Browsing by Subject "Evangelicalism"
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Item Ambivalent Devotion: Religious Imagination in Contemporary Southern Women's Fiction(2011-02-22) Peters, Sarah L.Analyzing novels by Sheri Reynolds, Lee Smith, Barbara Kingsolver, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, and Sue Monk Kidd, I argue that these authors challenge religious structures by dramatizing the struggle between love and resentment that brings many women to the point of crisis but also inspires imaginative and generative processes of appropriation and revision, emphasizing not destination but process. Employing first-person narration in coming-of-age stories, Smith, Reynolds, and Kingsolver highlight the various narratives that govern the experiences of children born into religious cultures, including narratives of sexual development, gender identity, and religious conversion, to portray the difficulty of articulating female experience within the limited lexicon of Christian fundamentalism. As they mature into adulthood, the girl characters in these novels break from tradition to develop new consciousness by altering and adapting religious language, understood as open and malleable rather than authoritative and fixed. Smith, Kidd, and Naylor incorporate the Virgin Mary and divine maternal figures from non-Christian traditions to restore the mother-daughter relationship that is eclipsed by the Father and Son in Christian tradition. Identifying the female body as a site of spiritual knowledge, these authors present a metaphorical return to the womb that empowers their characters to embrace divine maternal love that transgresses the masculine symbolic order, displacing (but not necessarily destroying) the authority of God the Father and His human representatives. Reynolds and Walker portray physical pain, central to the Christian image of crucifixion, as destroying the ability of women to speak, denying them subjectivity. Through transgressive sexual relationships infused with religious significance, these authors disrupt the Christian moral paradigm by presenting bodily pleasure as an alternative to the Christian valorization of sacrifice. The replacement of pain with pleasure inspires imaginative work that makes private spirituality shareable through artistic creation. The novels I study present themes that also concern Christian and non-Christian feminist theologians: the development of feminine images of the divine, emphasis on immanence over transcendence, the apprehension of the divine in nature, and the necessity of challenging the reification of religious images and dualisms that undermine female subjectivity. I show the reciprocal relationship between fiction and theology, as theologians treat women's literature as sacred texts and fiction writers give life to abstract religious concepts through narrative.Item How to Bridge the Culture Gap: How John Dewey?s Aesthetics May Benefit the Local Church(2012-02-14) Shockley, Paul RussellIn my personal experience, I have discovered notable aesthetic problems that face many contemporary evangelical churches. In spite of these churches? best efforts, they fail to bridge the culture gap and foster a meaningful worship service. But John Dewey?s aesthetic philosophy understands the shifting nature of our environment and the value of aesthetic experience, providing beneficial insights to assist unhealthy churches. To better understand the applicability of his philosophy, Chapter II is an exposition of John Dewey?s aesthetics that revolves around four central questions: What is Dewey?s starting point for aesthetics? What distinguishes aesthetic experiences from others? What is his criticism of the ?museum conception of art?? What is the significance for Dewey of our activities having or not having aesthetic quality? Chapter III is a Deweyan investigation of four real churches: the elite church, which promotes an aesthetic that is reserved for its members; the broken church, which is divorced from community; the humdrum church, which is preoccupied with the routine; and the sensational church, which is characterized by indulgence. Chapter IV is a description of two recent attempts to bridge the culture gap and offer meaningful worship activities: the seeker-sensitive movement which contends that the church must be ?culturally inviting? to the community, and the emerging movement(s), which seeks to dismantle traditional churches using deconstructionism and reconstructing worship services that are experiential, pluralistic, and sensory. My Deweyan argument in Chapter V is that both the ?seeker-sensitive? and the ?emerging? movements fail to adequately understand the shifting character of our environment and our relation to it. If problem churches acknowledge that discontinuity with environment is inevitable, seek to meet the needs of others, embrace adjustment as a core component, and value aesthetic experience, they will be in a better position to bridge the culture gap and offer an enriching worship experience in their services. Three Deweyan lessons are gleaned from this inquiry: value aesthetic experience and its contribution in bridging the culture gap, implement Deweyan insights drawn from our examination of traditional churches, and contribute to society by generating artproducts that will benefit the community.Item Intersections of theatre, activism, and born-again Christianity: American evangelical theatre from 1974 to 2004(2012-05) Wood, Steven W.; Chansky, Dorothy; Bert, Norman A.; Gelber, William F.; Fried, Eric; Fuentes, TinaAlthough there have been many studies about American evangelical politics and the influence of born-again Christianity in popular culture, few scholars have given attention to evangelical theatre. My studies examines four aspects of evangelical theatre: evangelical publishing houses and theatre networking conferences; theatre programs in religious higher education; the megachurch seeker service dramas of Willow Creek Community Church; and the Jesus monodramas of Tom Key, Max McLean, and Curt Cloninger. Together, these four case studies explore how evangelicals forged their theatre interests, performed their religious dramas, and used drama to speak to the larger evangelical community.Item The cosmic challenger : what American evangelicals think about Islam and why(2009-08) Shaw, Joseph Daniel; Azam, Hina, 1970-; Busby, JoshThis thesis answers the question, "What do twenty-first century American evangelical Christians think about Islam and why do they think that way?" The dominant perception of these Christians is that Islam is a cosmic challenger to Christianity. In other words, Islam and Christianity are in an existential competition to win souls. This thesis utilizes perceptions of Islam as the analytical reference point by which to better understand American evangelicals. The driving hypothesis is that some things about what and why evangelicals think about Islam will reveal broader conclusions about evangelicals themselves. Evangelical Christian literature is broken down into four classifications: informational, prophetic, apologetic, and missional. In the end, consideration of Islam and Muslims leads evangelicals to either an activist impulse or missional impulse.