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Isaiah 40-55 deals with various important themes related to Israel's salvation. However, in spite of the great number of works on these chapters, there are still many unsolved debates. This is because chs. 40-55 are written in excellent poetic language, which, although terse, is full of imagery, parallelism, personification, and rhetorical questions. These poetic and rhetorical devices were very effective for communicating to the original audience but often prevent readers in modem times from understanding the meaning of the text. In particular, when these devices are approached from purely historical-critical perspectives, continued misunderstanding and increased debate is often the result. Taking these concerns into consideration, this project has employed a linguistic approach which deals with mental frames and cognitive metaphors which are based on the cognitive world of the ancient people. In interacting with God, who is the main speaker, the three closely related metaphors, "Jacob-Israel," "Servant," and "Zion," play a very important role in the rhetorical development of chs. 40-55. This project has tried to integrate these metaphors within the frame "the relationship between God and his people." While this frame is fundamental in the Bible, there are also various sub-frames such as king/subject, parents/children, husband/wife, judge/litigant, master/servant, shepherd/sheep, and potter/pottery. Within chs. 40-55, by employing these various subframes with three main metaphors, "Jacob-Israel," "Servant," and "Zion," the prophet tries to communicate and persuade the addressees, the exiles, to accept God's message. While the three metaphors are the main figures in the text, each of them has different connotations. In addition, they are closely related to the addressees themselves (the exiles); thus, the prophet seeks to make them identify the three figures with themselves. By observing, criticizing, and comforting these three figures, the prophet responds to the potential complaints of the exiles and persuades them to return to God. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Thesis advisor: Jane E. Regan / Few would dispute the notion that consumerism is a prevailing feature of American culture. The extent to which consumer culture dominates the way most people see the world makes imagining alternatives to consumerism almost impossible. This stultification of imagination is highly problematic. As it stands, consumer culture, measured by the principles of Catholic Social Teaching, demonstrably tends to inhibit human flourishing on personal, social, and global levels. There is a need to transform consumer culture in order to support human flourishing more robustly, and this barrenness of imagination impedes that transformation. This dissertation assumes that it is a task of teachers in faith to educate toward cultural alternatives that better support human flourishing. This task requires engaging in and developing what Scripture scholar Walter Brueggemann calls "prophetic imagination." The prophetic imagination involves both deconstructing the taken-for-granted dominant culture and entering into a community whose practices, values, and ideals effect an alternative culture. While here focused on consumer culture, this model of educating for prophetic imagination has broader applicability; it can also be used, for example, to challenge cultures of racism, sexism, and militarism. This education in imagination develops in what scholars of management Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger call "communities of practice." Jesus and his disciples model for Christians a community of practice that imagines and acts prophetically. Communities of practice that educate for prophetic imagination ought to measure their own imagination against Jesus's prophetic imagination, shaped by his understanding of the Reign of God. This portrait of communities of prophetic practice is fleshed out in an exploration of empirical studies of communities that engage learners and draw them into an imagination that re-shapes not only how they see what the world is but also how they envision what the world can be. Communities of practice that educate for prophetic imagination can foster the transformation of consumer culture into a culture that better supports human flourishing. In order to do so, however, they must start with an anthropology that adequately understands what flourishing entails. These communities ought to be attentive to three aspects of the human person that tend to be given short shrift in consumer culture: the person's role as a creative producer, the person's inherent relationality, and the person's need embrace finitude, the limitations of human capability. The Church should be utilizing communities of practice to overcome the sterility of imagination and contribute to a culture of what might be called humanizing plenitude. This culture supports the fullness of human thriving by re-imagining what that thriving entails and engaging in practices to facilitate it. The Church as teacher can be involved in this education for the purpose of cultural transformation to enhance human flourishing in various arenas. Finally, this dissertation particularly proposes that this education can happen in higher education, in parishes, and in collaboration with the wider community. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry.

This thesis is an analysis of female prophecy as it is constituted, represented or performed in seventeenth-century texts. I consider both the way in which prophecy is socially constructed and the role of prophetic experience in the development of feminine subjectivity. I argue that interpreting prophecy within the context of psychopathology or feminism (to take two examples of critical practice) colludes in the early modern objectification of women's speech and somatic experience. Using an interdisciplinary approach, I argue that prophecy needs to be understood as a media event and as a site of discursive proliferation. In this study, I examine texts which participate in the explication of a prophetic event and interrogate their intentions and functions. I suggest that an inclusive reading of prophecy allows the critic to recuperate women's agency. My study of prophecy combines the seventeenth-century notion of prophecy as a category for diverse linguistic and bodily manifestations with an analysis of the rhetorical strategies of the prophetic text. In the course of this thesis I consider: 1. the work of various scholars who have attempted to explicate the relations between gender and radical religiosity; 2. how a comparison between hysteria and prophecy illuminates the primacy of psychopathology in the interpretation of seventeenth- and nineteenth-century women's experience; 3. the interplay between scriptural models of prophecy and early modern biblical exegesis; 4. the role of texts in (in)validating female bodily experience and 5. how seventeenth century antisectarian texts attempt to police the female creative imagination.

This thesis is an examination of Muslim traditions concerning Muhammad's call to prophethood. Although Muhammad's initial prophetic call is one of the most crucial events in the history of Islamic religious tradition, Muslim records of the event are too inconsistent to be reconciled. At the expense of sound source criticism, some influential modern Islamicists, like Tor Andrae and W. M. Watt, have tried to reconstruct Muhammad's call from inconsistent hadiths. Drawing on the works of four Muslim traditionists, i.e. Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Sa'd, al-Bukhari and al-Tabari this thesis points out that, other than the fact that Muhammad must have gone through a fundamental religious experience, Muslim traditions do not permit a reconstruction of the historical event of Muhammad's call; they do provide, however, evidence of the complex ways in which Muslims understood the event, suited to their religio-theological interpretation of the Qur'anic allusions to the modes of Muhammad's religious experiences.

This thesis addresses the question of how to interpret instances in Hebrew prophetic literature in which one speaker quotes another speaker. Speech quotations of this kind occur almost 300 times across the prophetic corpus and exhibit a wide range of quoting and quoted participants with modal and temporal variations. In order to examine this phenomenon and to formulate a method for its interpretation, the thesis conducts an exegetical case study of Jeremiah 2.1-­‐3.5 which is distinguished by its high number and density of quotations (twelve instances in forty-­‐two verses). With a few notable exceptions, the phenomenon of prophetic speech quotation has not received any attention in its own right but was subsumed under other research concerns, such as prophetic conUlict or the form-­‐critical genre of disputation speech. Across these and other studies, the interpretation of quoted speech is marked by two principal procedures: a) on the basis of their assumed authenticity, quotations are frequently employed as a way to gain direct access to expressions of Israelite religion; b) in most studies, the approach to quoted speech is deUined by extracting the quoted words from their literary environment and by assigning them to a Uixed number of categories. Prompted by the exegetical studies by Wolff (1937) and Overholt (1979), the thesis utilizes Sternberg’s publications on quotation theory in order to confront these two central domains of authenticity and categorization. Quoted speech is deUined as a dualistic structure in which the inset (quoted utterance) is subsumed under the frame (quoting context) in order to serve its perspective and rhetorical goals. The dynamics of the frame-­‐inset relationship renders appeals to authenticity and direct access misguided: every quotation is subject to the forces of contextual mediation, inUluence, and shaping. The inseparable bond between frame and inset also challenges the approach of extraction and categorization. As a corrective to previous approaches, the thesis thus constructs the argument that prophetic speech quotations must always be interpreted within their literary context. To demonstrate the accuracy and implications of this methodological discussion and argument, the remainder of the thesis analyzes the twelve quotations in Jeremiah 2.1-­‐3.5. Special attention is devoted to the contextual integration of the quoted words and to the ways in which they are utilized to serve their frames. In close interaction with previous studies on this passage, this exegesis demonstrates the beneUits of a reading that takes into account the contextually conditioned nature of prophetic speech quotations. At the end of the thesis, the results of this analysis are summarized and related to other quotations in the Book of Jeremiah and other prophetic texts. The contribution of the thesis relates to the exegesis and understanding of the speech quotations and text of Jeremiah 2.1.

This thesis investigates the sermons delivered at Paul's Cross, the outdoor pulpit at St. Paul's Cathedral, during the reign of James I. It examines the preachers' use of rhetoric to influence the religious and political attitudes of contemporaries by comparing theories of preaching, found in sacred rhetorics and other tracts, to preachers' practice in their sermons. By this method, arguments associated particularly with Paul's Cross and its London audience can be identified and the rhetorical, doctrinal and socio-political aspects of Jacobean preaching, which are fragmented in much of the current scholarship, can be integrated. The thesis consists of five 'case studies' in the functions of rhetoric in sermons on different subjects. A short introduction reviews current scholarship on seventeenth-century preaching and describes the methodology used. Chapter I examines political preaching, focusing on John Donne's 1622 sermon defending James I's Directions concerning Preachers (STC 7053). It demonstrates the importance of the division between the 'exposition' of the scriptural text from its 'application' to the hearers in political preaching. The second chapter looks at preaching on religious controversies. It compares the rhetorical techniques of polemical sermons with those of recantation sermons preached by converts. Examining this topic in relation to William Crashaw's Sermon preached at the Crosse of 1608 (STC 6027) and Theophilus Higgon's recantation sermon of 1611 (STC 13455.7), this chapter shows the centrality of arguments based on the opponent's character (ethos) to controversial preaching. Chapter III studies exhortation with reference to Joseph Hall's Pharisaisme and Christianity (1608; STC 12699). It demonstrates that persuasion was considered a function of argumentation, not rhetorical ornament. It also examines the disabling of rhetoric in exhortations to charity by the Church's strict sola fide doctrine. The arguments for plain or ornamented preaching styles and their relation to the role of the preacher in the Church are discussed in Chapter IV, on Daniel Featley's 1618 sermon The Spouse her Pretious Borders (STC 10730). This chapter investigates preaching decorum and the debates over the display of rhetoric and learning in the pulpit. The 'prophetic sermon' or 'Jeremiad' is examined in Chapter V, on Thomas Adams' The Gallant's Burden (1612; STC 117). The characteristic use of biblical types and examples in these sermons is re-examined and the current argument that the use of Old Testtament examples suggests a 'special relationship' between God and England is denied.

The study investigates the effect of mushrooming, unaccountability unsupervised leadership tendency, which has affected the African religiosity and took it by storm. Hence, the study of this nature will gaze its attention in South African townships in particular. Thus, by referring “independent church” a researcher does not specifically mean traditional churches who gain independence from western churches, which were planted in the African soil, but rather means the regular breaking away of churches by leaders, in order to start their own, if they do not see eye to eye with the current church leader. These are modern churches, which are young and most of them are yet in ownership of land and infrastructure. On the other hand, a researcher designates independent prophetic or new charismatic churches because these churches are the extension of the charismatic movement or neo-Pentecostals. In Addition, it is also due to practices by these churches, which are bizarre and unusual, which includes, eating of grass, eating of snakes, drinking of petrol, spraying of Doom on the congregants and other experiences Kgatle (2017) denotes in his study, to demonstrate the power of God (2017). As practices such as these are a new phenomenon in the history of South African church. Hence, they are called Prophetic based on showing more interest in prophesy, healing, deliverance, and the gospel of prosperity. These pastors have autonomy and freedom to practice without any accountability. Thus, there are lot of questions asked about independent prophetic churches growth. Is it genuine growth? Can it be attributed to mission advancement? Many have attributed such growth, as a result of people who have pulled from classical Pentecostal, mainline churches as well and most probable other traditional movements. This growth could not therefore be attributed to missionary expansion, if it does, there is a notion that some followers who are attracted to these churches are purely drown to them seeking prophetic voice, either or miraculous intervention such as healing and deliverance. Hence, leaders who do not have a responsible structural place for accountability challenge a researcher. Thus, the situation has led to the damage of theology and image of the church. Henceforth, self-appointed, theologically untrained and lack of mandate from mother bodies by such leaders poses societal challenges and outcry. Thus, the bizarre acts committed by these independent prophetic churches have left many speechless and asking questions. What South African church has become? To what extent is the independency of the independent church? Which religious body do the leaders account to? Who carries the accountability of the pastor? Is the claim of reporting straight to God justifiable? Have these tendencies of being not accountable led to chaotic state, which, currently have plucked the church? Hence, the study is therefore investigating the effect of mushrooming of the independent prophetic churches and its unsupervised leadership, which has dented the image and landscape of the church fraternity; thus, the above questions have helped to guide the research. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Practical Theology / PhD / Unrestricted

This dissertation explores the prophetic tradition in lyric poetry, focusing on the example set by Walt Whitman and carried forth in Hispanic letters, most notably in the cases of León Felipe, Federico García Lorca, and César Vallejo. By “prophetic” I do not wish to suggest “predictive” but rather a voice that, like the words of the biblical prophets, speaks to an entire community, by turns profoundly critical, but also appealing to human dignity. In the preface to the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman explains the public value of poetry: “[F]olks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects…. they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls.” (621) The roots of Whitman’s lyric song would grow deep in these three contemporary Hispanic poets, during times of grave social and political crisis. By tracing the influence of Whitman’s prophetic voice in their works, I show how his aesthetic of sacrifice reaches dramatic conclusions in the New York of Lorca’s poetry, as well as in the Spanish Civil War represented in Felipe’s Ganarás la luz and Vallejo’s España, aparta de mí este cáliz. Their prophetic lyric voice rises from Whitman’s song, founded upon a communal humanity and an “I” freed from the limits of the individual self. This voice, which we see in the poetry of Whitman, Felipe, Lorca, and Vallejo, is a lament culminating in the very personal sacrifice of the first-person poetic subject. I show how these four authors respond to the crises in their own times and lives with contemporary public voices that redeem our own human dignity in a world that might seem otherwise abandoned to its own undoing.

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