An Historical and Theological Analysis of Campus Crusade for Christ's Evangelistic Practice in Two American University Contexts

This dissertation, an exercise in practical theology, consists of a critical conversation between the evangelistic practice of Campus Crusade for Christ in two American university contexts, Bryan Stone's ecclesiologically grounded theology of evangelism, and William Abraham's eschatologically grounded theology of evangelism. It seeks to provide these evangelizing communities several strategic proposals for a more ecclesiologically and eschatologically grounded practice of evangelism within a university context. The current literature on evangelism is long on evangelistic strategy and activity, but short on theological analysis and reflection. This study focuses on concrete practices, but is grounded in a thick description of two particular contexts (derived from qualitative research methods) and a theological analysis of the ecclesiological and eschatological beliefs embedded within their evangelistic activities. The dissertation provides an historical overview of important figures, ideas, and events that helped mold the practice of evangelism inherited by the two ministries of this study, beginning with the famous Haystack Revival on Williams College in 1806. Both ministries, Campus Crusade for Christ at Bowling Green State University (Ohio) and at Washington State University, inherited an evangelistic practice sorely infected with many of the classic distortions that both Abraham and Stone attempt to correct. Qualitative research methods detail the direction that Campus Crusade for Christ at Bowling Green State University (Ohio) and Washington State University have taken the practice of evangelism they inherited. Applying the analytical categories that emerge from a detailed summary of Stone and Abraham to qualitative data of these two ministries reveals several ways evangelism has morphed in a manner sympathetic to Stone's insistence that the central logic of evangelism is the embodied witness of the church. The results of this analysis reveal the subversive and pervasive influence of modernity on these evangelizing communities—an influence that warrants several corrective strategic proposals including: 1) re-situating evangelism within a reading of the biblical narrative that emphasizes the present, social, public, and realized nature of the gospel of the kingdom of God rather than simply its future, personal, private, and unrealized dimensions; 2) clarifying the nature of the evangelizing communities and their relationship to the church; and 3) emphasizing the virtues that characterize a new evangelistic exemplar who is incarnational, intentional, humble, and courageous.

A Self-Organizing Neural Model of Motor Equivalent Reaching and Tool Use by a Multijoint Arm

This paper describes a self-organizing neural model for eye-hand coordination. Called the DIRECT model, it embodies a solution of the classical motor equivalence problem. Motor equivalence computations allow humans and other animals to flexibly employ an arm with more degrees of freedom than the space in which it moves to carry out spatially defined tasks under conditions that may require novel joint configurations. During a motor babbling phase, the model endogenously generates movement commands that activate the correlated visual, spatial, and motor information that are used to learn its internal coordinate transformations. After learning occurs, the model is capable of controlling reaching movements of the arm to prescribed spatial targets using many different combinations of joints. When allowed visual feedback, the model can automatically perform, without additional learning, reaches with tools of variable lengths, with clamped joints, with distortions of visual input by a prism, and with unexpected perturbations. These compensatory computations occur within a single accurate reaching movement. No corrective movements are needed. Blind reaches using internal feedback have also been simulated. The model achieves its competence by transforming visual information about target position and end effector position in 3-D space into a body-centered spatial representation of the direction in 3-D space that the end effector must move to contact the target. The spatial direction vector is adaptively transformed into a motor direction vector, which represents the joint rotations that move the end effector in the desired spatial direction from the present arm configuration. Properties of the model are compared with psychophysical data on human reaching movements, neurophysiological data on the tuning curves of neurons in the monkey motor cortex, and alternative models of movement control.