Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Delaware, 2006. / Principal faculty advisor: Joel Best, Dept. of Sociology. Includes bibliographical references.

Project (D. Min.)--Iliff School of Theology, 2006. / Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 121-123; 126-146).

This thesis looks at the missiological implications of church planting in global cities. Chapter 1 introduces the main argument for this thesis: that all evangelism strategies should hold church planting as the end goal and that the most strategic places to implement these strategies are our global cities as evidenced by what has happened in New York City. The chapter will begin with a look at the significant movement that has happened in Manhattan over a twenty year period (1990- 2010) with the evangelical population of the city growing from less than one percent evangelical to now more than three percent. An introduction to the definition of global cities will segue into a look at the imperative for church planting initiatives in these cities. Chapter 2 will offer a deeper study of the characteristics of a global city and the missiological significance of such cities. It will explore world urbanization in light of the fact that over 50 percent of the world now lives in cities. The strategic nature of the cities will be analyzed given the influence that global cities have on the culture of the rest of the world. Finally, New York City will be shown as a global city and its significance on the missiological landscape will be highlighted. Chapter 3 provides a history of some of the major New York City church planting initiatives. Specifically, it will review the church planting history of Concerts of Prayer and the Church Multiplication Alliance, Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church and Jim Cymbala and The Brooklyn Tabernacle. Lastly this chapter will reveal methodologies used by other prominent ministries to reach the city context. Chapter 4 will look at implications learned from New York City on how a global city church planting strategy could impact the Southern Baptist Convention. A look at the history of SBC church planting in New York City will be looked at with special attention being paid to the effectiveness of these strategies. Chapter 5 will conclude this thesis with a look at the lessons learned during this research process. It will also look at three areas of further study that are needed. This work contends that the priority of all missions strategies should be a focused approach on global city church planting. This will prove to be an effective use of people and financial resources that ultimately has an impact on the whole world.

This work aims to analyze the responses of Syria to two international changes comparatively. After the end of the Cold War, US initiated a foreign policy doctrine based on American hegemony. This policy was firstly manifested in the war on Iraq as a response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on January 17, 1991. It was noteworthy to see Syria aligning with the US during the Gulf War (1990-1991), as the country had been allied against the US during the Cold War period. Syria was also the first state accepting US proposal for a peace conference known as Madrid Peace Conference. All these developments reveal that Syria had been cooperated with the US in the aftermath of the Cold War. The second international change analyzed within the framework of this study is the September 11 events. Following the September 11 attacks, the US declared a &ldquo / war on terror&rdquo / to recover its superpower position and intervened in Afghanistan and then Iraq. In that process, Syria opted for countering the US and became the leading critique of the invasion of Iraq. This study examines the different responses of Syria to the end of the Cold War and the post-September 11 period through using neoclassical realism as a model.

I was interested in researching the underlying factors that drove resiliency in regional U.S. hotel markets. I did this by conducting an empirical analysis of twenty nine different markets post September 11 and investigating general, leisure and business variables. I concluded that leisure variables were the underlying drivers of resiliency in regional U.S. hotel markets. I then conducted an event study to try to apply my findings to stock market prices of publicly traded hotel companies. Although it was a challenge to differentiate between companies that depended more on leisure versus business customers due to their asset diversification, I categorized each company into one of the two subsets. If my findings held, I would assume that that the cumulative abnormal returns for the companies that relied on business customers would be more negative than the companies who relied on leisure customers. However, this was not the case, so the findings that leisure variables drive market resiliency were not a good predictor of stock market reaction.

My dissertation focuses on a set of Anglo-American novels that deal with the events of 9/11. Identifying thematic and stylistic differences in the fiction on this topic, I distinguish between novels that represent directly the jolts of trauma in the wake of the attacks, and novels that, while still holding the events as an underlying operative force in the narrative, do not openly represent them but envision their long-term aftermath. The first group of novels comprises Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall (2005), Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). The second one includes Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs (2009), John Updike’s Terrorist (2006) and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008). Drawing on concepts from trauma theory, particularly by Cathy Caruth and Dominick LaCapra, and combining them with the ethical philosophies of Levinas and Heidegger, I argue that the constructions of 9/11 in Anglo-American fiction are essentially twofold: authors who narrate 9/11 as a tragic human loss in the city of New York turn it into an occasion for an ethical dialogue with the reader and potentially with the “Other,” whereas authors who address 9/11 as a recent sociopolitical event transform it into a goad toward a bitter cultural indictment of the US middle-class, whose ingrained inertia, patriotism and self-righteousness have been either magnified or twisted by the attacks. Considering processes of meaning-making, annihilation, ideological reduction and apathy that arose from 9/11 and its versions, I have identified what could be called, adapting Peter Elbow’s expression from pedagogical studies, the “forked” rhetoric of media and politics, a rhetorical mode in which both discourses are essentially closed, non-hermeneutic, and rooted in the same rationale: exploiting 9/11 for consensus. On the contrary, in what I call the New-Yorkization of 9/11, I highlighted how the situatedness of the public discourses that New Yorkers constructed to tell their own tragedy rescues the Ur-Phaenomenon of 9/11 from the epistemological commodification that intellectual, mediatic and political interpretations forced on it. Furthermore, pointing to the speciousness of arguments that deem 9/11 literature sentimental and unimaginative, I claim that the traumatic literature on the attacks constitutes an example of ethical practice, since it originates from witnesses of the catastrophe, it represents communal solidarity, and it places a crucial demand on the reader as an empathic listener and ethical agent. Ethical counternarratives oppose the ideological simplification of the 9/11 attacks and develop instead a complex counter-rhetoric of emotions and inclusiveness that we could read as a particular instantiation of an ethics of the self and “Other.” As much as the 9/11 “ethical” novels suggest that “survivability” in times of trauma depends on “relationality” (J. Butler), the “cultural” ones unveil the insensitivity and superficiality of the actual US society far away from the site of trauma. The binary framework I use implies that, outside of New York City, 9/11 is narrated neither traumatically (in terms of literary form), nor as trauma (in terms of textual fact). Consequently, on the basis of a spatial criterion and in parallel to the ethical novels, I have identified a category of “cultural” fiction that tackles the events of 9/11 at a distance, spatially and conceptually. In essence, 9/11 brings neither shock, nor promise of regeneration to these peripheral settings, except for Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, a story in which we are returned to a post-9/11 New York where different ethnic subjects can re-negotiate creatively their identities. The cultural novels are ultimately pervaded by a mode of tragic irony that is unthinkable for the ethical novels and that is used in these texts to convey the inanity and hubris of a politically uneducated and naïve America – one that has difficulties to point Afghanistan on a map, or to transcend dualistic schemes of value that embody precisely Bush’s Manichaeism. The potential for cultural pluralism, solidarity and historical memory set up by the New York stories does not ramify into the America that is far away from the neuralgic epicenter of historical trauma. This proves that the traumatizing effects and the related ethical calls engendered by 9/11 remain confined to the New York literature on the topic.

Syfte: Syftet med studien är att belysa hur 11 september-attackerna gestaltades i svensk och brittisk morgonpress en vecka efter händelserna. Tyngdpunkten i undersökningen ligger på jämförelsen mellan tidningarnas gestaltningar av händelserna. Frågeställningar: Hur gestaltas nyheten veckan efter katastrofen? Vilka likheter och skillnader finns mellan tidningarnas gestaltningar? Hur ser förhållandet mellan text respektive bilder/nyhetsgrafik ut i de båda tidningarna? Teori: Studiens teoretiska ramverk är gestaltningsteorin och främst Robert Entmans modeller. Gestaltningsteorin handlar om mediernas inflytande över hur människor upplever och uppfattar den verklighet vi lever i. Då studien är en jämförelse mellan svensk och brittisk dagspress kontextualiseras studien genom en skildring av situationen för dagspressen i respektive land. Metod: Uppsatsen har undersökt gestaltningar i medieinnehåll genom att använda kvantitativ innehållsanalys som metod för insamling av empiriskt material. Materialet utgörs av samtliga artiklar om 11 september-attackerna i Dagens Nyheter och The Guardian från 2001-09-12 och en vecka framåt. Analysen är utförd på 191 artiklar. Resultat: Förekomst av konfliktgestaltning, human interest-gestaltning, ansvarsgestaltning och ekonomisk konsekvensgestaltning identifierades i båda tidningar. De förstnämnda accentueras mer i The Guardian medan ekonomisk konsekvensgestaltning förekom i högre utsträckning i DN. Indikationer på förekomst av moralgestaltning fanns i The Guardian men kunde inte bekräftas. Även andra faktorer som påverkar nyhetsgestaltningen identifierades. Undersökningen visade även att texten och bilderna i anslutning i viss mån förutsätter varandra då de stärker varandras gestaltningar. Utrymmet för själva artiklarna varierade stort mellan tidningarna. The Guardian hade fler utrymmeskrävande artiklar såväl som bilder. / Purpose: The study aims to shed light on how the September 11 attacks were framed in Swedish and British newspapers one week after the events occured. The main focus of the study is to compare the newspapers' framing of the events. Issues: In what ways are the news portrayed during the week after the events occured? What similarities and differences are there between the newspapers' framings of the events? How much space does text and images/news graphics occupy in the two papers? Theory: The study's theoretical framework is framing theory, mainly Robert Entmans ideas about the different depictions of media. Framing theory is all about how the media influence the way people experience and perceive the reality we live in. Since the study aims to compare Swedish and British newspapers, a contextualisation is performed through a depiction of the situation of the press in Sweden and the UK. Method: The essay has examined the framings in media content by using quantitative content analysis as a method for collecting empirical data. The material consists of all items on the September 11 attacks in Dagens Nyheter and The Guardian, from the date 2001-09-12 and a week ahead. The analysis was conducted on 191 articles. Results: Conflict frame, human interest frame, responsibility frame and economic consequences frame were identified in both newspapers. The former were accentuated in The Guardian. Economic consequences frame was more common in DN. Indications of morality framing were found in the Guardian, but could not be confirmed. In addition, factors having effect on news framing were identified. The study also revealed that text and images presuppose each other while reinforcing each other's frames. The space for the articles themselves varied considerably between the papers. The Guardian contained more space demanding articles as well as images.

Since the mode of level-of-analysis has to be treated as an empirical tool for IR theories to make a claim to become a social science in its own right, this study attempts to explore the political process of a mutual construction of the international system and the nation states within the model in three parts. Firstly, this study examines how the international system and the national states be settled upon as pregiven scientific entities on the basis of objective spatiality of territory and borders. Secondly, this study shows that in order to merge all states¡¦ diversities and differences into the sameness and likeness, the mutual construction is linked to the plausible assumptions about the structural world of universal rationality among all states, and the unfolding history of linear and progressive evolution. Finally, this study takes the September 11 and the war on terrorism as an example to illustrate the mutual construction and its consequences.

The September 11 terrorist attacks brought a discourse on the transatlantic rift to the agenda of international community. In fact, at the end of the CW, the emergence of the US as the leading hegemonic power gave way to transatlantic divergences concerning security perceptions and strategies of the post-CW era. Also, NATO has been challenged with these drastic changes in the international system. Yet, owing to the initiatives taken for the transformation of the Atlantic alliance during the 1990s, NATO maintained its relevance for the new world order. However, the divergences of the US and Europeans on their strategies to deal with the post-September 11 security threats led to another discussions about the future of NATO. Indeed, as the US&rsquo / post-September 11 unilateral policies deepened the transatlantic rift already underway since the end of the CW, on the way to Iraq war, NATO turned out to be the place where the divisions between the allies were reflected the most. Hence, the US&rsquo / preferences for ad hoc coalitions of the willing understanding damaged the longduring multilateral alliance by leading to a secondary role for NATO during the US&rsquo / Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns. That is why, time is needed to see whether the old allies facing new threats can reconcile their differences in the name of a renewed transatlantic security cooperation through the initiatives taken within NATO?

Project (D. Min.)--Iliff School of Theology, 2006. / Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 121-123; 126-146).