This dissertation examines the ethical systems created in response to the crisis of the Holocaust by Emmanuel Levinas, Elie Wiesel and Richard Rubenstein. Prior to the Holocaust, European Jewish philosophers grounded ethics in traditional metaphysics. Unlike their predecessors, Levinas, Wiesel and Rubenstein all make ethics "first philosophy" by grounding ethics in the temporal experience of suffering rather than ontology or theology, deliberately rejecting ethical views rooted in traditional metaphysical claims. With varying degrees of success, they all employ Jewish texts and traditions to do so. Their applications of Jewish sources are both orthodox and innovative, and show how philosophical approaches to ethics can benefit from religion. Suffering becomes not only the first priority of ethics, but an experience that simultaneously necessitates and activates ethical response. According to this view, human beings are not blank slates whose values are informed exclusively by culture and moral instruction alone; nor is human consciousness awakened or even primarily constituted by reason, as argued by deontologists. Rather, consciousness is characterized by affectivity and sensibility as interconnected faculties working in concert to create ethical response. This dissertation argues that if what makes ethical response possible is located in human consciousness rather than in metaphysics or culture, a re-orientation of philosophy toward the investigation of human affectivity and its role in ethical response is in order. All three thinkers examined actively resist categorization and repudiate claims that a single philosophical system can be successfully applied to all aspects of life, and this dissertation does not choose one of the three projects examined here as the most persuasive or significant. Instead, it explores how the work of Levinas, Wiesel and Rubenstein might be combined, built upon and expanded to form an ethics that is deeply informed by human experience and makes human and non-human suffering our greatest priorities.

Intrusive thoughts are aversive, private thoughts that are unwanted but intrude into consciousness, and are a ubiquitous phenomenon that approximately 93% of the population experiences (Radomsky et. al., 2014). Obsessional thoughts are a key etiological component of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Cognitive behavioral models of OCD conceptualize intrusive thoughts and obsessive thoughts as the same phenomenon occurring on a spectrum, with obsessional thoughts being a particular type of intrusion that is integral to the development and maintenance of OCD (Moulding, 2014). However, there is little evidence to demonstrate this relationship. This study examined intrusive thoughts across stratified groups based on intrusion frequency using ecological momentary assessment. This exploratory study examined potential idiographic differences in reported experiences of people ranging from low to high levels of intrusive thought frequency. Personalized contemporaneous networks were constructed from participant data and examined for differences in topography, measures of centrality, and magnitude of relationships between nodes. These networks are visually distinct, providing a glimpse into a wide variety of ways in which participants experience and relate to their intrusive thoughts.

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<p>During the civil rights era, the two African American political traditions Black conservatism and Black nationalism substantively overlapped. Surveying the literature on Black radicalism and the long civil rights movement, however, mention of this, let alone of a well-articulated strain of conservatism within the African American community during the period, is few and far between. Understanding why Black conservatism has been left out of these conversations comprises my research question. I argue that it is the significant differences between the two ideologies that largely explain this. Namely, Black conservatives’ practice of condemning Blackness, whether during the civil rights era or today, answers why they are left out of the scholarship on Black nationalism and civil rights. It draws a sharp line between Black conservatives, not only from Black nationalists, but mainstream African American identity, too.</p>

<p>The Churches of Christ trace their roots back to the Stone-Campbell movement that began in the early-nineteenth century. This Restoration movement was initially formed by several smaller religious groups that left mainstream denominations in the search of freedom in worship and Christian lifestyle. Over time, they pursued the dream of uniting Protestant denominations by restoring the first-century church. This new fellowship embraced a wide range of worship styles despite disagreements on several theological issues.</p> <p>From these irenic roots, the Churches of Christ underwent three major fractures over issues of worship and Christian lifestyle in the twentieth century. There were various social and theological issues that influenced each fracture. In each case, however, this tension was initiated by a desire to restore and preserve the first-century church, and was brought to fruition by the inability to resolve different practices through the use of the Restoration hermeneutic. This thesis shows that despite different social conditions, different issues, different combatants, different countries and different times in history, this church family continued to fracture due to the application of the Restoration hermeneutic.</p> / Master of Theological Studies (MTS)

The general argument of this thesis contends that the poetics of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, in particular a comparison between The Brothers Karamazov and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, remain profitable for political theological ethics. I conduct this analysis in critical comparison with the political theology of Henri de Lubac, with a focus on the question of desire and the sacramental mediation of the divine as it is embodied politically. Following de Lubac, especially in The Drama of Atheist Humanism, I argue that both Dostoesvky and Nietzsche were both deeply attuned to the fundamental human desire for the transcendent in modernity, a desire which engenders the creation of new images of the divine in order to unify society as a whole, mediating new forms of political identity. More specifically, I examine the problem of retributive desire in the poetics of The Brothers Karamazov and Thus Spoke Zarathustra as it connects with the historical development of Western Christianity and modernism. I demonstrate how their poetic formulations of retribution relates to suffering and the desire for the transcendent. In particular, I compare the characters of Dostoevsky’s novel, especially Ivan Karamazov and the Grand Inquisitor with the antagonists in the narrative of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the “dragon” of Christian valuation and the “cold monster” of the modernist state. Furthermore, I demonstrate that Dostoesvky, Nietzsche, and de Lubac espouse conceptions of sacramental mediation that reflect a desire for a higher social unity that circumvents imperialistic intention, stimulating new possibilities for posthumanist political community. I maintain that Zarathustra can be interpreted as the poetic embodiment of immanent Dionysian desire, mediating a conception of transcendence, expressed through the thought of eternal recurrence, which transvaluates retributively rooted Western Christianity and modernist morality. In Zarathustra, Nietzsche reimagines a politic of friendship, whereby adversarial oriented relationships spur healthier life-affirming forms of living, courageously confronting the sick, unhealthy values of Christianity and modernism. In The Brothers Karamazov, as reflected in the story of Alyosha Karamazov, Dostoevsky imagines the divine as a mystery that envelops the immanent, mediated through the Incarnation of Christ, freely embraced through the sacrifice of the self. Dionysian desire is transfigured through the power of Resurrection, generating a cruciform way of living, embodied in the active, commitment of neighbour-love and a forgiveness-oriented spirit. For de Lubac, what remains decisive is the recovery of the social meaning of the Eucharist, the sacramental self-offering of Christ mediated through the church. Like Dostoevsky, de Lubac argues for the necessity of an inner, transformative reception of the divine Word embodied socially, yet this possibility is mediated through the liturgical practice of Roman Catholicism. For the Russian Dostoevsky, the particular ecclesial form of community is less defined institutionally. His poetics accentuate the reality of an innate eucharistically oriented “social structure,” expressed as a prophetic hope for the possibility of a healthier, life-affirming politic in Western culture if incarnationally embraced by the peoples of the West. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)