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This study sought to understand the perspectives of young Black males toward post-secondary education. A qualitative case study research design was selected because it allowed the researcher to examine in a holistic fashion the complexities of how the issues of school, home, community, and peers function in the life of a young Black male in St. Thomas, USVI; and how these issues in his life yield a perspective on and a decision about participating in higher education. A case study using taped interviews and observations of one high school Black male and his mother was conducted. Data were analyzed using Ethnograph and a coding matrix based on the tenets of grounded theory. The findings showed that the young man was ambivalent about the educational process and about his plans concerning his preparation for the future. In high school he saw three options: enlisting in the military, engaging in full-time employment, or pursuing a college education at the University of the Virgin Islands as long as he could achieve success. He viewed all three paths as equal. His family's influence had a profound impact on his decision to participate in advanced education despite his lack of commitment and his underachieving high school career. The educational issues in the territory signal the need for territorial policy makers to initiate educational improvements in the public schools and to mandate, at the university level, an information and recruitment program for young males to improve the demographics of post-secondary education in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Recommendations for further research are offered. / Ph. D.

Scope of the work - This research project involves two components. The first is a translation from Latin into English of St Thomas Aquinas’s Quaestio disputata de spiritualibus creaturis. This is an important, though largely neglected, work of St Thomas dating from 1267- 68, dealing with a range of issues relating to the two categories of created spirits recognised by Thomas, viz. angels and human souls. The perspective of the Angelic Doctor is principally, though not exclusively, that of philosophy rather than of theology. What is found in the disputed question is the development of a number of arguments, and the consequent taking up of a number of positions, that are the immediate source of what St Thomas has to say about angels and the human soul in the first part (prima pars) of his Summa Theologiae - a part which was completed by 1268. What he has to say about the Averroistic view that there is only one receptive intellect, and only one agent intellect, for all human beings (see Articles 9 and 10 of the disputed question) prepared the way for his crucially important polemical treatise of 1270, the De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas. The project provides a complete translation of the Quaestio disputata de spiritualibus creaturis which extends across eleven ‘articles’ addressing selected questions concerning angels and/or human souls, viz. matter/form composition, modes of union with (or separation from) matter, specific differences between angels, receptive intellect and agent intellect in human beings, and the distinction between the soul and its powers. Pages vi- vii of the Introduction to the project discuss the way in which the translation of the text of St Thomas has been approached. To cite one sentence: “An attempt has been made at all times to use a style of translation that is pleasantly readable, non-jarring, and non-pedantic” - but one that is subject to total fidelity to expressing the philosophical meaning of St Thomas. The second component of the project is eleven sets of notes (one hundred and seven pages in all), each set of which belongs to one or other of the eleven articles making up the text of St Thomas as translated. There is a degree of cross-referencing between some of the notes belonging to particular articles. The notes are of varying length and are concerned to facilitate an understanding of what the Angelic Doctor has to say in his Quaestio disputata de spiritualibus creaturis. Most of the notes fall into one or other of the following categories: biographical (providing information about a number of persons whose names appear in Thomas’s text), historical (giving information about institutions and events connected with the time, or life, of St Thomas), exegetical (explaining why a particular English translation of Thomas’s Latin has been used, or illustrating a point in the text by citations from other works of the Saint, or on occasion taking issue with some feature of the critical Latin text of Leo Keeler, S.J., on which the translation has been based), and ‘philosophical extension’ notes (seeking to amplify what St Thomas has been arguing in the disputed question on created spirits by considering related issues in other works of his, or by further exploration of a concept or notion used in the text but not dwelt on by Thomas). 2 Aim of the work - The aim of the project has been to make available an accurate, and attractive, English translation from thirteenth century Latin of an important work of Thomas Aquinas, and to support this activity with accompanying sets of notes. The achievement of appropriate scholarly standards has been a pervasive intention in all that has been undertaken.

The thesis aims to answer the following question: how did the relationships people had with Thomas Cantilupe, Bishop of Hereford between 1275 and 1282, shape the nature of his posthumous cult? The thesis rejects the idea that the veneration of saints in medieval England was politically neutral, or that their cults represented a stable, uncontentious means of resolving social discord. Instead, it posits that the invocation and memorialisation of Cantilupe was an intrinsically political act, and one that was available to ordinary people; these memories were formulated through their personal experiences of life in thirteenth century Hereford, and the people and institutions that populated it. These arguments are primarily based on evidence drawn from Cantilupe’s canonisation proceedings, particularly records and testimonies of his purported miracles. The first chapter discusses the historiography of saints’ cults in medieval Europe, and how their social function has typically been characterised, and outlines the principal sources for the thesis and how they will be used. The second chapter of this thesis takes the form of a brief biography of Cantilupe’s life and career, with a particular focus on how his actions might have affected the ways different people perceived him after his death. The third chapter enumerates the principal institutions and individuals that exercised power alongside Cantilupe in the diocese, and situates miracle recipients for whom we otherwise have little evidence within these contexts. Chapter four deals with the perspectives generated by Cantilupe’s interactions with the other lay and ecclesiastical authorities that constituted the structures of power in the diocese. Chapter five concerns the attitudes generated through direct experience of Cantilupe himself, or the way in which these attitudes were mediated by someone who did know him personally. Evidence that helps us to establish how ideas about Cantilupe were memorialised is discussed in chapter six.

Ce travail interroge la constitution d’une métaphysique de la personne humaine dans la pensée de Thomas d’Aquin. Si on s’accorde généralement à reconnaître que la réflexion thomasienne sur la personne a eu une influence décisive sur la compréhension moderne de l’homme comme personne, on constate également que l’expression personne humaine n’est pas familière de l’Aquinate et ne fait l’objet d’aucun développement particulier dans son œuvre. En effet, l’approche métaphysique de la personne humaine dans le corpus thomasien est logée dans les textes théologiques dans lesquels Thomas, suivant une démarche analogique, définit la personne divine en conservant l’affinité avec l'homme. Ce travail de conceptualisation, à la charnière de la théologie et de l’anthropologie, s’inscrit dans le sillage de la thématique chrétienne de l’homme image de Dieu. Dans le monde latin, les diverses composantes de cette riche tradition se rassemblent à la fin du VIe siècle autour de la figure de Boèce. Au détours des analogies sur les mystères de la Trinité et du Christ, Thomas est conduit à repenser la métaphysique de la substance et de la subsistence, héritage de la traduction de la notion grecque d'hypostase effectué par Boèce. Au bout du compte, ces analogies n’aboutissent pas seulement à une métaphysique de la personne subsistant dans la nature humaine, elles fondent ultimement une véritable métaphysique de la personne humaine en définissant une manière humaine de subsister. / This work examines the formation of a metaphysics of the human person in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. On one side it is generally agreed that the Thomistic thought on the person had a decisive influence on the modern understanding of man as a person, on the other side the term human person is not familiar of Aquinas and not subject to any particular development in his work. Indeed, the metaphysical approach of the human person in the Thomistic corpus is found in the theological texts in which Thomas defines the divine person maintening the affinity with man. This work of conceptualization deals with the Christian theme of man image of God using the analogy. In the Latin world, the various components of this rich tradition come together in the late sixth century around the figure of Boethius. From analogies on the mysteries of the Trinity and of Christ, Thomas is led to rethink the metaphysics of substance and subsistence inherited from the translation of the Greek notion of hypostasis made by Boethius. Ultimately, these analogies do not lead only to a metaphysics of the person subsisting in human nature, they found a true metaphysics of the human person by defining a human subsisting way.

This thesis aims to interpret the elements of beauty and art in the marriages portrayed in Geoffrey Chaucer¡¦s Canterbury Tales by means of St. Thomas Aquinas¡¦s theory of beauty and that of art. St. Thomas asserts that beauty consists of three elements: proportion, clarity and integrity, and that art imitates and denotes production. I take beauty and art as the crucial concepts and use analogy as the inquiring tool to examine the imaginary domain between beauty and art as applied to marriage, meanwhile investigating the implied language of intercommunication between aesthetics and marriage. Marriage is taken as a representation of beauty; its different forms and contents portrayed in Chaucer¡¦s various tales will be analyzed so as to see to what extent they reflect and diverge from medieval aesthetic sensitivity and how aesthetic theory can be adopted to interpret medieval marriage. In Chapter One, the theory of ¡§proportion¡¨ is applied to the various forms of marriage depicted in the Tales to explore how the marriage of the nobility and that of the commoners will correspond to this element of beauty, as portrayed in ¡§The Clerk¡¦s Tale,¡¨ ¡§The Man of Law¡¦s Tale,¡¨ ¡§The Second Nun¡¦s Tale,¡¨ ¡§The Franklin¡¦s Tale,¡¨ ¡§The Merchant¡¦s Tale,¡¨ ¡§The Miller¡¦s Tale,¡¨ ¡§The Wife of Bath¡¦s Prologue¡¨ and her tale. Chapter Two examines the roles the variants of ¡§clarity,¡¨ that is, physical and spiritual beauty, play in marriage, and a debate on the coexistence and non-coexistence of physical and spiritual beauty of a wife among the pilgrim-tellers will be demonstrated. Furthermore, in Chapter Three I shall extend the medieval concept of art to that of the ¡§procreative art¡¨ in marriage, and explore the relationship between the procreative art and the ¡§integrity¡¨ of marriage in the aforementioned tales. The conclusion discusses Chaucer¡¦s positions on the aesthetics of marriage of the nobility and that of the commoners portrayed in the tales.

In considering the increasing interest in the study of a global Middle Ages, there seem to be few individuals, either fictional or actual, that had a more powerful cosmopolitan currency than the figure of Prester John and the legends surrounding his kingdom. As a product of cultural imaginings and questionably recounted historical events, the search for and legitimization of Prester John has commanded consistent interest, both popular and scholarly, almost continuously since first mention of the figure of John in 1145. The now infamous Letter of Prester John, which details the magnificent Christian kingdom lying somewhere in the East, beyond the approaching threat of an ever-expanding Islam, has long catalyzed a hunt, by both adventurers and scholars, to seek the elusive patriarch. The very indeterminacy of the geographic location of Prester John allowed the European imagination to consequently imagine him everywhere precisely because he could neither be confirmed nor denied existence anywhere. This report will explore the ways that a reading of the Prester John legend reveals competing ambitions of enclosure and expansion within twelfth and thirteenth-century Latin Christendom, specifically around the time of the Fifth Crusade. This report will trace the ideational tensions within a presumed Christian Crusading West trying to legitimate itself against the dialectical buttress of what was increasingly professed as its heretical other, Islam. The Fifth Crusade, especially, seemed to hinge on the possibility of the harmonious convergence of Eastern and Western Christian powers, literalizing the sense of Christian enclosure around all of Islam. Prester John’s kingdom thus served two functions: first, to comprise the other half of the Christian enclosure, and secondly, to mark a phenomenological limit point of human experience that domesticated alterity under the banner of a sovereign priest-king. / text

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O assunto da dissertação é o fenômeno chamado Culto de Tomé. O primeiro capítulo informa inicialmente a origem do Culto de Tomé na Finlândia. A seguir, apresenta a chegada e a expansão do Culto de Tomé em comunidades da Igreja Evangélica de Confissão Luterana no Brasil e descreve as manifestações litúrgicas atuais do Culto de Tomé dentro do contexto de comunidades da Igreja Evangélica de Confissão Luterana no Brasil. O segundo capítulo versa sobre a relevância do Culto de Tomé para as pessoas que dele participam. Apresenta os principais tópicos, apontados pelas pessoas, da importância do Culto de Tomé. O terceiro capítulo interpreta o fenômeno Culto de Tomé e, por fim, extrai conseqüências para o fazer litúrgico atual. / The subject of the dissertation is the phenomenon called the Liturgy of St. Thomas. The first chapter gives information about the origin of the Liturgy of St. Thomas in Finland. Following this, the arrival and the expansion of the Liturgy of St. Thomas in congregations of the Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession in Brazil is presented and the present liturgical manifestations of the Liturgy of St. Thomas within the context of the congregations of the Evangelical Church of the Lutheran in Brazil are described. The second chapter examines the relevance of the Liturgy of St. Thomas for those who participate in it. The principal topics which the participants indicated as important are presented. The third chapter interprets the phenomenon, Liturgy of St. Thomas, and finally, extracts consequences that apply to doing liturgy today.