Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2013, Theological Studies

The study of feminist biblical hermeneutics is very diverse; it can mean different things to different people. As a result, there is much disagreement concerning how to read Scriptures from a feminist perspective in the correct way. For a proper study of the Scriptures from a feminist point of view, one must converse with other forms of feminist hermeneutics. Therefore, using excerpts from Mark 5 and John 4, this thesis will create a dialogue between the theologians Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Musa Dube, and John Paul II. In doing so, this thesis will attempt to show a more comprehensive feminist biblical hermeneutic using theological perspectives from Catholic Western feminism, Protestant Two-Thirds World feminism, and the Magisterium.

Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2022, English

While Iris Murdoch scholars tend to focus pointedly on her moral quest for goodness, I plan to demonstrate that appreciating her unique brand of metaphysics is not possible without also deciphering her lesser-analyzed philosophy of evil. In “Against Dryness” (1961) Murdoch claims that modern literature “contains so few convincing pictures of evil” and that our inability to “imagine evil” is a consequence of our post-war perception of humanity, which she believed was far too optimistic given the human atrocities committed in the twentieth century. We are thus left with a dangerous fantasy that humans are “totally free and responsible, knowing everything we need to know for the important purposes of life,” which is a dry view because it fails to consider that humans are complex, contingent, and morally muddled. I will show how Murdoch's problem of dryness exists in today's pervasive social media practice of “cancel culture” which, like a dry novel, also paints an overly optimistic view of human nature and naively assumes that humans can readily choose acts of good over evil. I will do so by analyzing Murdoch's evil enchanters—particularly a chillingly demonic scene in The Flight From The Enchanter (1956) that involves a dry interpretation of the pornographic photograph surreptitiously taken of Rosa Keepe in which Calvin Blick exclaims: ‘This is my eye' . . . ‘This is the truthful eye that sees and remembers. The lens of my camera.' Just as Calvin's evil eye judges Rosa within the rigid confines of one snapshot in time, those who participate in cancel culture utilize similar reductive tactics to determine the moral value of a person based upon a sole photo, text, or event and purposefully do not make any space to consider the entire—invariably muddled, flawed, and complex— picture of the life of the individual they contemptuously excoriate and seek to cancel. The solutions to dryness that Murdoch's philosophy intimates are twofold: on the moral (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, East Asian Languages and Literatures

This dissertation theorizes a fourfold interpretative model through examining a major ethnic minority document from southwest China—Chronicles of Southwest Yi (Xinan Yi zhi, hereafter as The Chronicles). As a key text in understanding Yi written tradition from western Guizhou province, the document is difficult to access due to a decline in the number of native transmitters, the lack of a theoretical toolkit to unlock the content of the text, and prejudice against oral-connected texts written in unfamiliar genres on the part of some scholars. Building upon past Yi scholarship, genre theories, and epic studies, this project offers doable approaches to deciphering what is intended by the multiple generations of tradition-bears: 1) treating the translated volumes as a corpus to study the language thoroughly, 2) connecting the verses with information that can help uninitiated readers appreciate the artistry of the text, 3) taking into account consensuses reached by modern-day scholars to situate the text in its textual network, and 4) keeping track of afterlives and ramifications of traditional lore and voicing opportunities opened up by contemporary media. Besides methodological innovations, the dissertation also testifies The Chronicles as an encyclopedic compendium and reliable cultural-historical records.

Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2021, Theological Studies

This thesis argues that the Western sacramental and christological ecclesiology of Otto Semmelroth, SJ, is complementary with the Eastern pneumatological-trinitarian theology of liturgy of Jean Corbon, OP. Their little studied theologies are taken as key for interpreting and receiving the Second Vatican Council. Where Semmelroth had a distinct and influential impact on Vatican II's sacramental ecclesiology, particularly in Lumen Gentium, Corbon had a similar impact on the theology of liturgy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. A particular point of significance of Vatican II is its personalist paradigm shift of recentering the faith of the church on God's revelation of self as Trinity of persons. Semmelroth and Corbon not only started with and maintained the primacy of divine initiative but they also made their faith-filled awareness of the mystery of God, revealed through Christ in the Spirit, the lynchpin of their theological endeavors. Their strikingly similar fundamental, methodological move of perceiving reality as determined by the mystery of the person of God enabled both Semmelroth and Corbon to achieve advances in sacramental theology and theology of liturgy, respectively. Building on these insights, this thesis synthesizes Semmelroth's and Corbon's theologies in proposing sacrament and liturgy as co-principles of the church as the form of trinitarian communion. This thesis proceeds by first characterizing the basic points of philosophical and theological twentieth century personalist thought, which takes persons as central and determinative in understanding reality. Ormond Rush's theological hermeneutical principles of Vatican II are then described. The geographical orientations of the theologies of Semmelroth, Corbon, and Vatican II are explored next and a conciliar hermeneutical principle of complementarity with distinction between Eastern and Western theologies is proposed. From there, Dei Verbum's theology of divine revelation is analyzed. Foll (open full item for complete abstract)

M.M., University of Cincinnati, 2019, College-Conservatory of Music: Music History

This thesis examines ambiguous musical topics in Chopin's music and explores their role in the communal artistic culture of 1830s and 1840s Paris. The first chapter analyzes Chopin's Polonaise-Fantasy to show how topics are evocative but elusive, always (or never quite) emergent. The second chapter seeks a context for ambiguous topics within the intellectual milieu of Chopin's salon circle. Balzac's novel Le Chef d'oeuvre inconnu (1831-46) displays a specific connection between the literary topos of a painting studio and the sonic, aural ambiguity sounded by its artists. The final chapter reflects on ambiguous topics in performance by examining Richter's 1977 recording of Chopin's Third Scherzo, chosen because of the way that Richter utilizes ambiguous topics in the piece to create a particular impression of aesthetic liveliness. Chopin's topics suggest an emergent, but contested, virtual subjectivity that has enlivened groups of performers and critics ranging from the 1840s salon to late twentieth-century communities around recorded media.

Psy. D., Antioch University, 2019, Antioch Santa Barbara: Clinical Psychology

This phenomenological study examines the experiences of insomnia among sixteen Americans who are descendants of people who lived in the United States during chattel slavery. The investigation is guided by the following two central questions: Is the lived experience of insomnia among African Americans the same as the experience among non-Hispanic White Americans? In addition, what is the lived experience of sleep among African Americans and Non-Hispanic White Americans? Each participant met individually with the researcher and privately reflected on their experience with insomnia defined here as a condition in which individuals have difficulty initiating and maintaining sleep that furthermore affects their daytime functioning. As the investigation unfolded, the researcher studied the experiences of the participants through a multimodal lens informed primarily by Festinger's Cognitive Dissonance Theory and Heidegger's Hermeneutics. As participants of this research investigation reflect on their experience, we observe the interplay between insomnia, race, and mental wellness coming into focus. Emotional experiences are captured, and the reflective experience allows for a re-examination of the legacies and effects of American history. Findings in this study support the notion that people tend to use cognitive dissonance when their beliefs are challenged, and those participants with a preference for consistency also experienced insomnia more frequently. No evidence was uncovered of the participants' insomnia being a direct effect of the inter-generational transmission of the trauma associated with chattel slavery. However, many African American families continue to report being severely negatively impacted by their ancestors' experiences during slavery and its aftermath. Insomnia, a common symptom of posttraumatic stress disorder can credibly be considered one likely sequela of the traumatic impact of slavery on the lives of African Americans. This Dissertation is ava (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Music (MM), Bowling Green State University, 2019, Music Composition

Lived Perpetually Oblique is an original through-composed composition for orchestra, with an approximate duration of six and a half minutes. Central to the piece's concept is musical meaning expressed through the signification of ideas and concepts through sound. To explore musical signification, a theoretical framework was employed in the pre-compositional process that directly informed the musical structure through the self-analysis of my lived experience. Pre-compositional planning involved the rigorous analysis of my dream journal entries that were made from April 30, 2011 through January 26, 2012. Each entry was assigned a general mood (“dream content”) as well as a quantifier of duration (the degree of “dream vividness.”) The content and vividness of each entry was then transcribed into a musical corollary consisting of representative melodic and harmonic quality. By strict correlation of musical materials to dream materials, the sonic gesture of the composition became inseparable from my own lived experience. The musical materials generated through the above process are introduced chronologically with every quarter note beat, with each pulse corresponding to a subsequent calendar date. More vivid journal entries result in longer musical strains; therefore, the density of orchestration at any given point in the score is a product of the level of detail found within a given succession of journal entries. The harmonic language of the musical corollaries at a local level encompasses traditional tonality, pandiatonicism, and free atonality. The type of harmonic language employed for a given musical voice is determined by the content of the prose that it is based on, with particular ideas and emotions associated with motives of discrete consonant/dissonant character. The overall harmonic gestalt from the many concurrent voices is heard as a constantly evolving cluster, with melodies weaving in and out of the audible surface. Lived Perpetually Oblique i (open full item for complete abstract)

Psy. D., Antioch University, 2018, Antioch Seattle: Clinical Psychology

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore how a mainstream theory of psychological practice might inadvertently conceal and ignore contemporary values and ideologies and their pathological consequences. Through a hermeneutic approach, I interpreted Leslie Greenberg's Emotion-focused therapy: Coaching clients to work through their feelings (2nd ed), a popular and widely used theory in psychotherapy. As a practitioner with humanistic foundations, this was also an opportunity for the author to understand his own unexamined values as a therapist. Specific EFT constructs and concepts that reflected Enlightenment assumptions and values were examined. EFT was situated within Enlightenment philosophy, particularly it's alignment with European movements for increasing individual freedoms and resisting church and other perceived arbitrary authority. An argument of how Enlightenment perceptions were disguised within EFT's scientific and objectivist frameworks was formed based on this contextualization. One way that Enlightenment philosophy contributed to increasing individual freedom was by relocating moral sources within the individual, which led to a configuration of the self that is reflected in theories like EFT. Broadly, the assumptions that were surfaced reflected philosophical ideas promulgated by Descartes, Locke, Kant and Rousseau, as well as essential ideas from Expressivist and Romantic philosophies in general. Several themes were identified through the interpretation: The Reduction and Reification of Emotion as a Basic Building Block, The Emotional Brain and Interiorized Emotion, Emotion Scheme and the World Inside Our Brain, Immunity from Cultural Influence, Emotion Transformation as a Return to Grace, Internal Guide and the Voice of Nature, and Uniting of the Expressivist and Instrumental Stance. Examining the assumptions of EFT revealed how moral assumptions can become concealed within a mainstream psychotherapy theory, which in turn helped to expl (open full item for complete abstract)

M.A. (Master of Arts in English), Ohio Dominican University, 2018, English

Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales contains some of the literary world's most interesting characters. Among the myriad of pilgrims who undertake a religious journey and share their stories along the way is his fascinating Prioress. She is the subject of study at both the secondary and post-secondary levels of education, and yet the nature of the study is quite varied and inconsistent and there is often a disconnect between the two. In this paper, I provide an organized pedagogical approach to the teaching of Chaucer's Prioress at the high school level that will capitalize on and utilize a collection of best practices and literary theory. I begin by analyzing some of the more creative and effective instructional methods seen in high schools in the United States and around the world, arriving at the use of the Socratic Seminar as the best suited approach for the study of the Prioress at the high school level. Next, I explore literary criticism of Chaucer throughout the years in an effort to orient the reader to several methodologies, principally those practiced by D. W. Robertson, E. Talbot Donaldson, and Lee Patterson. In the next part of my paper, I suggest that students also create their own critical turn on the Prioress by utilizing a fusion between Roberson's Historicist and Donaldson's New Criticism theories. This fusion of theories is best represented in the study of Philosophical Hermeneutics, a theory first outlined by German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, and it best serves the study of the Prioress. Finally, I outline the pedagogical approach of using the Socratic Seminar and Philosophical Hermeneutics in the high school classroom. It is my goal to illustrate how the use of these two methods will help to provide an in-depth, rich educational experience for the students who study Chaucer and his Prioress in high school.

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Toledo, 2018, Foundations of Education

Peace education is an emerging and growing field of study that holds promise for the future survival of our species. This reconstructive project involves a process of comparative philosophical analyses between approaches to peace education, as well as between the approaches and the social context of Kuwait. It concerns the research question: what philosophical conception and approach to peace education is potentially most compatible with Kuwaiti culture? In this dissertation, I place particular focus on the following approaches to peace education: integrative, critical, Islamic, gender, and comprehensive. Using a relational hermeneutics method, I analyze the relative compatibility of these approaches to Kuwaiti culture. Based on a fusion of peace education horizons and Kuwait's cultural horizon, the following compatible elements emerge: reflection, dialogue, creative learning, and action. These elements form the framework to guide a potential Kuwaiti Approach to Peace Education (KAPE) proposed at the end of the dissertation. While I argue these elements must exist in a successful KAPE, I also contend that they only provide guidelines and a basic structure while the people of Kuwait have to actually complete and fulfill the framework through their own reflection, dialogue, creative learning, and action.

Psy. D., Antioch University, 2017, Antioch Seattle: Clinical Psychology

Military mental health clinicians (MMHCs) have been essential to Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. They served in extreme stress conditions, including on the frontlines. As co-combatant/clinician, the MMHC bridged unique perspectives on the effects of war stress experienced by Active-Duty Service Members (ADSMs). To date, no study has focused uniquely on MMHCs narratives as they provided care from this multiple perspective. This investigation was carried out from a phenomenological “Duty to military mission or service member?” This dilemma could not be reconciled that resulted in unrealized fulfillment of duty. MMHCs responses to unrealized duty defined an overarching polarity of Integrity—Corruption. A hermeneutic approach was used to identify the author&perspective. A single, open-ended question was asked of seven MMHCs about lived experiences while serving, resulting in in-depth interviews. These were textually coded. Though clinician positive and negative experiences were consistent with previous research, significant differences bear discussion. Following data analysis, participants identified duty as the superordinate theme that led to the question, #x2019;s relevant understandings before, during, and after the interview process. In reconstructing and contextualizing interview material, one finding was that MMHCs were required to operate in a place of turbulence between contradictory military and psychological traditions. Another finding concerned a growing divisive fissure between military and the public at-large, impacting reintegration efforts for those who serve. Public and governmental silence about traumas of ADSMs and MMHCs suggests a parallel, cultural dissociation occurring about war trauma. A question is posed if diagnosing trauma as pathology is a further way that external, contextual forces are consistently kept unformulated, distanced, or denied. Rather than locating the etiology and treatment entirely within the individual—resulti (open full item for complete abstract)

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2017, Leadership and Change

The dissertation is a deep study of an iconic 20th century female, African American leader whose acclaim developed not only from her remarkable first generation post-Reconstruction Era beginnings, but also from her mid-century visibility among Negroes and some Whites as a principal spokesperson for her people. Mary Jane McLeod Bethune arose from the Nadir- the darkest period for Negroes after the Civil War and three subsequent US Constitutional Amendments. She led thousands of Negro women, despite social adversity, to organize around their own aspirations for improved social and material lives among America's diverse citizens., i.e. “the melting pot.” The subject of no fewer than thirty-two dissertation studies, numerable biographies, innumerable awards, and namesake educational institutions, Bethune ascended to public leadership roles. Her renown of the first five decades of the 20th century is reconstructed to be less enigmatic for people of African descent, and more visible for other mainstream Americans. Remarkably, she employed a uniquely crafted philosophy of interactional destiny for the world's “races” anchored in her brand of Christian evangelism. Bethune's uniquely early feminist worldview and strategies for inter-racial cooperation, different than the worldviews of some of her contemporaries, achieved much social capital and opened doors of opportunity for herself and countless others through a brief federal government position, and organized women's work before 1955. Since much of her meta-narrative was riddled with hagiography and myth, this study has fettered out some myths and eradicated some of the hagiography. The study combines primary sources, secondary sources, photo-ethnography, and hermeneutics to illuminate another pathway for future leadership students and organization developers to appropriate aspects of Bethune's 20th century leadership performance as their own. Unintended to merely applaud Dr. Bethune's leadership performance, this stud (open full item for complete abstract)

Psy. D., Antioch University, 2017, Antioch Seattle: Clinical Psychology

There is little consensus within research and literature on how best to approach the supervisory relationship and experience. This lack of consensus is concerning due to the central role that supervision has in shaping each generation of clinicians and psychotherapists. Relational theory offers a philosophical grounding for inquiring as to what individuals find most significant in their experiences of supervisory relationships. In order to emphasize mutuality within a clearly asymmetrical arrangement, both supervisors and supervisees were interviewed in a qualitative study. Twenty individuals; 10 supervisors and 10 supervisees participated. The study was designed to shed light on significant and impactful experiences from each stakeholder's position to help identify cultural artifacts that are embodied and transmitted in supervision. Three primary themes arose from the data: Emotional Experiences, Growth and Learning Processes, and Self and Others. The findings supported relational approaches to supervision, which were effective in supporting supervisees and fostering mutuality and connection in participants' supervisory experiences. This research study highlighted artifacts within the field of psychology such as supervisory evaluation, presence, and dynamics of oppression, and liberation.

Doctor of Philosophy in Urban Studies and Public Affairs, Cleveland State University, 2017, Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs

This study explores the governance of an urban watershed using a combination of interpretive approach and resilience framework. The key idea within resilience and social ecological systems (SESs) discourse is to link 'human systems' (e.g. communities, society, economy) with 'natural systems' (e.g. ecosystems, biophysical elements) and to understand the interconnections and feedbacks between these systems. Under resilience thinking SESs (e.g. urban environmental) are viewed as complex adaptive systems, therefore, adaptive governance is key for maintaining long-term sustainability of these systems. With this study, I examine the case of the Cuyahoga River in Northeast Ohio, an urban watershed with legacy pollution and water quality issues, which in the recent times has also been recognized as an icon in water management. To do so, I conducted an interpretive analysis using a combination of political ethnography, interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA), and social network mapping. Specifically, I conduct a characterization and analysis of an urban watershed, bringing the resilience and SES frameworks to the study of urban SESs. I also develop a conceptual framework for analyzing urban watersheds based on SES dynamics and resilience attributes that are critical for building adaptive capacity, explicitly focusing on governance and management influences. Further, I explore what the networked approach to watershed governance in the Cuyahoga River watershed mean to the governance actors in terms of building long-term adaptive capacity. I suggest that using approach and through continued dialogue and discourse, governance actors create and bind policy meanings that overtime transforms governance. I suggest that the lessons drawn from this study will provide insights for watershed managers, public agencies, and non-governmental organizations to enhance their long-term capacity-building mechanisms and processes that support watershed planning, policy development, implemen (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1987, Graduate School

MARCH, University of Cincinnati, 2016, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Architecture

Despite a growing neglect for place architecture in the contemporary worldview, the subconscious experiential and psychic importance of places in shaping our firsthand experience of the world has not decreased as society has continued to speed down the track of modernization. The homogenization of place through globalization, introduction of digital “place” and motivations of capitalism have together catalyzed a reductive design formula streamlined for perpetuating merely superficial projections of nostalgic place-images. The complex relationships and qualities of places cultivate the capacity for human dwelling, which is the primary means by which humans understand the always already present meanings and contexts of their lived situations within the inexhaustible background of our human existence known as the lifeworld. By revealing the genius loci, or spirit of place, through a continual ontological process of interpretation known as hermeneutics, it is possible to engage a dialogue between place and audience capable of addressing unique local conditions such as culture, history, geography and environment through the work of place architecture to uncover and augment spontaneous meaningful experiences within the lifeworld.

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), University of Dayton, 2015, Theology

This dissertation seeks to understand and evaluate the hermeneutical logic and apologetic mentality behind American evangelicalism's appeal to biblical inerrancy during its twentieth- and twenty-first-century battles for the Bible. In nuanced agreement with Christian Smith's charge that evangelicalism's pervasive interpretive pluralism renders appeals to biblical inerrancy meaningless, I argue that what drives the perpetuation of such appeals is a fundamental desire for epistemic certainty in the face of what is perceived to be a devastating subjectivism. This is a certainty said to be obtained and maintained by an oversimplified conception of sola scriptura and a biblical hermeneutic replete with modernistic assumptions about textual objectivity and the effects of history and tradition upon interpretation. After attending to the intersection of the hermeneutical theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer with those of high-profile evangelicals James Packer and Clark Pinnock, I propose the adoption of a more community-centered conception of biblical authority alongside a rehabilitation of faith as trust in God's own faithfulness.

Psy. D., Antioch University, 2015, Antioch Seattle: Clinical Psychology

Placebo response has been an elusive phenomenon in the fields of medicine, medical research, and psychology. Even though it has been heavily utilized as a comparator treatment in double-blind psychopharmacological studies, the reliable definition and consistent understanding of placebo response are missing. In this contextual exploration, I outlined the state of current placebo response research and variable rates of placebo response reported in double-blind studies. I identified the gap in the literature—lack of consistent understanding of placebo response—that has led to a waste of resources by the psychopharmacological research industry. Further, I compared and contrasted the current inconsistent Western medical understanding of placebo as outlined by a leading expert on placebo research (Fabrizio Benedetti) and the potential new understanding of placebo response based on philosophical concepts of Hans-Georg Gadamer. I concluded that placebo response appeared to be a contextual phenomenon and therefore could be expected to behave similarly to other contextually based healing modalities as described by Gadamer. I determined that the positivistic approach of modern medical research was not an appropriate method for understanding, researching, or defining placebo. Thus, I argued that psychopharmacological research could be improved by changing the way it used placebo in its control groups and maximizing placebo response in both placebo and active treatment groups instead of minimizing it. I argued that this new approach would bring the drug trial environment closer to the real life treatment environment and improve the quality of the drug trials. The electronic version of this dissertation is at AURA: Antioch University Repository and Archive, http://aura.antioch.edu/ and OhioLINK ETD Center, https://etd.ohiolink.edu

Doctorate in Sacred Theology (S.T.D.), University of Dayton, 2005, International Marian Research Institute

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Doctorate in Sacred Theology (S.T.D.), University of Dayton, 1995, International Marian Research Institute

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