This thesis consists of a preface and twenty-one original short stories. The preface examines the differences between creative nonfiction, autobiography, and memoir. The twenty-one interrelated stories included are autobiographical in nature, in some ways memoirs and in some ways creative nonfiction. The over-all theme of the collection explores one character's journey of self-discovery and transformation.

"The Origins of Left Behind Eschatology” examines the origins of the beliefs that undergird the popular Left Behind novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. How that system of belief arose has long been hotly debated. Using mainly non-fiction books and articles by authors with Left Behind views, I first seek to determine what those beliefs are. From that I draw out eight specific beliefs that are essential to Left Behind eschatology. I next conduct an examination of eschatology in certain eras of Church history, looking for the origins of each of these eight test criteria and seeking when they all first came together to form a system. I examine the early Church thoroughly, but briefly, noting that five of the test criteria were present in the first three hundred years of Christian history. However, no individual taught more than four of them. In addition, the four scholars in this period who each taught four of these beliefs also taught doctrines contrary to Left Behind. I then look at the period from the Reformation, with particular emphasis on the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. While teachings similar to two of the three remaining Left Behind concepts are found in the seventeenth century those two ideas do not properly emerge until the eighteenth century in a work by Morgan Edwards, a Welsh/American Baptist. The final criterion does not appear until the late 1820s in the thought of J.N. Darby of the Plymouth Brethren. Darby was also the first to draw all eight elements together in the early 1830s. I close with a look at how these beliefs became widely accepted and adapted in the remainder of the nineteenth century and in the twentieth.

"The Origins of Left Behind Eschatology” examines the origins of the beliefs that undergird the popular Left Behind novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. How that system of belief arose has long been hotly debated. Using mainly non-fiction books and articles by authors with Left Behind views, I first seek to determine what those beliefs are. From that I draw out eight specific beliefs that are essential to Left Behind eschatology. I next conduct an examination of eschatology in certain eras of Church history, looking for the origins of each of these eight test criteria and seeking when they all first came together to form a system. I examine the early Church thoroughly, but briefly, noting that five of the test criteria were present in the first three hundred years of Christian history. However, no individual taught more than four of them. In addition, the four scholars in this period who each taught four of these beliefs also taught doctrines contrary to Left Behind. I then look at the period from the Reformation, with particular emphasis on the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. While teachings similar to two of the three remaining Left Behind concepts are found in the seventeenth century those two ideas do not properly emerge until the eighteenth century in a work by Morgan Edwards, a Welsh/American Baptist. The final criterion does not appear until the late 1820s in the thought of J.N. Darby of the Plymouth Brethren. Darby was also the first to draw all eight elements together in the early 1830s. I close with a look at how these beliefs became widely accepted and adapted in the remainder of the nineteenth century and in the twentieth.

This study aims to capture how left-behind children in China experience their life with their parents’ migration and how they exercise agency to negotiate with structural and cultural contexts when living under these circumstances. The fieldwork was conducted in a middle school in a rural region of the inland province Hunan, with the data mainly being obtained from in-depth interviews with 16 focal left-behind children. An integrative theoretical framework is proposed to explain the dynamic process of living with parents’ migration by explicating the interaction between structure, culture, and agency. The research findings indicate that the left-behind children’s experiences can be conceptualised as “ambivalence” in that they incorporate simultaneous existence of opposing emotions towards their parents’ migration. Such experiences are grounded in the structural and cultural contexts associated with migration on the one hand, and on the other, provide the driving impetus for children to reproduce and/or transform their structural and cultural contexts by adopting agentic strategies either more engaged with the present or more directed towards the future. An integrated theoretical framework has been developed to capture a dynamic understanding of left-behind children, wherein ambivalence is proposed to act as a bridging concept to link agency with structure and culture. This framework challenges the univalent orientations in conceptualising agency as rational choice or resistance and emphasises the mutual sustaining relationships between culture and structure, which could contribute to the debates in the sociology of childhood field by advancing theoretical integration so as to transcend the agency/structure dichotomy. By highlighting left-behind children’s ambivalent experiences, this research further contributes to the literature that challenges the image of passive victims attributed to them, and adds to the knowledge on how to address their needs as well as to facilitate their exercising of agency, which can inform related policy and service provision.

This thesis provides a rhetorical analysis of prophetic texts, non-fiction premillennialist dispensational studies, the fictional series, Left Behind and interviews with series’ readers. This thesis argues that prophetic rhetoric constitutes an epistemological position whereby Rapture believers create knowledge, cast knowledge as good or evil and finally act as gatekeepers to determine what can and should be known. Rapture subculture is composed of both a hard core and a set of narrative believers, those who have acquired the nomenclature, but perhaps not the dogmatic belief in a Rapture, Tribulation, Armageddon, and Millennium schema. The process of turning narrative believers into hard core believers relies on the use of a range of topoi, appeals to authority, evil and time. Rapture rhetoric, aimed at bolstering the beliefs of the hard core and cultivating the beliefs of those still undecided, relies on the process of transfer to gain acceptance for one claim based on acceptance of another and then relies on narrative plasticity to enlarge the basis for those accepted claims. These arguments are exchanged for stories in the fictional Left Behind series, whereby the characters, institutions and knowledge of the end-times becomes encapsulated in an easy-to-read and simple-to-relate tale that codes knowledge as either good knowledge revealed from God or evil knowledge acquired through human understanding. These narratives and arguments both get used among prophetic believers to explain their lives and their world, internally and externally to the prophetic subculture, in order to convince more narrative believers of the truth of their claims. Prophetic communities develop knowledge products, cultural entailments and cultural manifestations of prophetic belief to serve as symbols of the end-times narrative. Rapture subculture, based on prophetic beliefs, is not monolithic; however, this thesis is able to draw some broad generalizations about the prophetic community and the rhetoric they use to explain their claims within their ranks and to the outside world.

This thesis provides a rhetorical analysis of prophetic texts, non-fiction premillennialist dispensational studies, the fictional series, Left Behind and interviews with series’ readers. This thesis argues that prophetic rhetoric constitutes an epistemological position whereby Rapture believers create knowledge, cast knowledge as good or evil and finally act as gatekeepers to determine what can and should be known. Rapture subculture is composed of both a hard core and a set of narrative believers, those who have acquired the nomenclature, but perhaps not the dogmatic belief in a Rapture, Tribulation, Armageddon, and Millennium schema. The process of turning narrative believers into hard core believers relies on the use of a range of topoi, appeals to authority, evil and time. Rapture rhetoric, aimed at bolstering the beliefs of the hard core and cultivating the beliefs of those still undecided, relies on the process of transfer to gain acceptance for one claim based on acceptance of another and then relies on narrative plasticity to enlarge the basis for those accepted claims. These arguments are exchanged for stories in the fictional Left Behind series, whereby the characters, institutions and knowledge of the end-times becomes encapsulated in an easy-to-read and simple-to-relate tale that codes knowledge as either good knowledge revealed from God or evil knowledge acquired through human understanding. These narratives and arguments both get used among prophetic believers to explain their lives and their world, internally and externally to the prophetic subculture, in order to convince more narrative believers of the truth of their claims. Prophetic communities develop knowledge products, cultural entailments and cultural manifestations of prophetic belief to serve as symbols of the end-times narrative. Rapture subculture, based on prophetic beliefs, is not monolithic; however, this thesis is able to draw some broad generalizations about the prophetic community and the rhetoric they use to explain their claims within their ranks and to the outside world.

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The aim of this thesis is to examine how the Filipino children are affected when either one or both of their parents are living and working abroad based from a teacher’s point of view. Focus is directed towards influences on the daily life of children. The study is based on qualitative interviews with six high school teachers, from two different schools. Their statements have been analyzed by using the theory of attachment and sentence categorization. The teachers described that they think it is a common thought that left-behind children tend to have a bad behavior. However, none of these teachers described the children that they are teaching in that manner but in fact, they described them as responsible, independent and good students. Conclusion of the study is that the cultural context and the environment affect how the children are able to cope with their situation. It was also found that the role of the mother has a significant importance for these children. There is also great need of a motherly and fatherly figure, even though it is not the biological parents of the children.