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Harkening to the Sound: The Influence of a Clergyperson's Vocal Code on the Homiletical Message with Recommendations for Transplanted Preachers
No full textIn the field of homiletics, attention is given to structure, content, and delivery, but previous work has often neglected to consider how the sound of a clergyperson’s voice impacts the message the audience hears. In the quantitative segment of this project, a study was designed to examine how hearers make assumptions of preachers based on their vocal code, with findings suggesting that hearers do form biases based on the sound of a voice. The qualitative segment reports experiences from a dozen transplanted clergy.
These findings are evaluated within a missional contextualization framework, resulting in suggestions for future clergy who are navigating significant demographic transitions.Rev. Dr. William Brosen
Toward More Effective Catechesis: Models of Discipleship at Galilee Episcopal Church
No full textThe demands of parish ministry on clergy often preclude considered and well-planned approaches to parish-wide catechesis. Additionally, a muddled understanding of confirmation (in our prayer book tradition, the ecumenical scene, and our national canons) leaves confirmation open for competing theologies. Laity and clergy often view confirmation as an opportunity for catechesis, but because the rite is derivative of baptism it cannot be that opportunity and should instead be a celebration of the lifelong formation that has already occurred, as well as a communal affirmation that the Holy Spirit will continue to bless and sustain the confirmands in their unfolding journey. This project details how Galilee Church in Virginia Beach has engaged in a comprehensive formation program for children, and how this program supersedes and replaces a traditional confirmation class. It further details the importance of attending to a variety of factors in order to create an environment for successful catechesis. Finally, it considers opportunities from with both the Prayer Book tradition and the historical Catechumenate for future development of adult formation in the parish setting.Rt. Rev. Dr. Joe Burnet
Truth Telling at theTable: The Eucharist and White Supremacy in the Episcopal Church
No full textThe Eucharist is a sacrament of grace, liturgically enacted in words, gestures, and substances meant to recall the executed and resurrected body of Jesus Christ, a Palestinian Jew under political occupation. It calls the assembly into ethical action in solidarity with Jesus, to stand alongside him, and with those who currently suffer in our communities. The Eucharist is crucial for the work of racial justice and holds
transformation for those white U.S. American Christians who are seeking to challenge the social and political idolatry of white supremacy. To access the practice of love that the Eucharist leads us to, to recover the vision of God from within the rites of a historically white supremacist tradition, white Episcopalians must engage in the uncomfortable and vital work of truth telling. This project offers an exploration of the racial history of the denomination, and a political liturgics grounded in black liberation theology, sacramental and political theology, and ritual theory. It concludes with suggestions for anti-racist liturgical and pedagogical practice for majority white Episcopal parishes.James Turrell and Kelly Brown Dougla
Weeds
Get PDFThesis for Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. This entry contains only the abstract of the short story collection.Weeds is an eclectic collection of first stories, a kind of sampler like the old-fashioned flower-bordered alphabets young women once embroidered as demonstrations of their needlework. The present sampler, however, is festooned with unpretty things: cobwebby attics, deathbeds, and invasive insects, to name a few. These stories examine the challenge of inhabiting a human body, the quiet ferocity of the domestic environment, and the redemptive potential of sickness, death, and storytelling. Greek and Arthurian mythos and modern Hispanic (particularly Latin American) fiction are their warp and woof.
Weeds, The Little Ones, The Language of the Lord, and The Spider and the Butterfly are examples of magic realism, in which real-seeming characters experience and remember the world as they need to, unburdened by mundane physical limitations. The purely speculative stories— Where There's a Will, Myrmecology, and Death Manual—take on big trouble like dismemberment, environmental devastation and zombies to put greater pressure on the characters' humanity and valor. In the realistic tales—The Bridge, A Necessary Assumption, The Backpack—characters focus their gazes on ordinary objects and familiar landscapes in a search for solutions to personal frustrations and problematic relationships.
First-person narration invites the reader's complicity in the characters' most intimate moments and forces the reader to inhabit uncomfortable bodies. The Little Ones, an homage to Paraguayan short story master Horacio Quiroga, is a personal journal that tracks the disintegration of a mind infuriated by change. Where There's a Will asks the reader to experience living as a "decorpitated" head who's fighting for her life and marriage while facing exploitation and sexual harassment. In Weeds, a girl survives her fraught passage into puberty thanks to a talent for magical thinking and using legends as dragomen to interpret her parents' breakup and the sudden appearance of three mysterious white hairs.
Ordinary places and objects wield extraordinary power. With the aid of a handy domestic appliance, a wife prevents her husband's retirement from ruining her perfect relationship with their house. In The Language of the Lord, a supermarket becomes a Borgesian labyrinth where a widow has a last chance to get some satisfaction and come to peace with disappointments. In The Backpack, a woman worn down by caregiving achieves a different liberation than she'd imagined through her obsession with some old camping equipment and a stranger she meets only in her dreams.
Words are magical instruments of salvation; listening is the necessary complement to telling. The Spider and the Butterfly is an askew love story; the modular structure and alternating first-person and third-person narration provide a dimensional view of Mother, a controlling matriarch who even as a ghostly presence exerts her power over Livy, Doctor, and Norma. The broken fourth wall in Livy's sections invites the reader into the family circle to play a role in alleviating Livy's fear of dying alone. In Myrmecology, a deep-earth miner becomes obsessed with a colony of ants while failing to act to save his marriage or town until, at the crucial moment, a few syllables awaken him to his humanity. Finally, in Death Manual, humor and tragedy mix when a man rises from the dead and makes a terrible mess of things until his daughter breaks with family tradition and says the words he needs to hear.Michael Griffith, Adianne Haru
"His studie was but litel on the Bible": A Natural, Textual, and Spiritual Analysis of Signs and Signifiers in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Physician's Tale
Get PDFEmbracing a Hermeneutic of Tikkun Olam
No full textOver the past several decades the Episcopal Church, among other denominations and faith communities, have embraced the theology of creation care.
One of the major obstacles to creation care in the Church happens to be some of the teachings of the Church itself, namely teachings which incorporate a literal understanding of dominion as used in Genesis 1:26-28. When humanity sees itself as the pinnacle of God’s creation, imbued with the right to rule the whole of creation in the name of God, there is an intrinsic danger that we might abuse that gift.
In his article “The Dominion Mandate and the Reconstructionist Movement,” Bob
DeWaay outlines a movement since the late twentieth century holding “the conviction that the Scripture gives the church a mandate to take dominion over this world socially and culturally before the bodily return of Jesus Christ.” This mandate, also called by some the “dominion covenant,” extends beyond the social and cultural to embrace control over the physical world as well.
This project proposes the need to deconstruct the theology of Dominionism and offer a hermeneutic in its place which honors God, humanity, and the whole of creation. The model offered in its place is based on the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, often translated as repairing the world. Tikkun olam, which calls upon us to be repairers of the world, or repairers of the breach, is a modern day movement with roots in the Mishnah of ancient Judaism. This model is offered as another way of understanding what Jesus of
Nazareth meant when he spoke about the kingdom of God.Prof. David Star
A Tiny, Eternal Continent
Get PDFMy collection of poems discusses the process of growing, grieving, and the desire to come of age gracefully even as life changes. In some poems the growth process takes the form of learning to mourn and overcome obstacles that would otherwise seem insurmountable. Other poems are both emotional and critical in discussing topics of blackness, feminism, identity, and marriage. Although the range of growth takes on a variety of forms in my collection, it is the tone of pessimism in juxtaposition with the fierce need to “make lemons into lemonade” that anchors these poems to a common thread throughout these pages.
What I am most proud of when it comes to the writing process is what I’ve learned from an ultimate failure I experienced almost immediately after writing what I thought would be the first successful poem of my thesis work. It was called “Florida Authorities Consider Possibility of Super Snake in Everglades.” This was a novelty poem that was supposed to examine feminism with a warning of women rising up against oppression in an organized way that would reproduce itself from generation to generation of women. I had been inspired by an interesting news article about snakes and I made the best connections I thought possible between one and the other.
This poem failed because it was not specific and grounded enough into its emotional truth. It was a political poem that was trying to be too abstract instead of bringing it home to specific examples of what I was criticizing in a misogynistic society. I have a habit of flooding poems like these with sensory detail and abstraction in place of narrative and concrete specifics. What made matters worse with this poem was that I was already into a heavy extended metaphor that used the “Super-snake” (the product of procreating Burmese and Indian Pythons) who’d been expected to viciously eat its way through the Everglades, as women who are tired of being mistreated in society. These women would “eat” their way through the patriarchal nonsense. A metaphor like this needs to be supported by concrete specifics more than abstracted lyric.
I was not telling my truth or a truth I had come to know intimately enough to write effectively about. I realized this only after I looked at my poetry as if I were seeing it for the first time. Would I care about what this poet has to say on this topic? Does this poem hold a universal emotional truth that helps me understand myself, my situation, and my world better? Even though I am the writer, my answer to both of these questions was no.
In the first stage of my writing process, I used my earliest poems to test the emotional core and the honesty of my new poems. If I saw I was hitting ineffective notes I stopped. I reevaluated the subject matter, asked myself why I cared about it, and began piecing together the message I was trying to bring to the surface through the vessel of that poem. Specifically, the biggest change was understanding each poem’s unique conceit and writing carefully towards it. In poems like “Crisis at a Poetry Slam,” I was expressing the shame the speaker felt when surrounded by performance poets who had pieces that were more “important” than hers.
This poem challenges the conception that it doesn’t matter what you write about on open mic night as long as you share. I am highlighting what it feels to like to be the only one in the room with a love poem in the midst of all the political poetry. The speaker demonstrates her awareness of “larger” issues while holding on to the fact that she has no immediate urge to write about these things, and that makes her feel like less of a poet. Earlier versions of this poem fell flat in communicating this in a plainspoken way that would help readers relate to this sentiment.
There were four poets I consistently looked to for a push of inspiration as well as different approaches on finding my way into a poem. Ocean Vuong’s collection of poetry, The Night Sky with Exit Wounds, informed the experimental forms I used to work my way into the section of my book that deals with death and sickness. Like Vuong’s poem “The Seventh Circle of Earth” my poem, “Pancreas and the Brick Duplex on Bonny Oaks Drive,” plays with the different ways a narrative can be stated clearly in a poem without losing the music or lyrical quality. I use footnotes to tell the story that the poem on the main portion of the page merely elevated.
This experiment with form was helpful in my struggles with marrying narrative to abstraction. When writing about death, I am concerned about being able to stay close and courageous enough to look my subject in its face and do it justice. Vuong’s poems similarly handle topics dealing with loss, coming of age as a gay male, and processing hate. I studied how he refused to let his readers look away from any of his subject matter. iii From harvesting his sexual freedom from the “wet grass of the baseball field behind the dugout” to the plainspoken confessional quality his work brings with every piece, I learned so much about how to keep my eyes open even as I submerge myself beneath tears, blood, spit, or any other fluid with which these poems brim with. I still have room to get uglier and to dig further into these wounds. My next stage of revisions will be dedicated to cutting everything open even more.
Patricia Smith, Caludia Rankine, and Danez Smith all contributed to helping me learn to write my blackness in a way that felt as authentic to me as wearing my own skin. I always get self-conscious in how to occupy literary spaces with the right amount of blackness and the right amount of womanhood. The notion that a choice must be made has been an ongoing struggle for me as well as its own inspiration source. Citizen, Incendiary Art, and Don’t Call Us Dead demonstrated to me how to write about myself as if I am my own story. I learned that my life, my skin, and even my smallest interactions/occurrences are often deeply connected to a larger dialogue that I can engage in, make sense of, and help other readers (especially those that have similar experiences) do the same. I wrote this journey in “Mama Used to Tell Me.” As I was revising this one, I thought about the conversational micro-aggressions I experienced when going relaxerfree in 2010. Most of these interactions were small, but heavy with a larger conversation about black womanhood and feminism. The revision for this poem involved unpacking this dialogue.
Understanding conceptual/word association and interconnectivity was the most important part of gaining perspective on how to get into a poem, learn what it wants to say, and get out of it gracefully. Classroom experience at Sewanee was instrumental in my understanding of the revision process. In Chris Bachelder’s Forms of Fiction class and Kelly Carlisle’s Non-Fiction workshop, we read samples of original texts and compared them to their revised versions. This gave me insight on how to shave down and only keep what is absolutely necessary in my poetry, making every word count. In Jamie Quatro’s fiction workshop, we discussed how to carve our stories out of all the fluff by doing imitations from the fiction in literary journals and understanding how they work in their concise forms. In Nickole Brown’s two poetry workshops everything came together for me. She developed a list of ten poetry guidelines to use during the revision stage. It was a reminder to check my poem’s title, shape, linebreaks, verbs, point-of- view, tone, punctuation, economy of language, emotional core, and solidified ending before calling it finished. Each of these poems are only the best possible lines from a slew of sloppy earlier versions of themselves
The Church and Social Responsibilities: A Case Study of the Development of Church Schools in the Diocese of Kaduna, Church of Nigeria, Anglican Communion
Get PDFThis project looks at the coming of the Christian Missionary Society (CMS) to Nigeria, and how they established schools in order to carry out their mission which was evangelization of the local populace. It looks at the principles which the CMS used to run their schools in Nigeria and how those principles enabled the CMS schools deliver quality education with good moral standards, and made education affordable and accessible to all. The project also looks at the period in which the Nigerian government took over the educational sector from the Church and how this resulted in a steady downward trend in education, until in recent years when the
Church rose up to salvage it. This intervention by the Church has not yielded the same results witnessed during the time of the CMS. Church schools today are very expensive beyond the reach of the average Nigerian, and moral standard is still a huge struggle. Therefore, this project proposes the use of the principles of ethics of land highlighted in Ellen F. Davis’s Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture, An Agrarian Reading of the Bible, and the biblical use of money and possessions in Walter Brueggemann’s Money and Possessions, in addressing the various challenges facing the Church schools in Nigeria and in the Diocese of Kaduna Anglican Communion in particular, and finally proffers suggestions on the way forward.Professor Andrew R.H. Thompso