The genre of apocalypse has an irresistible draw. The concepts of beginning and end to humankind as well as the cosmos situate themselves in our daily stories, microcosmic narratives that repeat through time, placing the footprint of humankind a little more firmly into the earth, a place we have called our home from beginning and, naturally, to the end. In a world that constantly pushes forward to the next piece of technological equipment, reducing mass pandemics to mere over the counter solutions, and extending its hand into the abyss of the unknown universe, humanity craves the elusive next chapter in the novel of the world. But what is to be attained when we reach the climax? When we are situated in the denouement? And finally, what happens when all is at an end? There is a universal truth of birth, and a universal truth of death (despite our advances to elude it). By that logic there must exist a macrocosmic version, a global scale birth, termed creation by many, and thus a large scale death. But since death of the individual remains a complete mystery, many diverse factions exist. This extends to the global picture then, not only seeking inquiry into what happens after we (as in the individual) but when the entire world ceases to exist. This thesis is an attempt to explore the genre of apocalypse for a deeper understanding of these questions and notions. With various systems in place, such as those put forth by John J. Collins and other apocalypse scholars, there exists a possibility to examine various iterations of apocalypses. By examining paradigm traits and tiers and the complications that arise with systemization, this thesis develops a methodology in which to include the functional take on various case studies of apocalypse. Generally reserved for examinations of sacred text, the expanded methodology presented here will seek to not only look at an example of said text, but also a secular text, two examples of ‘sacred function’, and one ideological example of a secular function. This study is not about changing the makeup of the paradigm, nor is it an effort to disprove criteria, nor tack on additional items. The goal is to use the paradigm to identify a more well-rounded view of the genre, and then see what can be gleaned from those categories and their prototypes. In doing so, the definition of the apocalypse genre will be more comprehensive, and thus beneficial for any avenue of study to which it is applied.

The pastoral problem being addressed has to do with the culture of consumerism and individualism that have influenced the culture of the Church. Within Western society, the “ism” culture, consisting of factors such as: hedonism, consumerism, materialism, secularism, relativism and individualism, has become very prominent. Christians often operate no differently than non-Christians, and this is problematic since Christians are called to be salt for the earth and light for the world (Matthew 5:13-16), a people set apart. In John 15:19, we are told that we were not made to be of this world, so we need to stop being influenced by the culture and instead allow the beauty of the Christian faith to influence the world. What is presented here is not just a hope to overcome consumerism and individualism, but an entire revamping of what it means to be Christian. It suggests the need for a culture change, which if Christians and church leadership focus on, has the power to solve other pastoral and ethical issues as well. Such a cultural change will lead to vibrancy among believers and will attract more people to the faith, as well.

This thesis examines the twenty-two passages in the Gospels in which God’s forgiveness of human sin is explicitly addressed. Using modern textual, literary, form, redaction, and historical criticisms as exegetical tools, the examination maps out the development of these biblical vignettes so as to extract from the process an understanding of what the Gospel writers wanted to convey to Jesus’ followers about God’s forgiveness. Four distinct forgiveness modes were discovered: repentance leads to forgiveness (e.g. proclaim repentance and forgiveness to all nations in Lk 24:47), faith acts as a conduit to forgiveness (e.g. sinful woman kissing Jesus’ feet in Lk 7:48b-50), one must forgive in order to be forgiven (e.g. the Lord’s Prayer in Lk 11:4 and Mt 6:12), and forgiveness is a free gift based solely on God’s mercy (e.g. on the cross, “Father, forgive them” in Lk 23:34). None of these views represents a majority Gospel vision of forgiveness, with each of the four viewpoints having four to seven episodes occurring in the Gospel cannon. Seldom are any of these pathways to forgiveness mentioned together. Despite a plethora of information about forgiveness, nowhere do the Gospels present a wholistic explanation of divine forgiveness. The Gospel writers, like their Hebraic ancestors, were comfortable with a multivariant view of God’s forgiveness and showed no propensity to develop a wholistic theology of forgiveness. However, underlying this untidy approach was an emphasis on God’s mercy and compassion that had roots in the Old Testament understanding of Yahweh as gracious and merciful and abounding in steadfast love. In addition, the seedling concepts of sin as an unpayable debt or of the importance of faith in Jesus appeared in the background of multiple Scripture passages from each of the four forgiveness themes.

The COVID-19 is still causing many deaths globally. Thus authorities have implemented strict public measures designed to reduce and limit the interactions between people. Such measures have impacted the pastoral ministry in many ways. There has never been such a great crisis for the pastoral ministry, especially the pastoral cares to the grievers. The grief in the bereaved has challenged the pastoral care in parish in numerous ways with regard to how to deal with them. In this circumstance, the pastoral care to the grievers comes to the surface with a totally different paradigm. Pastoral care to the grievers is best when rendered by and within a particular religious tradition such as religious rituals, faith ideology and cultural patterns. Therefore the local parish and staff have to try all means possible to connect with the grievers, while exercising discretion and creativity to minimize physical contact during the pandemic times. Now is the high time for the pastoral care service to the grievers to stand up for it. Now is the opportunity for the pastoral ministry to the grievers to provide a compassionate leadership.

Loving God is our highest perfection for Leibniz. It secures our belief and trust in the Creator, which is integral to the sciences as well as faith. Those who love God have justification for reasoning, that is, they can rationally expect to arrive at truth. This is because love is a receptivity to the perfection all of things; loving God, then, is a disposition and tendency toward the most perfect being, the ens perfectissimum. Individuals who perceive the divine nature “do not merely fear the power of the supreme and all-seeing monarch,” Leibniz writes, “but are assured of his beneficence, and lastly—and what brings everything together—burn with a love of God above all else.”1 In my dissertation, I argue that Leibniz’s qualification should be taken seriously: love of God “brings everything together.” The subject of my dissertation can be stated schematically. It consists of two pairs of claims, one pair philosophical, the other theological: A moral quality is required to secure our reason. From a most perfect unity, a moral quality follows. Love of God is our highest perfection. Love of God secures our reasoning. Both concern the security of reason, by which I mean the rational motivation for reasoning itself. They are reasons we ought to expect reasoning to lead to truth. Yet they do not form a tight demonstration: while an inference is clearly at work in the first pair, there are no inferences in the second. Also, there is a distinction between a moral quality and love for God. Unless they are identified, Leibniz’s philosophy and theology secure reasoning apart from one another. In 1686, Leibniz wrote his well-known “Discourse on Metaphysics.” A few months after, he composed a theological treatise, Examination of the Christian Religion. These texts, I argue, should be read side by side, and the first chapter compares how divine perfection secures our reasoning in both texts. Some Moderns’ notion of perfection—namely, Descartes’, Spinoza’s, and Malebranche’s—fail to secure our reasoning because their views entail arbitrariness in the world and the divine nature. But a proper sense of perfection, one that includes a moral quality, secures our reasoning by ensuring that everything is amenable to reason. Descartes also sought to secure our reasoning, and for the second and third chapters I compare his account with Leibniz’s own, then draw out the latter’s criticisms. For Descartes, the deity’s moral quality is characterized by an indifferent will, which is eminently and formally revealed throughout creation. Although recognizing the infinite source of all things directs our attention appropriate in the Cartesian system, Leibniz criticizes Descartes’ detached and indifferent God. When our disposition toward God is not characterized by love, we are less rational than otherwise. Leibniz finds intolerable moral implications in the Cartesian system, and I work out these implications in chapter three. Descartes’ criteria of true and false ideas does not settle dispute, but relies on “interior testimony.” Proper reasoning, then, does not tend toward unity among persons, and this is especially problematic in religious debate. Descartes’ method is Stoic, which also leads to trouble when it comes to church unity: one remains in the church by a sheer act of will, which can violate reason. Leibniz views such a detachment of faith and reasoning as dangerous, besides impoverishing the concept of reason altogether. Leibniz’s notions of God and perfection secure our reason by engendering love for God. “Discourse” and Examen begin with a moral disposition and tendency. In the last chapter, I argue that this is the case by considering two criteria Leibniz adopts—his test for perfection and the kinds of knowledge—as well as the foundation of his logic at the time. Leibniz can tolerate provisional beginnings, hypothetical truths, and original sin because of his robust conception of love. He distinguishes two ways we love God: spes, or hope, is a disposition or tendency to natural perfection, and caritas, or esteem, affection, or love, regards divine perfection. These states orient us according to the divine plan. Miracles are within the world as an effect of the deity’s moral quality: they are a means God personally relates to rational beings. Miracles reveal the moral effects of our perception of phenomena generally, included the regularity observed and classified by science. So, to conclude, I compare Leibniz’s discussion of revelation in Examen with his discussion of miracles in “Discourse” to draw out the significance of miracles for him. Besides much debate on the implications of miracles for his conception of substance, I argue that there is a moral motivation for retaining miracles, even those of the second rank.

While exploring the history of liberation theology themes appearing in Black musician’s work (in Dr. Daniel Smith-Christopher’s class Bible and the Blues), it came to my attention that there are many more contemporary artists whose work also touches on these themes, such as Lauryn Hill. My thesis argues with the help of Black and Womanist scholars that the naming of one’s reality through musical lamentations is a healing act. Further, musical lamentation is an act to carry forth communities and provide them with healing because the act of acknowledging and lamenting the suffering of a marginalized community is liberating in and of itself. This act of lamenting serves, then, as an act of truth-telling, that refuses to deny the pain that is caused by systems of oppression such as racism and sexism. Lauryn Hill’s album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill then expresses a theology of lament in which the lamentation itself serves a healing purpose for those listening.

Despite Hannah Arendt's prediction in the wake of World War II that "the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of post-war intellectual life," the majority of postwar philosophers have preferred to stay away from the idea of evil. But at the same time that philosophical reflection on the notion of evil has dissipated, there is no denying the fact that referring to "evil" has remained very common among the public at large, among political leaders, and in popular culture. To better understand what meaning the concept of evil might have for us today, in this paper I will address two main questions. First, recognizing the problems recent philosophers have raised against the idea of "evil," we should ask if we should simply take our leave of the concept of evil, admitting that it has been exhausted by overuse, shifting intellectual paradigms, and a triumphant secular age. In other words, does it make any sense for us today to go beyond calling something wrong or unjust or harmful or unspeakable and to speak in terms of "evil?" Is talk about evil simply a relic of a way of speaking and thinking about the world that we have long left behind? Is "evil" in fact one of those terms that have always drawn people into error and sometimes even into committing horrific acts? Second, if we believe we can begin to address this first set of questions about the notion of evil, it remains to be seen what exactly we might mean by evil. What are we pointing to when we call something "evil?" What makes something evil rather than merely wrong or unjust? What kinds of things do we reserve the judgment of evil for? This set of questions leads us to come up with a substantive account of evil, an account of what evil is and what distinguishes evil from other wrongdoing. To address these questions, our argument will proceed as follows. We will begin with an overview of the recent return to discussing evil after a turn away from evil by the majority working in philosophy. After giving a brief historical overview of these shifts we will then begin to argue for the need for philosophers to think about evil and the concept of evil. In short, as I will argue, because we continue to turn to the notion of evil in response to extreme forms of wrongdoing, philosophical reflection is warranted in trying to clarify what we might reasonably mean when we call an agent or action evil. Moving to a discussion of the idea of radical evil, we will begin with a close reading and interpretation of Kant's account of radical evil, pausing to discuss what he gets right and where he may err. We will then move to recent discussions of evil in contemporary philosophy, much of which can be understood as revolving around Kant's account of radical evil. In these contemporary accounts, evil is no longer used in an inclusive, wide sense, but almost exclusively to refer to the kinds of extreme, unforgivable wrongdoing we might classify under the notion of radical evil. In these recent accounts, there is an attempt to distinguish degrees of evil, between the "normal" or "ordinary" evils of serious wrongdoing that we nevertheless can understand, punish, and cope with, versus the "radical" or extreme evils that we cannot really understand, punish, or fit into our intellectual and moral frameworks. After discussing these recent accounts and appreciating the progress they make, we will nevertheless ask whether they can really help us grasp the kinds of horrendous evil they were developed in response to. In particular, we will argue that these recent accounts still fail to appreciate the notion of radical evil to its full extent, preferring to focus on the harm caused and on notions like the banality of evil and ordinary evildoers, projects which may end up distorting the nature of evil. Looking to some recent reflections on radical evil, we will argue that the Kantian notion of a perversion of the will and an evil heart help us to understand that radical evil is something that is usually anything but banal, but is a fundamental breach of our normal standards of wrongness and that this quality of excess and the inversion of the moral is what lies at the core of the acts and agents we deem evil. We will conclude by looking at the necessary limits of any abstract discussion of evil in general and how particular evils such as those experienced at Auschwitz cannot even begin to be explained by such accounts, arguing that our discomfort and horror in the face of evil nevertheless remains but that such attempts at reflection and understanding evil remain necessary and urgent.

This project traces shifts in understandings of causation from the premodern to the early modern period, focusing on one premodern interpretation of causation as representative of the Neoplatonic period, that of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and comparing this perspective to several early modern thinkers, especially, Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Francis Bacon. For Dionysius, formal and final causation have metaphysical superiority over efficient and material causation. By contrast, beginning in the early modern period, efficient causation, the sense that describes how an object acquires a particular shape, begins to be seen as metaphysically supreme. The main historical and philosophical reasons for this shift in perceived supremacy are the affirmation of the primary-secondary quality distinction, and the rejection of Forms and teleology. The primary-secondary quality distinction allows for reality to be completely quantified, and thereby renders superfluous qualitative approaches to reality, such as formal causation. Similarly, the rejection of Forms and teleology leaves formal causation meaningless. After this historical overview, the philosophical hypothesis that Dionysius's premodern understanding of causation is more amenable to those who want to avoid nihilism is defended: purely scientific notions of causation have no means for providing whatness, intelligibility, or determinacy to the world in a rationally defensible manner, and thus, when pressed, a purely scientific view of the world is without whatness, intelligibility, and determinacy, which, by definition, leads to nihilism. By contrast, a world with causes other than solely scientific causes, specifically, a world with formal (and final) causation such as Dionysius's, allows for whatness, intelligibility, and determinacy, and thereby escapes nihilism because whatness requires Form, intelligibility requires Form and teleology, and determinacy requires teleology (which, in turn, is a supplement to Form). As argued, science studies the world of becoming, and therefore cannot provide the grounds for the world of being (which belongs to metaphysics); to live in a world of pure becoming without being is to have a nihilistic worldview. The epilogue draws a significant implication from this conclusion: the premodern approach invites a necessary revival of natural philosophy because the world of becoming is wider than modern science acknowledges.

This qualitative research compared the practice of an expert preacher to core concepts in homiletic theory (the art and craft of preaching), searching for discrepancies between what theory suggested and what the preacher practiced. It also sought to validate that the preacher practiced what homiletic theorists prescribed and to inform homiletic theory by describing strategies he employed unlike those espoused in homiletic theory. To discover whether the participant's practice was congruent with theory, I first identified seminal theories. They were classified into the following modified version of Broadus's categories of ideal preaching: (a) content, (b) arrangement, (c) introduction,transition, and conclusion, (d) style, (e) illustrations, and (f) the delivery. I created a rubric from the literature review as a standard from which I compared the participant's audio and video sermons. The rubric had six categories, 39 subcategories, and 58 characteristics of ideal preaching to which the preacher was compared. The analysis included frequency counts of certain words, phrases, illustrations, and the results of the Flesch's Reading Ease score. To find strategies employed by the participant but not represented in the literature, I also used an inductive method to analyze the integral parts and patterns of the sermons. The analysis revealed that the preacher's practice was congruent with theory yet the preacher had never read homiletic theory. Because the preacher was able to sidestep the need to study homiletics, it was concluded that for him preaching was an intuitive art/craft. The research also revealed that the preacher had a personal homiletic philosophy wherein everything in his preparation, message design, and delivery centered on relevancy. The preacher felt strongly that the message had to apply to his listeners in meaningful ways. The preacher's strength centered not so much on how he presented, but what he presented. His sermons were filled with what homiletic theorist Sunukjian called "timeless truths." They made the preacher's sermons insightful, hopeful, and most of all, relevant to his listeners.

A great religious Awakening was taking place in 1805 until the end of the Civil War. Religious debates became the order of the day, and were at least equal in importance to the political debates. Alexander Campbell was one of the leading debators of the period. He was born September 12, 1787, in Ireland, but moved to America in 1809, settling in western Virginia. In 1812, Alexander and his father, Thomas Campbell, launched what they called "The Restoration Movement", in which they were seeking for the unity of all Christians on the basis of the Bible.