With the insights from critical assessments of the existing Korean American pastoral care approaches through critical reviews of the Korean concepts of the self and how this concept evolves after immigration, process conversion theories, and in-depth interviews, this dissertation proposes the new Uri-sung (We-ness) pastoral care approach, for first-generation Korean converts to Christianity after their immigration to the United States.

This dissertation puts Dante into conversation with Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Emmanuel Levinas, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. The purpose of this conversation is to help make Dante’s Divine Comedy more pertinent to contemporary readers. The Divine Comedy can be a template for how one experiences a spiritual transformation.

This dissertation uses grounded theory to build a practical theology of mission rooted in the experience of congregations in the United Church of Christ in the San Francisco Bay Area during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Interviews with pastors revealed that congregations understood their primary mission to be building and maintaining robust, intimate, tangible community where members felt connected and known.

This dissertation aims to extend trinitarian theology in the wake of the scientific concept of emergent complexity. Emergence involves the growth of higher-level complex systems that cannot be reduced to their lower-level properties. Most significantly, the perichoresis that unites the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit within the external or economic Trinity will affect the internal or immanent Trinity. Emergent complexity within creation will affect the internal divine life. This dissertation augments Karl Barth’s theological method by explicating our primary revelatory experience in light of this scientific phenomenon.

Through the exploration of Greco-Roman wall painting in both its chemical processes and applications in ancient surface decoration, and the psychological transformational processes outlined in the discipline of analytical psychology, this dissertation demonstrates how meaning is grounded in something beyond ourselves. Active engagement, embodied experiences and intellectual appreciation of these processes serve as a framework for an eschatological trajectory of personal integration that is both individual and cosmic.

Through the dynamic interplay between text and imagination, communitas and liminality, this dissertation transmutes three pilgrimage sites—the Camino de Santiago, the Chartres Labyrinth, and the Spiral Jetty—onto the landscapes of American modernist poet Marianne Moore’s poetry. Each site serves as a distinct pilgrimage paradigm examining how pilgrimage functions as process, setting, and structure in Moore’s poetry.

This is a multimodal, interdisciplinary work that draws from cognitive linguistics and visual culture to illustrate how embodied visualization with the Tantric image of Parā Śakti functions to meet the Trika’s soteriological aim of nonduality between self and the world, illustrating and actualizing the potential of Tantric imagery to cultivate empathetic understanding with ideological and cultural “others.”

Historians of science have debated the complex science-religion relationship, reaching conclusions ranging from consonance to dissonance. This study’s contextual and biographical approach compares the engagement of seventeenth- and nineteenth-century scientists and theologians at the science-religion intersection. It contributes to current scholarship by recognizing the nuances in the science-religion relationship not categorizable as conflict, harmony, or indifference.

This study unmasks the invisible marks of white supremacy embodied in theological and social understandings. A womanist hush harbor pedagogy privileges the epistemologies of the oppressed, exposes the irrationality of white supremacy and provides insights for constructing intentional liberative spaces for theological reflection. It investigates social practices that either transform or further embed white supremacist practices into the social fabric of faith communities.

This dissertation argues that the Qur’an Muslims possess today has retained its essential features since first uttered by the Prophet. There is evidence from the continuous oral transmission of the Qur’an of the agreed upon recitations (qirā’āt), recensions (riwāyāt), and modes (ṭuruq) to substantiate this claim. The unchanging methods of orthoepy, through a link-transmission system, has preserved the Qur’an until today.

This dissertation is a theological reflection about the histories and realities of Asian Latinxs in light of the concept of mestizaje (cultural and racial mixture). This dissertation argues for a constant recognition of the inherent weakness of mestizaje to help Latinx theology notice the under- and mis-represented Latinx groups in the U.S. and an appreciation of their unique experiences and religious practices.

Mary of Bethany and Margery Kempe encountered God in a way that was rejected by their contemporary societies. Jacques Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis help us make sense of their transgressive actions as seeking the “real beyond the symbolic order.” These women’s spiritualities of desire provide insights for how contemporary Christian women can pursue God beyond oppressive structures.

This dissertation argues that the modern mechanistic worldview formulated during the scientific revolution was the primary trigger for the emergence of modern atheism. This study illuminates the origin of modern atheism in the Western world and simultaneously offers a new lens for understanding the conflict between modern atheists and theists that has continued to this day.

The tribal understanding of the importance of communal life serves as a foundation for the “Peaceable Dialogue” model – a non-violence model. Peaceful communities can emerge by including village leaders, women, and youth in dialogue that promotes positive peace. Such communities are critical to fostering a vibrant Indian democracy capable of celebrating its diversity in its commitment to justice and peace for all its citizens.

This dissertation focuses on the pedagogical dynamics in Rumi’s text Mathnawī-yi Ma‘nawī. In the text, Rūmī’s teaching is communicated largely through a polyphony of interacting, often diverging character “voices.”  These polyphonic “voices” in Rūmī’s Mathnawī “mirror” the dialogic interaction of internal “voices” within his reader-listener, thus providing a textual model for transformation and attainment of wisdom on the path.

This dissertation analyzes the power and subjectivity demonstrated in Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection through the lens of Foucaultian biopolitics and intersectional queer theory, naming it as vital power. As revelation of God, this framework demonstrates divine power that incorporates the ambiguities of material life, relates in open and non-hierarchical ways (intratrinitarianly and with creation), and condemns systems that oppress minoritized bodies.

This dissertation argues that the letter to Philemon constructs a koinonia-space, a space of radical kinship that challenges both the noxious nucleus of Roman slavery and systemic dehumanization in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Considering the content of Paul’s prayer in verses 4-6 and his challenging request in verse 16 as the hermeneutical keys to the whole letter, the message of the letter to Philemon is a summons to an ethic of koinonia among the followers of Christ.

This dissertation aims to articulate a theological alternative to postmodern nihilism via Han Urs von Balthasar’s theology of beauty. It argues how beauty—the aesthetic experience of the Gestalt Christi— draws together all the disparate threads of meaning and thus makes the Gestalt become the locus where the living Logos can be expressed, revealed, and grasped here and now.

This dissertation argues that the dismissal of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) educators from Catholic schools constitutes discrimination that is theologically and morally unjust. Theologically, it argues that walking a synodal path should inspire Catholic leaders to dialogue with (not exclude) dissenting Catholics. Morally, it contends that a civil right to religious freedom should never be used to violate the inalienable human rights of LGB people.

This dissertation argues that the ablutionary efficacy of blood in the purification offering of Leviticus 4, 5, and 16 is the influence that allows Paul, in Romans 3:24–26a, to reconceptualize Jesus’s blood-shedding action on the cross as the ultimate act of purification, after which no more purity offerings will be needed.

This dissertation studies the history of an artifact, a garment of shame from the Mexican Inquisition in 1560, that was worn by an Englishman there and in Spain, then returned to Mexico for exhibition in the cathedral for more than a century. This study reveals negotiated, blended beliefs that challenge monolithic understandings of confession within histories of colonialism, mission, and institutional religion.

Many artists of the early twentieth century shared a belief in the power of spiritual art to transform human society. Such “mystical-utopian” orientations, informed by the era’s increasingly global flow of ideas, transcended cultural and national boundaries, as exemplified in the contributions of American painter Arthur Wesley Dow, Swiss-German artist Johannes Itten, and Indian poet and polymath Rabindranath Tagore.

This dissertation argues that European approaches to Jews and Judaism were construed alongside approaches to the unconverted outside Europe as part of a pan-Protestant-imperialist ideology of global conversion. As Protestant missions modeled their justification for their colonialism on the Christian gospel mandate, representations of Amerindians were increasingly cast in the language of Christian supersession over Judaism.

There is an urgent need for the American community college educator to make and carry out a commitment to civic interfaith leadership. The community college educator as civic interfaith leader can and should examine and revise existing curricular and co-curricular resources by cultivating and sustaining commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion and the promotion of religious literacy.