This dissertation describes a method for constructing a religious environmental ethic modeled on the spiritual practice of lectio divina, or devotional reading. Lectio divina is an explicitly religious way of reading, distinguished from other modes of reading not by what is read--even sacred scriptures can be read for mastery of content, for entertainment, etc.--but by how it is read. In lectio divina, the reader engages the text with a willingness to be transformed by an encounter with the sacred, mediated somehow by the text. This vulnerability is inherent in a religious reading, as is the intimacy implicit in the repeated engagement with the text that is central to the practice of lectio divina. The emphasis on vulnerability and intimacy marks this religious approach to environmental ethics as a form of virtue ethics. Consistent with the traditional insight conveyed by the two-books metaphor, whereby Christians believed God was revealed both in the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature, I map the classic stages of lectio divina onto a reading not of scripture but of the natural world. Paying attention requires careful observation, the naming and description of relevant details, and awareness and articulation of emotional responses as one repeatedly visits natural settings. Pondering requires a willingness to enter deeply into the religious, scientific, and other sources that help us understand the natural world and our place within it, as well as a willingness to reflect critically upon those sources. Responding calls upon readers of nature to take definite actions that flow out of the previous stages of paying attention and pondering, utilizing knowledge born of familiarity to address environmental challenges while also protecting natural settings in which the unnamable sacred can be encountered. Surrendering involves acknowledging human limits of understanding, will, and action, and nonetheless finding rest and restoration by trusting in some force beyond the merely human. I illustrate this argument with interpretations of literary works by Terry Tempest Williams, thereby asserting the relevance of religiosity to human transformation and to efforts to imaginatively embody human-land relationships that further human and ecological flourishing.

The type of commentary a narrative is able to make is fully dependant on the type of narrator who is relating it. The visual elements present in a film are the true narrational forces which guide it. The presence of the camera, the use of lighting, the architecture, and the objects present in the film each have their own meaning. These elements come together to make a greater commentary than the dialogue. How these meanings interact with each other is what defines what type of narrator is present in the film. By analyzing what type of narrator is relating the story it is possible to examine what commentary the film is able to make. Mike Nichols? 1967 film The Graduate and Terry Gilliam?s 1998 film adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson?s 1971 literary work Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas make commentaries that act as bookends for the ideals of the youth culture during the late 1960?s. Where as The Graduate is condemning the shining emptiness of 1967 suburban California society which its narrator inhabits, Fear and Loathing?s narrator is depicting the twisted abomination which grew within the emptiness of that society during those four years. The fact that Gilliam?s adaptation came 27 years after the source material was created allows for an even more specific translation of Thompson?s message. The Graduate is looking towards the unknown future where as Fear and Loathing is look backwards at the results. The Graduate is commenting on the current situation and looking forwards where as Fear and Loathing is looking backwards to see what has happened in the interim. It is this difference that forces the type of narration and the visual style employed by the films to be diametrically opposed.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, The Divinity School, August, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references.

As Internet communities such as question-answer (Q&A) forums and online social networks (OSNs) grow in prominence as knowledge sources, traditional editorial filters are unable to scale to their size and pace. This absence hinders the exchange of knowledge online, by creating an understandable lack of trust in information. This mistrust can be partially overcome by a forum by consistently providing reliable information, thus establishing itself as a reliable source. This work investigates how algorithmic approaches can contribute to building such a community of voluntary experts willing to contribute authoritative information. This work identifies two approaches: a) reducing the cost of participation for experts via matching user queries to experts (question recommendation), and b) identifying authoritative contributors for incentivization (authority estimation). The question recommendation problem is addressed by extending existing approaches via a new generative model that augments textual data with expert preference information among different questions. Another contribution to this domain is the introduction of a set of formalized metrics to include the expert's experience besides the questioner's. This is essential for expert retention in a voluntary community, and has not been addressed by previous work. The authority estimation problem is addressed by observing that the global graph structure of user interactions, results from two factors: a user's performance in local one-to-one interactions, and their activity levels. By positing an intrinsic authority 'strength' for each user node in the graph that governs the outcome of individual interactions via the Bradley-Terry model for pairwise comparison, this research establishes a relationship between intrinsic user authority, and global measures of influence. This approach overcomes many drawbacks of current measures of node importance in OSNs by naturally correcting for user activity levels, and providing an explanation for the frequent disconnect between real world reputation and online influence. Also, while existing research has been restricted to node ranking on a single OSN graph, this work demonstrates that co-ranking across multiple endorsement graphs drawn from the same OSN is a highly effective approach for aggregating complementary graph information. A new scalable co-ranking framework is introduced for this task. The resulting algorithms are evaluated on data from various online communities, and empirically shown to outperform existing approaches by a large margin. / text

Paired comparison models in loglinear form are generalised linear models and can be fitted using the IWLS algorithm. Unfortunately, the design matrices can become very large and thus a method is needed to reduce computational load (relating to both space and time). This paper discusses an algorithm for fitting loglinear paired comparison models in the presence of many nuisance parameters which is based on partition rules for symmetric matrices and takes advantage of the special structure of the design matrix in Poisson loglinear models. The algorithm is implemented as an R function. Some simple examples illustrate its use for fitting both paired comparison models and (multinomial) logit models. (author's abstract) / Series: Research Report Series / Department of Statistics and Mathematics

Thesis (D. Min.)--Ashland Theological Seminary, 2005. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 195-212).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, 1997. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 162-170).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Ashland Theological Seminary, 2005. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 195-212).