Browsing by Subject "pastoral"
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Item Open Access Speaking Into Silence: Services of Hope and Healing for Today's Congregations(2019) Strickland, JenniferAs 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.
Item Open Access Violent by Nature: Danger and Darkness in the Pastoral World(2022) Lee, ToriThis dissertation challenges the notion of pastoral as a rural utopia by exposing the violence and danger innate to the bucolic world. The classical tradition has historically understood the pastoral world as an idyllic paradise standing in opposition to the dangerous city, which it casts as Other. By combining approaches drawn from narratology and intertextuality with a lens of critical classical reception, I demonstrate the inaccuracy of this dichotomy. In doing so, I argue instead for a re-conception of the ancient pastoral landscape as a dark and dangerous setting that exists on a continuum with the urban environment. This dissertation critically reevaluates traditional scholarly conceptions in ancient literature by prioritizing non-canonical texts.After an introduction, the second chapter argues that sexual and intimate partner violence are integral parts of the pastoral world that scholars have willingly overlooked for centuries. I explore physical, sexual, and emotional abuse in pseudo-Theocritus, Calpurnius Siculus, and Nemesianus to show that the relative safety of the locus amoenus in Vergil’s Eclogues is the exception, not the rule. The third chapter confronts one of the signature structural elements of pastoral poetry, the song contest. It dissects the elements that make up an amoebean exchange to argue that these contests that purport to showcase only poetic competition are in fact infused with verbal abuse and physical agonism as well. The chapter includes a close reading of Calpurnius’s sixth eclogue, which fails to launch the expected contest at all due to an exaggerated profusion of insults that literalizes the metaphor of words as weapons—with violent consequences. Thus, violation and violence are woven into the very structure of the pastoral song exchange.
The fourth chapter explores the relationship between danger and didaxis in pastoral. By looking at Calpurnius 5 alongside Georgics 3, I argue that Calpurnius uses descriptions of danger as narratological tools to justify transitions to the didactic mode. Ultimately, however, I conclude that the dangers of the rural landscape are too numerous and ingrained for even the most thorough precautions to fully protect against them. Thus, by the fifth and final chapter, I maintain that danger is an innate and integral part of the pastoral sphere, just as it is presented in the urban sphere. I argue that the common binary constructed between city and country in literature is a false one. Just as characters travel between the two settings, sometimes in the course of a single poem, so do the dangers native to one place migrate back and forth between them. By looking at one of Theocritus’s urban mimes alongside his bucolics and Calpurnius’s seventh eclogue, I reframe the traditional conception of the pastoral sphere as a safe haven. Instead, it is a dystopia with danger, violence, and strife at its very core.