Reading Between the Lines: The Potential of Popular Young Adult Fiction in Adolescent Spiritual Formation

Popular culture is a powerful, shaping force in the lives of teenagers between the ages of fourteen through eighteen in the United States today. This dissertation argues the importance of popular fiction for adolescent spiritual formation and it investigates that importance by exploring the significance of narrative for theology and moral formation. The dissertation employs mythic and archetypal criticism as a tool for informing the selection and critique of narratives for use in adolescent spiritual development and it also incorporates insights gained from developmental psychology to lay the groundwork for the development of a curriculum that uses young adult fiction in a program of spiritual formation for teenagers in a local church setting. The dissertation defends the power of narrative in Christian theology and concludes that narrative shapes the imagination in ways that alter perception and are important for the faith life of teenagers in particular. I go on to argue that not all narratives are created equal. In using literary myth criticism in concert with theology, I use the two disciplines’ different aims and methods to fully flesh out the potential of theologies intrinsic to works meant for a largely secular audience. The dissertation compares various works of young adult fiction (M.T. Anderson’s Feed and Terry Pratchett’s Nation in dialogue with a theology of creation; Marcus Zusak’s I am the Messenger and Jerry Spinelli’s Stargirl in dialogue with salvation and saviors; and the four novels of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight saga in dialogue with a theology of hope (eschatology). The dissertation explores how each theme surfaces (even if only implicitly) from both literary and theological standpoints. The dissertation concludes with a sample four-week lesson plan that demonstrates one way the theological and literary critique can be formed into a practical curriculum for use in an adolescent spiritual development setting. Ultimately, this dissertation provides a framework for how practitioners of young adult formation can select, analyze, and develop materials for their teenagers using new works of popular young adult fiction. The dissertation comes to the conclusion that popular fiction contains a wealth of material that can challenge and shape young readers’ own emerging theology.

Adaptive Neural Models of Queuing and Timing in Fluent Action

Temporal structure in skilled, fluent action exists at several nested levels. At the largest scale considered here, short sequences of actions that are planned collectively in prefrontal cortex appear to be queued for performance by a cyclic competitive process that operates in concert with a parallel analog representation that implicitly specifies the relative priority of elements of the sequence. At an intermediate scale, single acts, like reaching to grasp, depend on coordinated scaling of the rates at which many muscles shorten or lengthen in parallel. To ensure success of acts such as catching an approaching ball, such parallel rate scaling, which appears to be one function of the basal ganglia, must be coupled to perceptual variables, such as time-to-contact. At a fine scale, within each act, desired rate scaling can be realized only if precisely timed muscle activations first accelerate and then decelerate the limbs, to ensure that muscle length changes do not under- or over-shoot the amounts needed for the precise acts. Each context of action may require a much different timed muscle activation pattern than similar contexts. Because context differences that require different treatment cannot be known in advance, a formidable adaptive engine-the cerebellum-is needed to amplify differences within, and continuosly search, a vast parallel signal flow, in order to discover contextual "leading indicators" of when to generate distinctive parallel patterns of analog signals. From some parts of the cerebellum, such signals controls muscles. But a recent model shows how the lateral cerebellum, such signals control muscles. But a recent model shows how the lateral cerebellum may serve the competitive queuing system (in frontal cortex) as a repository of quickly accessed long-term sequence memories. Thus different parts of the cerebellum may use the same adaptive engine system design to serve the lowest and the highest of the three levels of temporal structure treated. If so, no one-to-one mapping exists between levels of temporal structure and major parts of the brain. Finally, recent data cast doubt on network-delay models of cerebellar adaptive timing.

Isoperimetric Partitioning: A New Algorithm for Graph Partitioning

Temporal structure is skilled, fluent action exists at several nested levels. At the largest scale considered here, short sequences of actions that are planned collectively in prefronatal cortex appear to be queued for performance by a cyclic competitive process that operates in concert with a parallel analog representation that implicitly specifies the relative priority of elements of the sequence. At an intermediate scale, single acts, like reaching to grasp, depend on coordinated scaling of the rates at which many muscles shorten or lengthen in parallel. To ensure success of acts such as catching an approaching ball, such parallel rate scaling, which appears to be one function of the basal ganglia, must be coupled to perceptual variables such as time-to-contact. At a finer scale, within each act, desired rate scaling can be realized only if precisely timed muscle activations first accelerate and then decelerate the limbs, to ensure that muscle length changes do not under- or over- shoot the amounts needed for precise acts. Each context of action may require a different timed muscle activation pattern than similar contexts. Because context differences that require different treatment cannot be known in advance, a formidable adaptive engine-the cerebellum-is needed to amplify differences within, and continuosly search, a vast parallel signal flow, in order to discover contextual "leading indicators" of when to generate distinctive patterns of analog signals. From some parts of the cerebellum, such signals control muscles. But a recent model shows how the lateral cerebellum may serve the competitive queuing system (frontal cortex) as a repository of quickly accessed long-term sequence memories. Thus different parts of the cerebellum may use the same adaptive engine design to serve the lowest and highest of the three levels of temporal structure treated. If so, no one-to-one mapping exists between leveels of temporal structure and major parts of the brain. Finally, recent data cast doubt on network-delay models of cerebellar adaptive timing.