Thesis advisor: John F. Baldovin / This dissertation forges a conversation between Martin Luther and Louis-Marie Chauvet on the connection between sacraments and ethics. In conducting an ecumenical conversation concerning the nature and implications of this connection, the dissertation strives to name and develop theological resonances between the two thinkers that provide new ways forward in areas where formal Lutheran-Roman Catholic dialogues have either been historically quite difficult (sacramental theology) or largely silent (ethics). The first chapter of the dissertation locates the project within the field of liturgy and ethics, especially as it developed through the Liturgical Movement in the United States in the 20th century. The chapter then moves to outlining the philosophical background of Chauvet and the hermeneutical lens through which the dissertation approaches Luther. The dissertation reads Chauvet as a faithful Roman Catholic who nevertheless wishes to re-cast sacramental theology in terms distinct from reigning Thomistic categories, and it approaches Luther through the Finnish School of Luther Interpretation, a movement that, analogously to Chauvet, has re-cast Luther's theology in terms distinct from more traditional readings of Luther. The second chapter moves to Luther himself in earnest. Outlining his sacramental theology and arguing that the way he conceives of the connection of sacraments to ethics is as unification with Christ, the chapter poises Luther for conversation with Chauvet. Likewise, the third chapter summarizes Chauvet's theology in terms of his treatment of the symbol and the symbolic, his theological anthropology, and finally his sacramental understanding of symbolic exchange and its connection to ethics. The fourth chapter builds upon the substance of the second and third chapters by actually conducting the conversation that is the dissertation's ultimate goal. Beginning by arguing that the nexus point between the two theologians is their conviction that gratuitousness and graciousness provide the ground for sacramental theology, the chapter uses that nexus to allow Chauvet and Luther to enrich each other's theologies. Specifically, tensions exist in the theological anthropologies of both Luther and Chauvet that can be eased by allowing each to inform the other. Similarly, the concept of communal ethics and the role of the sacramental community in society provide fertile ground for the theologians' mutual enrichment. The dissertation ends by gesturing toward further implications of the discussion, and by outlining possible avenues for future work. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Thesis advisor: John R. Sachs SJ / This dissertation explains how divine grace, that is, God's self-communication to humanity, is a communitarian reality specifically in its participative, dialogical, and prophetic core as well as its manifestations, characteristics, and consequences. It draws from two main sources: Karl Rahner's understanding of grace and the pastoral statements and reflections of the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conference (FABC) from 1974 to 2010. Religious and cultural pluralism and the abiding poverty in Asian communities are the realities that frame the discussion both of the FABC documents and the main theme of this dissertation. The FABC believes that in order to respond to God's call for the Asian Church to be "a communion of communities", the Asian Church--hierarchy, religious, and laity--must reckon with these permanent realities through which God reveals divine self and will. They must therefore figure significantly upon the Church's ways of evangelizing, theologizing, and living in community. For this reason, the FABC understands being a communion of communities as God's call for the Church to be more participative, dialogical, and prophetic in evangelization and attitude with and towards other communities. The life-giving relationship in the experience of grace does not remain restricted to God and individual persons. God gives Godself gratuitously not simply to individuals but to the whole human community. Divine self-giving creates loving, self-donating persons in communion with Godself and one another. The community is therefore a privileged place where one experiences grace especially in the shared effort to respond to God's unifying presence and call to greater participation, dialogue, and prophetic action with other communities. As the ground of grace, God's presence and activity in the world is always participative in human realities, dialogical with persons, and prophetic in its thrust for the poor. The response to this grace also takes on communitarian characteristics, that is, participative, dialogical, and prophetic attributes. Self-consciousness and self-forgetfulness form a significant dialectic that takes place in the experience of grace--both on the side of the Giver and of the recipients of the gift. A community that enjoys God's grace is constantly aware of the fact that the grace is due to God's gratuitous, selfless love for all. At the same time, grace empowers a community towards self-forgetfulness as God's self-communication always calls forth shared self-denial and servanthood as witnessed to by the total self-outpouring of Christ to the world. The grace of God therefore becomes clearly manifest in a community whose members willingly participate in fostering well-being, when they strive for deeper harmony through constant and open dialogue, and most of all, when they take care of their poor sisters and brothers. / Thesis (STD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry. / Discipline: Sacred Theology.

Thesis advisor: Frederick G. Lawrence / This dissertation, an exercise in interpretation, is on Bernard Lonergan’s notion of faith as expressed in his early Latin theological writings—especially his scholastic supplement Analysis Fidei (1952). This interpretation consists largely of an analysis of the intellectual horizon in which Lonergan did his earliest thinking on faith; without a grasp of this horizon Lonergan’s early, especially scholastic notion of faith is almost overwhelmingly difficult to understand. The horizon analysis is completed in the first four chapters of the dissertation. Chapter One aims to show that Lonergan’s analysis of faith is rooted in the theological context informed by the decrees of Vatican I (especially Dei Filius) and its focus on the question about the relation of faith to reason, and by the effort especially in Catholic theological circles of the time to mine the works of Thomas Aquinas, the Doctor of the Church, for a deeper understanding of the revealed mysteries. Chapter Two situates Lonergan’s notion of faith in his understanding of a developing world-order; coming to faith is understood as a part of a larger process that, on the one hand, begins with a natural desire to see God (a natural desire to understand everything about everything) and, on the other, terminates in the absolutely supernatural goal of beatific knowledge: knowing God as God. Chapter Three narrows the scope and situates the act and virtue of faith in Lonergan’s rigorously systematic theology of grace that distinguishes clearly between grace as operative and cooperative on the one hand, and actual and habitual on the other. Chapter Four offers a very brief sketch of Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of the notion of faith, from which Lonergan’s own work takes its bearings. After this horizon analysis, Chapter Five offers an exposition of Lonergan’s own treatment of the notion of faith as found in his early Latin theology. The chapter investigates three principal sources, giving most attention to the third: first, the Gratia Operans dissertation (1940) together with the Grace and Freedom articles (1941–42); second, De Ente Supernatural (1946); and third, Analysis Fidei (1952). The chapter claims that Lonergan’s early presentation of faith breaks new ground by bringing into view, alongside a logical analysis of the act of faith, the psychological dimension of the conscious process of coming to believe revealed mysteries. Finally, a brief concluding chapter looks ahead to Lonergan’s later understanding of faith in Method in Theology (1972) in order to indicate some of the challenges that would need to be met in a full-scale treatment of the development of Lonergan’s notion of faith throughout his entire intellectual career—a project for which this dissertation can serve as a perhaps helpful prolegomena. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Thesis advisor: Stephen F. Brown / The purpose of this dissertation is to provide a systematic account of St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio’s doctrine of grace. More particularly, the dissertation argues that a systematic account of this kind can only be provided by attending to that doctrine through his theology of hierarchy, a methodology that derives from the Seraphic Doctor’s own claim in the Legenda Maior that St. Francis was a vir hierarchicus, or a “hierarchical man.” Throughout the course of his theological career, the Seraphic Doctor defines sanctifying grace as a created influentia that “hierarchizes” human beings by purifying, illuminating, and perfecting them from within, thus causing them to become a “similitude” of the Trinity. This dissertation explains what this means and why it matters. Methodologically, the dissertation proceeds in three parts. Part I, “Theological Foundations for Bonaventure’s Doctrine of Grace,” lays the necessary groundwork for the rest of the project in two ways: first, by introducing three historical figures whose work will provide indispensible theological contexts for approaching Bonaventure’s doctrine of grace, namely, Pseudo-Dionysius, Thomas Gallus, and Alexander of Hales; and second, by introducing the Seraphic Doctor’s own theology of hierarchy as he inherited it from these sources. Part II, “Bonaventure’s Doctrine of Grace,” then builds upon these foundations to present a systematic account of that doctrine as it developed in some of his most important works throughout his career as a theologian. Part III, “Theological Implications of Bonaventure’s Doctrine of Grace,” concludes the dissertation by exploring how that doctrine can inform scholarship on Bonaventure’s theological anthropology, Christology, and theology of sanctity, respectively. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Thesis advisor: Dominic F. Doyle / Thesis advisor: Reinhard Hutter / Thesis (STL) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry. / Discipline: Sacred Theology.

acase@tulane.edu / This paper weaves together theory and research in the areas of musicology, dance studies, gender studies, art, history, science, and philosophy. The author makes the claim that a post-modern treatment of the body in the arts has political implications. The paper explains how sound-movement reciprocity reveals the body’s innate capacity to shape itself and the environment. The dissolution of constructed identities, including the ostensible categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ make way for the ‘intentional body’ — a philosophy of being, in which the mind and body are indistinct from one another. Exemplifying the performative nature of identity and destabilizing normative understandings of gender, race, and nationality, Grace Jones is included as the practical application, or living representation, of this phenomenon. The culmination of the author’s research is a pedagogical book of piano études based on the theories of Rudolf Laban and Sonata 9, a multi-media, interdisciplinary dance performance, which is discussed at the end of the paper. / 1 / Sean Knapp

This dissertation examines various contemporary Protestant views of Christian Spirituality in light of Galatians 2:20 in order to correct some common errors caused by the elevation of personal subjectivism and the misinterpretation of Scripture. The purpose is to demonstrate the continual necessity of the Scriptures as the normative grounds for evaluating and correcting the theological and practical expressions of Christian spirituality. Christian spirituality focuses on the way that one lives as led by the Spirit in light of one's understanding of and experience with God. While the role of the Spirit in Christian spirituality is critical, direct emphasis on the necessity of grounding one's spiritual understanding and experience within the context of Scripture is often an absent element. Without the governing standard of the Bible, and with the increased influences of ecumenicalism, mysticism, secularism, subjectivism, and relativism within Protestantism, Christian spirituality remains somewhat ambiguous and covers a substantial range of religious beliefs to include biblical as well as extra-biblical ideas. Thus, to demonstrate how the Scriptures can help govern limits within Christian spirituality, Galatians 2:20 will be examined. This dissertation, then, employs Galatians 2:20 as a guide for establishing essential concepts concerning the spiritual life and, in so doing, corrects some common misunderstandings of the spiritual life. Chapter 1 defines spirituality and provides a brief history of interpretation for Galatians 2:20. Chapter 2 demonstrates that the cross is central to the justification of the believer and results in a transformation of life. Chapter 3 reveals that the Spirit serves as Christ's representative to the believer empowering them for Christian living. Chapter 4 emphasizes the reality that although the believer is to progress in sanctification, they will continually experience spiritual tension in this life between the Spirit and the desires of the flesh. Chapter 5 explains that personal faith is the means by which the believer lives out the indwelling presence of the Spirit. This lived faith is motivated by the sacrificial love of God. Chapter 6 provides a conclusion based on the preliminary thought regarding the necessity of biblical spirituality in light of some current trends within Christian spirituality.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Manchester, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 271-290).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Concordia Seminary, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 433-453).

The motivation for this research was an improvement of the quality of the Earth’s gravity solutions from the GRACE mission data through an instrument-level study. The objective was a better understanding of the characteristics and sources of the highfrequency noise in the range of (0.02 ~ 0.1 Hz) in the dual one-way ranging (DOWR) and its effect on the gravity solution. For this purpose, the mathematical model of the DOWR observation was derived and the Allan variance was computed to establish an upper bound on the level of frequency instability of the ultra-stable oscillators (USO) to determine their contribution to the high-frequency noise. Because they are dominated by the high-frequency noise, the postfit residuals of the time derivative of the DOWR ranges were also examined to evaluate the contributions of various other factors such as system noise from the microwave signal receiver, external influences, and internal influences. The results indicate that the system noise is the dominant source of the excessive highfrequency noise. As one method of mitigation, a tighter bandwidth filter was applied to the DOWR processing, resulting in modest improvements in gravity solutions. / text