religion that distinguished philosophical reason and religious faith as distinct sources of theory while nevertheless establishing meaningful dialogue between each. The first chapter surveys Kant's and Hegel's philosophy of religion and argues that they struggled to maintain the otherness of religious faith relative to philosophical interpretation. The subsequent chapters each focus on a period of Schelling's intellectual development — his early criticisms of Kant, his mature rejection of German Idealism's subjective metaphysics, and his late philosophy of religion — as he developed an alternative philosophical approach to religion. This provides a means of exploring the challenges that a philosophy of religion must navigate to move beyond the problematic opposition of faith and reason. I conclude by considering the university as a promising context for reformulating this problematic dichotomy central to the philosophy of religion. The professional division of faculties embodies the abstract delineation of faith and reason and indicates the social and political dimension of such academic efforts. I argue that Schelling's contributions to the philosophy of religion point to the idea of the university as a vital framework for both reconsidering the opposition of faith and reason and moving beyond this schema in order to conceptualize effectively the contemporary conflicts between rational and religious authority within pluralistic societies.

Spiritual Well-Being of Black LGBT Individuals When Faced With Religious Homonegativity by Patricia A. Hill MA, Loyola University-Chicago, 2004 BS, Chicago State University, 2000 Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Psychology Walden University May 2015 Abstract Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) individuals in the United States often face homophobic sermons and messages within their traditional religious settings. This phenomelogical research study was designed to document and understand the lived experiences of Black LGBT individuals' spiritual well-being in the face of homonegativity, and to identify the ways in which they cope with these experiences. The qualitative interview data from 9 participants were interpreted through the lens of feminist theory and Pargament's theory of the psychology of religion and coping. Recurring themes were coded from the participants' interviews using the QSR Nvivo 10 software program. Interview themes included change in faith community, experiencing familial acceptance or discord/rejection due to sexual orientation, feelings of abandonment by God/religion, negative experiences in a religious setting due to sexual orientation, emotional reactions, maladaptive coping, adaptive coping, and religious and/or spiritual reconciliation. The results of this study provide insight into the challenges that Black LGBT individual experience with religious homonegativity and they ways in which they cope with these stresses and challenges. This study promotes positive social change by providing a better understanding of the impact of Christian religion on the mental and spiritual well-being of the Black LGBT individual. These findings can be used to inform therapists and psychologists who are seeking treatment strategies for their Black LGBT clients. The findings suggest there is an educational component that also could benefit family, friends, and religious leaders who want to be present and accepting of the Black LGBT community.

This collection of poems is representative of the creative writing and literary studies completed during my time in Portland State University's Master of Fine Arts Program. Poetry workshops, seminars in prosody, syntax, and translation, and forays into the magic of rhetoric and defamiliarization in the novel have all contributed to the thinking and feeling shown in this work. Some themes that the collection circles around are: the alienating and sometimes ecstatic relationship between the identities of civilized human and human-as-animal, the processes of falling in and out of faith in a greater power and with belonging to a human community, non-binary and unconventional performances of gender and sexuality, psychological inquiry about the nature of the self, the cleaving of mind and body, and meditations on 21st Century youth.