Thesis (M.A.P.S.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 72-74).

abstract: This dissertation illuminates overlaps in Mormonism and the New Spirituality in North America, showing their shared history and epistemologies. As example of these connections, it introduces ethnographic data from women who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in order to show (a) how living LDS women adapt and integrate elements from the New Spirituality with Mormon ideas about the nature of reality into hybrid spiritualities; and (b) how they negotiate their blended religious identities both in relation to the current American New Spirituality milieu and the highly centralized, hierarchical, and patriarchal Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The study focuses on religious hybridity with an emphasis on gender and the negotiation of power deriving from patriarchal religious authority, highlighting the dance between institutional power structures and individual authority. It illuminates processes and discourses of religious adaptation and synthesis through which these LDS women creatively and provocatively challenge LDS Church formal power structures. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Religious Studies 2012

This study presents a critical investigation into the teaching of computer ethics. A qualitative pluralistic approach (a mixture of qualitative approaches) was used to investigate case studies of teaching computer ethics to university-level students from Bahrain. The main issue was that ethics to Arabs and Muslims is a matter of religion than a matter of philosophy whereas the dominant perception in the academic literature which discussed computer ethics teaching is that computer ethics is a form of practical philosophy and hence separate from religion. In order to shed light on this, the study investigated computer ethic’s perceptions and teaching practices which were occurring in universities in Bahrain. The study found that the issue was not a matter of perception but rather a matter of confusion and a misconception. Computer ethics was being confused with morality, religion, basic computer skills to name just a few. And such confusion was causing computer ethics to gradually disappear from the curriculum and become substituted with concepts which were not necessarily capable of building students’ ethical thinking. The study recommends that computer ethics teachers and policy makers from Bahrain distinguish computer ethics from religion, morality and from any other concept and identify it as an independent field of study, also teachers need to involve their students in social and ethical analysis of various kinds so that students understand that ethics is not a set of rules on what is forbidden and allowed aimed at providing straightforward answers to a given problem but rather ethics is a ‘cognitive tool’; a mechanism through which different competing ethical theories and standards are used to reflect on a given problem.

The thesis argues that Neopaganism on the Web is an example of mythopoesis and aims at showing both the novelty and the limits of such mythopoesis. I use the term "mythopoesis" in its original Greek meaning, i.e. "the creation (the making/crafting) of a myth or myths", thus stressing the dynamic way in which the process of creation (of myths, rituals, divinities, identities—all implicitly or explicitly played out, connected, and organised as "stories", which can be told, written or performed, as well as represented as images) unfolds in Neopaganism. Neopagan mythopoesis on the Web is new, original, and structurally different from other previous and contemporary examples of mythopoesis, either religious or not, since it does not refuse, put aside, or implicitly contradict, the rational framework elaborated by Western culture. The research involves exploring the contemporary cultural and historical context that allows for mythopoesis to take place and the technology that allows for it to develop. It analyses the key features of Neopaganism on the Web as they emerge from the mythopoeic recreation of two ancient goddesses (Gaia, and Artemis/Diana) and an ancient ritual (the Eleusinian mysteries). In covering several different fields (from ancient religions, to the Internet, to myth and ritual theory), and in examining a range of heterogeneous materials (from ancient texts, Neopagan hymns and art, to hypertexts), the analysis adopts an interdisciplinary approach.