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2025-2026 Lindenwood University Undergraduate Course Catalog
Get PDFLindenwood University Undergraduate Course Cataloghttps://digitalcommons.lindenwood.edu/catalogs/1214/thumbnail.jp
Lindenwood Digest, September 3, 2025
Get PDFThe Lindenwood Digest has been a digital employee newsletter since 2009
The God Prompt and Deus Ex Machina: Techno-Theological Tropes and Operational Metaphors in Generative Media
Get PDFThis study reframes two durable tropes—the ―God Prompt‖ and the deus ex machina—as analytic lenses for understanding how contemporary generative systems stage beginnings and endings of cultural production. The ―God Prompt‖ denotes command-driven synthesis in which minimal textual instructions instantiate content on demand, crystallizing a production loop of input, model execution, and post hoc evaluation that orients anticipation toward instantaneous yield and controllable variation. The deus ex machina names an externally imposed resolution that interrupts causal development—historically a crane-borne god, functionally an algorithmic override—thereby concentrating attention on closure mechanics rather than world-building continuity. Read together, the pair offers a compact comparative grid: locus of initiative (ex ante instruction versus ex post intervention), degree of system opacity (foregrounded prompting versus backstage mechanism), temporal signature (generation-as-inception versus intervention-as-termination), and authorship dynamics (distributed cueing versus imposed solution). The article operationalizes this grid across heterogeneous materials—prompt marketplaces, persona scripts, interface logs, and narrative case studies—to show how users internalize the ―grammar of prompting‖ while platforms increasingly standardize ―mechanics of closure.‖ The analysis yields testable predictions: longer or more structured prompts should increase perceived user agency and authorial claim, whereas abrupt machine-led resolutions should depress perceived coherence unless licensed by genre convention or interface signaling. By treating both tropes as cognitive scaffolds and infrastructural habits rather than theological or ethical claims, the study supplies a portable vocabulary for design research, narratology, and science-and-technology studies to evaluate how generative media choreograph control, surprise, and the price of narrative closure
Evidence of the Complexity of the Conversion to Christianity in Early Medieval Funerary Stone Carvings of Pagan Cultures in Scotland and Scandinavia
Get PDFThis thesis focuses on stone monuments created between the late fifth to late twelfth centuries CE, specifically in Scotland and Sweden. The aim of this thesis is to interpret the symbols or images inscribed onto the stone monuments to determine what they reveal about the Christianization of these regions. The Picts in Scotland and the Norse in Sweden left behind several standing stones such as the Craw Stane from the Picts and the Ledberg Stone from the Norse which have various symbols carved into them. These stones were sometimes created in connection with a burial, allowing the interpretations of their burial practices and how these practices were influenced by their belief systems. Furthermore, with the interpretation of the evolution of iconography found on the stones before and after conversion took place, the relationships between the Christians and the Pagan cultures can also be further explored and interpreted. However, these relationships and interactions between these cultures is much more complex than simply whether they got along or not. I believe that looking at the symbols on each stone and interpreting what they may have meant in their original context is the key to understanding just how complex relationships may have been. This research will shed more light on an under-studied field and allow for further research to explore the relationships between the Christian and Pagan cultures in other regions of northwestern Europe during the period of conversion. I believe that the further study of these stones will also allow for further interpretations of the complexities of cross-cultural interactions in other areas of Europe during this period and prove that the conversion from one culture and religion to another is much more complicated than previously thought
Image from the Winter 2025 Dance Concert, Lindenwood University
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Image from the Winter 2025 Dance Concert, Lindenwood University
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Image from the Winter 2025 Dance Concert, Lindenwood University
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Image from the Winter 2025 Dance Concert, Lindenwood University
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Image from the Winter 2025 Dance Concert, Lindenwood University
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Image from the Spring 2025 Dance Concert, Lindenwood University
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