Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2024, English

This paper brings together Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Graham Greene's The End of the Affair (1951), and Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat (1970) to explore the landscape of secular modernity and femininity in twentieth-century Britain, ultimately illuminating the ways that modernity is haunted by persistent presence. Robert Orsi writes in his 2016 book History and Presence that modernity is characterized by a spiritual absence (a vacuum in which spiritual presence, God or otherwise, cannot be accessed), leaving the modern subject isolated and alienated. Three female characters in these novels — Miss Kilman, Sarah Miles, and Lise — experience this absence in various ways. Through Miss Kilman's story, Woolf's novel illustrates how absence is institutionally enforced in public society. Despite Woolf's identity as a secular author, Mrs. Dalloway demonstrates surprisingly spiritual themes. Catholic convert Greene later uses Sarah Miles' controversial journey towards faith and eventual sainthood to attempt to enforce presence. However, the varied critical reception of The End of the Affair revealed that its secular, modern readership was yet ready to accept such a blatant account of presence active in public. By the time Muriel Spark pens her biting and satirical novella in 1970, presence has disappeared entirely; Lise can only articulate that she is seeking “the lack of an absence.” I argue that The Driver's Seat becomes an experiment in what a world devoid of presence would look like; when society has so structurally and institutionally limited the modern subject's access to presence, she can only seek to escape absence, which underscores how women's “liberation” actually manifests itself in a secular world. This paper concludes with an examination of the modern novel as a sacred space within which readers can encounter presence.

Committee: David Fine (Advisor); Thomas Wendorf (Committee Member); Tereza Szeghi (Committee Member); Michelle Wood (Committee Member) Subjects: Gender Studies; Literature; Modern History; Modern Literature; Philosophy; Religion; Spirituality

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, Educational Studies

America's public schools are diversifying. This diversification demands that teacher preparation programs prepare novice teachers with a vision of teaching that accounts for cultural difference. Scholars like Gloria Ladson-Billings have done work on how teachers might move toward more culturally relevant teaching with all students, but Ladson-Billings herself observes the need for a more theoretical grounding for this kind of teaching. I investigate the vision of teaching found in the philosophies of Plato, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Dewey, Nel Noddings, and Paulo Freire to see if any of them offer the theoretical grounding for culturally relevant teaching. When these philosophies are found wanting, I turn my investigation to an organization doing the explicit work of preparing teachers to teach culturally Other students—Teach For America. I also suggest the philosophy of Charles Taylor offers useful principles for grounding culturally relevant teaching. Through historical and qualitative study, I use Teach For America as a case study of a teacher preparation program preparing teachers to teach diverse students. This dissertation offers lessons for all teacher preparation programs seeking to better do this work and for all teachers wishing to be culturally relevant in the classroom.

Committee: Bryan R. Warnick (Advisor); Winston C. Thompson (Committee Member); Jan Nespor (Committee Member); Ann Allen (Committee Member) Subjects: Education; Education History; Education Philosophy; Education Policy; Philosophy; Teaching

MARCH, University of Cincinnati, 2017, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Architecture

This thesis explores a relationship between people and the spaces they share. It studies both living and working, and the accidental interactions that may occur from shared space. It is guided by concepts laid out by Charles Taylor, which questions the overestimation of individualism in the contemporary American culture. It is a response to a philosophically driven notion that humans have a need to exist in relationship to each other. Subsequently, it responds to the secondary outcomes of this notion, namely the economic viability of a shared economy in the San Francisco Bay Area. Ultimately this thesis will lead to a design of a multi-use building that focuses on the two aforementioned items: living and working. These will translate into architecture as co-housing and co-working.

Committee: Udo Greinacher M.Arch. (Committee Chair); Michael McInturf M.Arch. (Committee Member) Subjects: Architecture

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, Germanic Languages and Literatures

Section One of the dissertation explicates the post-secular philosophical discourse between Jurgen Habermas and Charles Taylor, while Section Two analyzes contemporary German and American novels in which religious fundamentalism figures prominently. The genesis of Habermas' reflections on religion is shown within his overall philosophy, and is then compared and contrasted with Taylor's viewpoints. Their respective concepts of “translation” and “articulation” are extrapolated in an effort to highlight deficiencies in widely-held notions of the secular. The literary analysis of Fatah, Peters and Updike examines the way in which the authors aesthetically depict the dynamics of a religious-secular divide, thereby enhancing critical reflection on understandings of religion, secularism and their presumed or apparent dichotomy. Both the philosophical and literary discourses are guided by the fundamental question of how normativity arises-both within the individual subject and in social collectives.

Committee: Bernd Fischer (Advisor); May Mergenthaler (Committee Member); Robert Holub (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Germanic Literature; Literature; Philosophy

BA, Oberlin College, 2010, Politics

This thesis conducts a close reading of G.W.F. Hegel's theory of mutual recognition and Charles Taylor's contemporary reworking of the theory. It is argued that theories of mutual recognition contain a problematic bias toward unity and harmony that obscures the ways in which struggles for recognition are often incomplete and open to contestation. More specifically, what is subject to critique in this thesis is what I term a “genus-species” model of difference, which treats particular differences—-of individuals or of specific cultures—-as stable subsets of a broader genus. I contend that this model of difference, when applied to theories of recognition, risks two major problems: 1) it tends to overemphasize the importance of shared cultural frameworks to human agency, and thus potentially misrecognizes particular differences within these frameworks; 2) it fails to capture an important aspect of human freedom, which involves moving beyond established horizons of recognition to create new values. A different picture of recognition is suggested via the work of Theodor Adorno. The concept of mimesis, understood as the subject's ability to assimilate him or herself to a specific Other and grapple with his or her particularity, is advanced as an alternative to the totalizing horizons of recognition described by Hegel and Taylor, and thus as an alternative model of human freedom.

Committee: Sonia Kruks PhD (Advisor); Harlan Wilson PhD (Other) Subjects: Philosophy; Political Science

Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2011, Theology

The contemporary condition of secularity poses a unique environment in which the Church becomes incarnate in the world. The subject of secularity itself has been the focus of serious academic study, and two broad sources of this phenomenon can be drawn from the lifetime work of Charles Taylor: the rise of foundational epistemology and particular changes within the modern social imaginary. These two paradigm shifts have created a latent moral and religious skepticism within contemporary secular society in which it is generally accepted that complex moral and religious issues cannot be arbitrated by reason and must ultimately be decided on the basis of an individual's personal feeling. In this thesis, the author draws on an integration of studies by Charles Taylor and Bernard Lonergan to establish that intellectual, moral, and religious conversion form the basis for the act of knowing and therefore provide an adequate theological response to the problem of skepticism. Furthermore, the author examines the social imaginary particular to contemporary secular society in order to develop a means by which the Church is able draw on sacramentality, communion, catholicity, the liturgy, and cosmology to embody an incarnational spirituality in a secular age.

Committee: Dennis Doyle Ph.D. (Advisor); Anthony Godzieba Ph.D. (Committee Member); Cyril Orji Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Theology