Heidelberg, Univ., Abschlussarb., 2008.

Thesis (M.A.)--David Lipscomb University, 1991. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 125-129).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Erskine Theological Seminary, 2002. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 146-150).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Erskine Theological Seminary, 2002. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 146-150).

This dissertation is centrally concerned with exploring obituaries as repositories of values. Obituaries are a publicly-available natural language source that are variably written for members of communities that are wide (nation-level) and narrow (city-level, or at the level of specific groups therein). Because they are explicitly summative, limited in size, and written for consumption by a public audience, obituaries may be expected to express concisely the aspects of their subjects' lives that the authors (often family members living in the same communities) found most salient or worthy of featuring. 140,599 obituaries nested in 832 newspapers from across the USA were scraped with permission from *Legacy.com,* an obituaries publisher. Obituaries were coded for the age at death and gender (female/male) of the deceased using automated algorithms. For each publishing newspaper, county-level median income, educational achievement (operationalized as percent of the population with a Bachelor's degree or higher), and race and ethnicity were averaged across counties, weighting by population size. A Neo4J graph database was constructed using WordNet and the University of South Florida Free Association Norms datasets. Each word in each obituary in the corpus was lemmatized. The shortest path through the WordNet graph from each lemma to 30 Schwartz value prototype words published by Bardi, Calogero, and Mullen (2008) was then recorded. From these path lengths, a new measure, "word-by-hop," was calculated for each Schwartz value to reflect the relative lexical distance between each obituary and that Schwartz value. Of the Schwartz values, Power, Conformity, and Security were most indicated in the corpus, while Universalism, Hedonism, and Stimulation were least indicated. A series of nine two-level regression models suggested that, across Schwartz values, newspaper community accounted for the greatest amount of word-by-hop variability in the corpus. The best-fitting model indicated a small, negative effect of female status across Schwartz values. Unexpectedly, Hedonism and Conformity, which had conceptually opposite prototype words, were highly correlated, possibly indicating that obituary authors "compensate" for describing the deceased in a hedonistic way by concurrently emphasizing restraint. Future research could usefully further expand word-by-hop and incorporate individual-level covariates that match the newspaper-level covariates used here.

Based on the missional experiences of the Wolaita Zone Kale Heywet Church (WZKHC) in Southern Ethiopia, this dissertation argues the indispensable nature of the holistic approach to mission in order to fulfil the missional responsibility of the church effectively. Balance must be kept between the two aspects of mission (evangelism and social concern) and they need to be integrated as working towards a single goal of proclaiming the Kingdom of God. In other words, neither of the two aspects of mission may to be magnified at the expense of the other nor should they be dichotomized as two unrelated parts. Mission emerges from the nature of God. Ever since the creation of the universe God has been at work and the church takes part in what he is doing. God's mission is holistic. Through Jesus Christ, He is working towards the redemption of the whole creation to its originally intended state. The research attempts to give attention to this concept as the Kingdom-oriented (Messio Dei) mission versus church-centered mission in light of holistic approach. To weigh the experience of the church (WZKHC) from the perspective of the Scripture, OT and NT analysis will be done in detail. Furthermore, the eschatological views pertinent to the final state of the creation and millennium will also be assessed in order to find out their contribution as a root of imbalance or polarization between evangelism and social concern. The aim of the study is to find out the factors that contribute to the imbalanced and non integrated approach to mission in the WZKHC in order to help the church regain the holistic perspective. This would be done mainly through qualitative research method, although quantitative approach is also employed rarely. / Thesis (M.A. (Missiology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

Based on the missional experiences of the Wolaita Zone Kale Heywet Church (WZKHC) in Southern Ethiopia, this dissertation argues the indispensable nature of the holistic approach to mission in order to fulfil the missional responsibility of the church effectively. Balance must be kept between the two aspects of mission (evangelism and social concern) and they need to be integrated as working towards a single goal of proclaiming the Kingdom of God. In other words, neither of the two aspects of mission may to be magnified at the expense of the other nor should they be dichotomized as two unrelated parts. Mission emerges from the nature of God. Ever since the creation of the universe God has been at work and the church takes part in what he is doing. God's mission is holistic. Through Jesus Christ, He is working towards the redemption of the whole creation to its originally intended state. The research attempts to give attention to this concept as the Kingdom-oriented (Messio Dei) mission versus church-centered mission in light of holistic approach. To weigh the experience of the church (WZKHC) from the perspective of the Scripture, OT and NT analysis will be done in detail. Furthermore, the eschatological views pertinent to the final state of the creation and millennium will also be assessed in order to find out their contribution as a root of imbalance or polarization between evangelism and social concern. The aim of the study is to find out the factors that contribute to the imbalanced and non integrated approach to mission in the WZKHC in order to help the church regain the holistic perspective. This would be done mainly through qualitative research method, although quantitative approach is also employed rarely. / Thesis (M.A. (Missiology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Trinity International University, 2008. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 114-118).

Thesis (Th. M.)--Grace Theological Seminary, 1992. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 101-120).

Thesis (Th. M.)--Grace Theological Seminary, 1992. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 101-120).