Browsing by Subject "Regional studies"

This thesis identifies the local Protestant church as an intentionally purple space and demonstrates that the Church is positioned to bridge differences. Purple churches are one of the last trusted institutions where everyday people gather. The local congregation is one of the social institutions to equipped to confront division. Our culture will continue to hemorrhage decency and churches will atrophy unless Protestant church leaders focus on bringing our communities back together. My thesis argues that practices of sharing sacraments and rituals together, while also supporting deliberative and democratic habits, serve as the civic function of teaching congregations learn how to address and overcome the polarization characterizing our nation. I contend that purple churches are doing the excruciating and challenging work of whispering hope into this desecrated and shattered moment in our human experience. While it takes a few hours to burn a house to the ground or chop down a tree, it takes a great deal of intention, struggle, and investment to build a community of wholeness out of the ashes of our current political landscape. This is the work of purple churches. My thesis will offer tools to strengthen the purple churches that exist in every town across the U.S. and a blueprint for building a purple church culture within existing protestant churches who face political divisions and struggles among membership. Finally, my thesis also explores stories from scripture that support the work of purple churches and of congregations seeking unity without uniformity.

This dissertation explores the relationship between external shocks local labor markets and entrepreneurship. The first and main essay investigates the effects of a large firm's geographical expansion (anchor firm) on local worker transitions into startup employment through wage effects in industries economically proximate to the anchor firm. Using hand collected data on large firms' site searches matched to administrative Census microdata, I exploit lists of anchor firms' site selection process to employ a difference-in-differences approach to compare workers and employers in winning counties to those in counterfactual counties. Counties are balanced along a number of socio-economic characteristics as well as ex ante industry distribution, firm size distribution, and firm age distribution. The arrival of an anchor firm induces entrepreneurship in industries linked through input-output channels by a magnitude of 120 new establishments that account for over 2,300 jobs. Relative to young firms in counterfactual counties, these new firms grow 12% faster in five-year employment growth and have a 7% lower failure probability. These effects are strongest in the most specialized and knowledge-intensive industries. Attracting an anchor firm to account appears to have limited spillover effects in employment that are mainly driven by reorganization of incumbent firms in input-output industries with occupational similarity of the anchor firm that face rising labor costs.

The second essay provides a blueprint for understanding the dynamics surrounding mass layoffs and business closures. This essay creates a novel data set linking geocoded Business Registration data to public layoff notifications data. This data can be used to understand how local entrepreneurship can reduce unemployment spells and earnings penalties for low wage displaced workers. Workers eventually employed by startups experience faster post-displacement wage growth than those eventually employed by mature firms. In final essay, I provide motivation for research investigating the spatially heterogeneous effects the advancement of certain industries inhibit entrepreneurship in others. I decompose a Bartik employment measure of demand for a region's labor. The decomposition shows that the recovery from the Great Recession was led by capital-intensive industries (e.g., transportation manufacturing and machinery manufacturing) that are typically inversely associated with local entrepreneurship. Interestingly, the inverse association of these industries and entrepreneurship appears to spillover into other industries. These industries include transportation equipment manufacturing and machinery manufacturing. This set of observations motivates this dissertation's research agenda to understand the cross-industry relationships that drive an area's level of entrepreneurship and labor market dynamism.

This study examines the contemporary debate over proposals to revise the Japanese "Peace Constitution" from the perspective of its meaning to the Soka Gakkai. To the present, the LDP's chief target for revision has been the war- and military renunciation clauses of Article 9. In connection with its argument that Article 9 undermines Japan's national security, the LDP has made the specification of collective self-defense a prime focus of its efforts to produce a draft for a new Japanese Constitution. During the last decade the LDP's best chance to date to achieve this goal arose by the convergence of a number of domestic and international circumstances. However, in the end, the LDP was prevented from realizing its revision aims on account of opposition from its coalition partner, the Komeito, which itself sought to preserve Article 9 at the behest of its core constituent, the Soka Gakkai. After having been excommunicated from the Nichiren Shoshu in 1991 Gakkai leaders prioritized activism on behalf of Article 9 as the pivotal component of an innovative hermeneutical strategy devised to evince that the movement had retained its legitimacy through the split. By contextualizing this hermeneutical strategy within the Soka Gakkai's overall historical development and analyzing the streams of activity put into motion thereby until their eventual intersection (via the Komeito) with the LDP's reform agenda, it has been revealed that the chance to impact the Constitutional revision process has served a critical function in enabling the Soka Gakkai to demonstrate its legitimacy as a wholly independent lay religious movement, and thus to remain a viable factor within today's Japanese religious landscape.

Many first-century Jewish leaders considered the marginalized outside the reach of God’s mercy. But Jesus seemed to challenge this social and religious value. This study explores the paths to restoration for society’s outcasts in the Gospel of Luke, whether their outside status was the result of sinful “conduct” (prostitution, tax-collection, etc.) or a culturally-defined “condition” (blindness, leprosy, nationality, gender, etc.). I attempt to show that Jesus drew a distinction between the “conduct marginalized” and the “condition marginalized” and sought to meet their needs differently based on their proper classification. Jesus addressed the specific needs of these outsiders which avoided over-condemning on the one hand and premature restoration on the other hand. He did not regard the condition marginalized beyond the pale of redemption; he did not regard the conduct marginalized beyond the possibility of repentance. Both were worthy to hear the message of the gospel.

The Gospel of Luke provides unparalleled resources for my investigation. This Gospel emphasizes society’s outcasts more than the other Gospels, especially Gentiles, lepers, the poor, and women. According to Simeon, the Christ child will be responsible for the rise and fall of many in Israel (Luke 2:34) reversing the status imposed by culture on the powerful and the weak alike. Jesus’ warning that those who exalt themselves will be humbled while those who humble themselves will be exalted is repeated twice only in Luke’s Gospel (14:11; 18:14). Jesus inaugurates his public ministry by citing Isaiah’s liberating promises to the poor, the captives, the blind, and the oppressed (Luke 4:18). The dinner table in Luke 14 is occupied by the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame, while the entitled powerful “will not taste of my banquet,” Jesus says (Luke 14:16-24). Jesus tends unconditionally to invite these outcasts to gather to him on the “outside” (away from Jerusalem, away from Jewish leaders, etc.). Instead of perpetuating the condemnation of the condition marginalized, Jesus seems to invite their restoration by confronting the myth that some sin lies at the root of their condition.

At the same time that Luke elevates these condition marginalized, he also places a greater stress on “repentance” for the conduct marginalized than we find in the other Gospels. It is Luke’s Jesus, after all, who famously adds “to repentance” in 5:32 to the expression, “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” in Matthew 9:13 and Mark 2:17. It seems that some outcasts are victims of societal injustice while others are suffering the consequence of marginalization as a result of their own choices. To further complicate matters, we find Jesus dining with “tax collectors and sinners” throughout the Gospel of Luke. This table fellowship is noted and condemned by some Jewish leaders who find Jesus too welcoming. But Jesus rejects the insult that he is a “friend of tax collectors and sinners,” along with being labelled a glutton and a drunkard. Instead of unconditionally accepting the conduct marginalized, Jesus invites their repentance for community restoration.

Many additional questions are raised in the process of this research: Does the Gospel of Luke allow us to classify the marginalized as “conduct” or “condition” and, if so, who might fit into those categories (alternative category labels might be “active” and “passive” marginalized—as in those who actively contributed to their marginalization through their behavior and those who were passively marginalized through no fault of their own)? Do these categories still exist today? How much cultural luggage is involved in the station of the first century’s outcasts? Was Jesus more accepting of people than his followers are today? Did Jesus consider himself a friend of tax collectors and sinners, unconditionally welcoming them? Did he use table fellowship as a means to drawing sinners into a relationship with himself? Is it culturally objectionable to refuse anyone inclusion today, as it seemed culturally objectionable to welcome everyone in Jesus’ day?

The path to restoration for society’s outcasts in the Gospel of Luke ran through Jesus. How they were restored by Jesus, however, seemed to take on different forms depending on why that person was marginalized in the first place. This study concludes that those who were marginalize through no fault of their own (condition outcasts) were unconditionally redignified by Jesus, whereas those who were marginalized due to sin (conduct outcasts) were offered forgiveness in exchange for repentance. Jesus did not hesitate to classify people as sinners. Those who thus repented were celebrated with large meals fitting those found who were formally lost. Furthermore, Jesus directly confronted self-righteousness and those who were guilty of oppression. If we seek to model ourselves after Jesus, we may require a measure of correction that aligns us with this portrait of Jesus presented in Luke’s Gospel.

This thesis endeavors to understand and analyze the issue of hierarchy in the leadership structure of the Korean Methodist Church by using the lens of the Reformed Tradition. There are both pros and cons to its structure, for these not only helped the Korean Methodist Church to grow rapidly in a short period of time, but also brought about problems such as secularization or classism. Interestingly, in examining church history, the same issue of hierarchy emerges at the center of its leadership structure. Several factors have affected the development of a hierarchical structure within the church. Although these factors have varied depending on the cultural, periodical, and situational circumstances, the common thread is how the churches have utilized them to their benefit. This thesis first explores the original grounds and meanings of church offices by visiting their biblical and historical grounds. Second, it offers a broad survey of church history, especially in the early and medieval church. By examining church offices in history, one can see how these have developed and functioned to strengthen churches' power and authority, eventually bringing the 16th-century reformation of the church. The Korean Methodist Church, which emerged from this Reformed tradition, faces the same dynamic of church leadership structure. By exploring this dynamic, one may better understand how to structure church leadership more fruitfully.

Through a case study of Carteret County, North Carolina, this research explores historic and contemporary narratives about fishery resource-use issues (e.g., conflicts over ocean spaces and species, disputes over fisheries governance, competing claims about the value of fish and fishing) in order to contribute to nature-society research in the fields of political ecology, cultural and economic geography, and environmental history. This project has three main objectives: (1) To analyze how historic narratives about fish and fishing have changed over the past century; (2) To evaluate the resource-use narratives of contemporary commercial and recreational fishers; and (3) To examine the process of state fisheries policymaking.

This project employed discourse analysis to analyze historic newspaper articles, contemporary interviews with commercial and recreational fishers, and North Carolina Marine Fisheries Commission meeting records. This research showed increasing frictions between commercial and recreational fishers over time, precipitated by state regulatory decisions and increasingly divergent interpretations by fishers of the proper roles for fish in environmental, economic, and social systems. Commercial and recreational fishers had distinct ways of thinking about fishery resources, shaped by their personal fishing histories as well as larger socioeconomic trends. In particular, though both types of fishers would agree that `fish are valuable public resources that should not be wasted,' their definitions of value, public, and waste were very different. Further, both recreational and commercial narratives are expressed within the policy process, and most policymaker decisions are compromises between commercial and recreational arguments. Political alliances frequently shift, but Division of Marine Fisheries staff (and their reports) often display substantial power to influence decision-making. Fish stock assessments often serve as objects around which moral arguments are made about how fisheries should be managed and allocated.

Overall, this research indicates that valuing nature also means valuing particular types of interactions between human and nonhuman nature (in this case fish). Further, different modes of interacting with fishery resources over decades have worked to separate recreational and commercial fishers socially and politically (leading to clashes where they overlap spatially). Where these cultural politics matter most is in struggles over the purpose of different types of fish and the meaning of central concepts in fisheries management, as the outcomes have implications for both the practical use of resources and the character and scale of governing institutions.

Around the turn of the 20th century, under the influence of the West, China experienced a major shift in the paradigm of thinking and managing its religious scene: from Confucian fundamentalist or anticlerical to anti-superstition. The latter paradigm quickly gave rise to wholesale temple destruction.Inspired by Durkheim's theory of ritual, this topic--Temple Destruction--is broadly defined in this thesis. Any actions that impede temples from carrying out their rituals, whether it involves removing popular gods from local temples, refashioning temples into elementary schools and government offices, or banning processions to venerate gods, are categorized here as "temple destruction". Mainly relying on the Ba County Gazetteer published in the Republican era, this thesis explores the situation of temple destruction in this county from the Late Qing to 1936. It finds out that it was temples of local cults that faced the most severe blow. These destroyed temples can be further divided into two categories: one type, exemplified by the City God Temple, was open to the entire territorial community, while the other type, like the Yuwang Temple, functioned as immigrant provincial guildhalls会馆, which were open only to members from their respective provinces. These two types of temples are also different in the main causes of their destruction. Compared to the former, the destruction process of provincial guildhalls was more gradual, with longer time span. This thesis consists of two main chapters, each of which explores the history before and after the destruction of one type of temple. It argues that the history behind the temple shows us how the local community was shaken during the process of modernization.

Who we are and the world we live in is only discernable through the stories that shape our lives. Meaning, personality, and identity are each received via story. If one were to attempt to define oneself, such a person could only do so by using a story. One cannot understand personhood or action in the world without the narrative—it is uninterpretable without the story. Anything that we do has a story with it. Anything that we want to do will have a story with it—and when we in pastoral leadership help our people know, see, love, and understand the world and God, we will be telling them a story. In helping people understand their story in light of a larger story—they find the unity of their lives within the structure of the larger story—the story of God.The approach of this thesis has much to do with its storytelling nature. The goal is to use storytelling to communicate theological truth. Formatting the thesis in an imaginative short-story fashion to provide a robust and layered theological framework will lend to exploration that seeks to locate contemporary persons in the story of Scripture. The thesis takes ten central themes or subplots of the Gospel and portrays each in its own short story interwoven into an overarching story. Each section of the thesis focuses on a thematic expression of the Good News in a short-story method. Theological research and analysis for each follows in a 3-4-page essay in which I carefully analyze each story for the ways in which it expresses the theological concept in question. This provides a theological/literary interpretation of the story itself. Along with the 3–4-page essay, I provide a bibliography specific to the literary and theological concept of each chapter. In creating this collection, I hope to provide a unique resource for theological reflection that will be helpful for preachers, congregations, and anyone who’s willing to step into a story.