Browsing by Subject "Hope"

ABSTRACTThis thesis is offers exilic texts as the basis for restoration for communities traumatized by displacement. The scriptural focus for the thesis is Jeremiah 30-33, the Book of Restoration. The purpose of the thesis is to provide tools for inner-city pastors to navigate the opportunities and challenges of displacement caused by gentrification. The thesis is fueled by the contrast between numerous studies that report the benefits of gentrification versus its ills experienced as a pastoral witness of the machinery of displacement in the northwest quadrant of Washington, D.C. In Dr. Ellen Davis’ work on Jeremiah, she shows Jeremiah’s painful growth into his prophetic role. This growth occurs through laments or “protests addressed to God” thus making it possible to “lay claim to realistic hope.” This birth of hope is in the beginning of the book in Jeremiah 1:10, “See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant,” with building and planting as themes for Jeremiah 30-33. Dr. Davis further explicates hope’s placement. Hope finds a concrete place economically through Jeremiah’s land purchase (Chapter 32:6-15) and socially through community building (chapters 30 and 31). Building upon this work, my thesis concludes that Book of Restoration provides a relevant and effective model of restoration for today’s church.

Marketers seek to create and consumers seek to cultivate a variety of positive emotional experiences. Despite their importance to consumer behavior, researchers have lacked a clear understanding of the distinct behavioral consequences of specific positive emotions. My dissertation examines how different positive emotions (e.g., hope, love, and pride) can differentially affect consumers' decisions and behaviors. I find that positive emotions can not only be differentiated but also that specific positive emotions lead to distinctly different patterns of consumption behavior, such as considering more options, donating in different ways, engaging in more effortful actions, or performing more socially conscious consumption behaviors benefiting distant others. I find important differences both with momentary emotional experiences and downstream consequences of chronic emotional experiences.

Positive emotions differ reliably in the degree to which they create a lens of problem-solving, social connection, and perceived control. For example, I find that positive emotions characterized by a social connection lens (e.g., love and gratitude) lead to increases in socially conscious behaviors benefiting distant others. The tendency to perceive one's environment through a problem-solving lens (which characterizes hope and interest but not love and gratitude) leads to larger consideration sets and engagement in more effortful environmental actions. I also examine how positive emotions characterized by different lenses, such as perceived control (e.g., pride) and social connection (e.g., love), produce distinct behaviors within the same consumption context (e.g., giving in different ways in response to a fundraising appeal). Five studies demonstrate that positive emotions can be characterized in ways that allow prediction of distinct forms of broadening and specific consumption behaviors.

As many theologians and pastors have pointed out, there is much fertile ground to be discovered in combining worship with intentional pastoral care and vice versa. This concept of pastoral care being integrated into worship is rooted in the theology of an incarnational God who is intimately involved with our daily lives. When we worship God, we encounter God’s presence, which is inherently full of grace, mercy, and love. There are times in our lives when this encounter is desperately needed for what we refer to as “healing.” Unlike physical healing, spiritual and mental healing often requires that which goes beyond the body, yet involves the body. Worship services can offer this.

As a pastor, I have taken vows to walk with people through life, to care for and nurture them spiritually. A large part of this responsibility is leading them in worship and helping them make sense of their lives, as well as helping them find words to express their life experiences as they commune with God.

This thesis will explore how the Protestant Church has ministered to congregants (or failed to minister to them) through two specific life experiences: miscarriage and sexual abuse. Through surveys and interviews, I will share real stories and examples of how these individuals felt cared for (or uncared for). Finally, I will offer new liturgy for worship services that might offer pastoral care to people in similar situations. Each service will include liturgy, suggested music, Scripture passages recommended for a sermon, and ideas for interactive elements that will allow people to acknowledge their feelings and stand together in community while turning to God for hope and healing.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the book of Genesis as a functioning literary whole, orienting

post-exilic Persian-era Judeans toward their ideal future expectations. While many have

contrasted Genesis' account of origins with the prophetic books' account of the future, this work

argues that Genesis narrates Israel's origins (and the world's) precisely in order to ground Judean

hopes for an eschatological restoration. Employing a speech-act linguistic semiotics, this study

explores the temporal orientation of Genesis and its indexical pointing to the lives and hopes of

its Persian-era users. Promises made throughout Genesis apply not only to the characters of

traditional memory, but also to those who preserved/ composed/ received the text of Genesis.

Divine promises for Israel's future help constitute Israel's ongoing identity. Poor, sparsely

populated, Persian-ruled Judea imagines its mythic destiny as a great nation exemplifying (and

spreading) blessing among the families of the earth, dominating central Palestine in a new pan-

Israelite unity with neighboring Samaria and expanding both territory and population.

Genesis' narrative of Israel's origins and destiny thus dovetails with the Persian-era

expectations attested in Israel's prophetic corpus--a coherent (though variegated) restoration

eschatology. This prophetic eschatology shares mythic traditions with Genesis, using those

traditions typologically to point to Israel's future hope. Taken together, Genesis and the prophetic

corpus identify Israel as a precious seed, carrying forward promises of a yet-to-be-realized

creation fruitfulness and blessing. Those who used this literature identify their disappointments

and tragedies in terms of the mythic destruction and cursing that threaten creation but never

extinguish the line of promise. The dynamic processes of Genesis' usage (its composition

stretching back to the pre-exilic period, and its reception stretching forward to the post-Persian

era) have made Genesis an etiology of Israel's expected future--not of its static present. Because

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this future will be fully realized only in the coming divine visitation, Genesis cannot be attributed

to an anti-eschatological, hierocratic establishment. Rather, it belongs to the same Persian-era

Judean synthesis which produced the restoration eschatology of the prophetic corpus. This

account of Genesis contributes to a canonical understanding of Second Temple Hebrew literature;

prophetic scrolls and Pentateuchal (Torah) scrolls interact to form a textually based Israelite

identity, founded on trust in a divinely promised future.

As Christians in the United States struggle to sustain hope in the face of global economic, environmental, military, and poverty crises, the most popular source of theological hope for preachers and congregations is that of Jürgen Moltmann and the Moltmannian hope that draws on his work. Moltmannian theology eschews close connections with more-canonically established doctrines of hope, claiming instead on a future-based, this-worldly eschatology that hopes in the God who suffers. An exclusive reliance on a Moltmannian theology of hope deprives the church of crucial resources for a robust eschatological hope and its practices. Critical attention to additional streams of of theologial hope, and to applicable discourses within and without Christian theology, provides the church with strength and resilience to sustain a distinctly Christian theological hope through and beyond disaster, despair, suffering, and death. Jesus Christ, the perfect hope, embodies the life -- earthly and eternal -- of humanity and its eschatological end, a life in which humans can participate, through grace and discipleship.

To make this argument, I survey characteristics of Moltmannian hope and then identify costs of a theological hope that relies exclusively on Moltmannia resources. I review a Patristic and Thomistic grammar of theological hope and its accompanying grammar of God; and I explore possible contributions to theological hope from an assortment of contemporary conversations outside conventionally-identified areas of Christian hope. I conclude with two suggestions for ecclesial formation of Christians in theological hope.