Knowing The Way: Scriptural Imagination and the Acts of the Apostles

In this dissertation, I offer a pedagogical proposal for learning the Christian Scriptures guided by respect for the nature of the reader and the integrity of the biblical text. Christian educators have profitably developed recent theoretical interest in the body’s role in human meaning with regard to worship and praxis methodologies, but the implications of this research for communal study of the biblical text merit further development. I make the case for adopting scriptural imagination as the goal of pedagogically constructed encounters with the Christian Scriptures. The argument proceeds through a series of questions addressing both sides of the text/reader encounter.

Chapter one considers the question “what is the nature of the reader and, subsequently, the shape of the reader’s ways of knowing?” This investigation into recent literature on the body’s involvement in human knowing includes related epistemological shifts with Christian education. On the basis of this survey, imagination emerges as a compelling designator of an incorporative, constructive creaturely capacity that gives rise to a way of being in the world. Teachers of Scripture who intend to participate in Christian formation should account for the imagination’s centrality for all knowing. After briefly situating this proposal within a theological account of creatureliness, I make the initial case for Scriptural imagination as a pedagogical aim.

Imagination as creaturely capacity addresses the first guiding value, but does this proposal also respect the integrity and nature of the biblical text, and specifically of biblical narratives? In response, in chapter two I take up the Acts of the Apostles as a potential test case and exemplar for the dynamics pertinent to the formation of imagination. Drawing on secondary literature on the genre and literary features of Acts, I conclude that Acts coheres with this project’s explicit interest in imagination as a central component of the process of Christian formation in relationship to the Scriptures.

Chapters three and four each take up a pericope from Acts to assess whether the theoretical perspectives developed in prior chapters generate any interpretive payoff. In each of these chapters, a particular story within Acts functions as a test case for readings of biblical narratives guided by a concern for scriptural imagination. Each of these chapters begins with further theoretical development of some element of imaginal formation. Chapter three provides a theoretical account of practices as they relate to imagination, bringing that theory into conversation with Peter’s engagement in hospitality practices with Cornelius in Acts 10:1-11:18. Chapter four discusses the formative power of narratives, with implications for the analysis of Paul’s shipwreck in Acts 27:1-28:16.

In the final chapter, I offer a two-part constructive pedagogical proposal for reading scriptural narratives in Christian communities. First, I suggest adopting resonance above relevance as the goal of pedagogically constructed encounters with the Scriptures. Second, I offer three ways of reading with the body, including the physical, ecclesial, and social bodies that shape all learning. I conclude by identifying the importance of scriptural imagination for Christian formation and witness in the twenty-first century.

Temporal Coding of Volumetric Imagery

'Image volumes' refer to realizations of images in other dimensions such as time, spectrum, and focus. Recent advances in scientific, medical, and consumer applications demand improvements in image volume capture. Though image volume acquisition continues to advance, it maintains the same sampling mechanisms that have been used for decades; every voxel must be scanned and is presumed independent of its neighbors. Under these conditions, improving performance comes at the cost of increased system complexity, data rates, and power consumption.

This dissertation explores systems and methods capable of efficiently improving sensitivity and performance for image volume cameras, and specifically proposes several sampling strategies that utilize temporal coding to improve imaging system performance and enhance our awareness for a variety of dynamic applications.

Video cameras and camcorders sample the video volume (x,y,t) at fixed intervals to gain understanding of the volume's temporal evolution. Conventionally, one must reduce the spatial resolution to increase the framerate of such cameras. Using temporal coding via physical translation of an optical element known as a coded aperture, the compressive temporal imaging (CACTI) camera emonstrates a method which which to embed the temporal dimension of the video volume into spatial (x,y) measurements, thereby greatly improving temporal resolution with minimal loss of spatial resolution. This technique, which is among a family of compressive sampling strategies developed at Duke University, temporally codes the exposure readout functions at the pixel level.

Since video cameras nominally integrate the remaining image volume dimensions (e.g. spectrum and focus) at capture time, spectral (x,y,t,\lambda) and focal (x,y,t,z) image volumes are traditionally captured via sequential changes to the spectral and focal state of the system, respectively. The CACTI camera's ability to embed video volumes into images leads to exploration of other information within that video; namely, focal and spectral information. The next part of the thesis demonstrates derivative works of CACTI: compressive extended depth of field and compressive spectral-temporal imaging. These works successfully show the technique's extension of temporal coding to improve sensing performance in these other dimensions.

Geometrical optics-related tradeoffs, such as the classic challenges of wide-field-of-view and high resolution photography, have motivated the development of mulitscale camera arrays. The advent of such designs less than a decade ago heralds a new era of research- and engineering-related challenges. One significant challenge is that of managing the focal volume (x,y,z) over wide fields of view and resolutions. The fourth chapter shows advances on focus and image quality assessment for a class of multiscale gigapixel cameras developed at Duke.

Along the same line of work, we have explored methods for dynamic and adaptive addressing of focus via point spread function engineering. We demonstrate another form of temporal coding in the form of physical translation of the image plane from its nominal focal position. We demonstrate this technique's capability to generate arbitrary point spread functions.

Assessment of the Spatial and Temporal Distribution of Functional Connectivity in Resting-State BOLD fMRI

Recent research into resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has shown that the brain is very active during rest. This thesis work utilizes blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signals to investigate the spatial and temporal functional network information found within resting-state data, and aims to investigate the feasibility of extracting functional connectivity networks using different methods as well as the dynamic variability within some of the methods. Furthermore, this work looks into producing valid networks using a sparsely-sampled sub-set of the original data.

In this work we utilize four main methods: independent component analysis (ICA), principal component analysis (PCA), correlation, and a point-processing technique. Each method comes with unique assumptions, as well as strengths and limitations into exploring how the resting state components interact in space and time.

Correlation is perhaps the simplest technique. Using this technique, resting-state patterns can be identified based on how similar the time profile is to a seed region’s time profile. However, this method requires a seed region and can only identify one resting state network at a time. This simple correlation technique is able to reproduce the resting state network using subject data from one subject’s scan session as well as with 16 subjects.

Independent component analysis, the second technique, has established software programs that can be used to implement this technique. ICA can extract multiple components from a data set in a single analysis. The disadvantage is that the resting state networks it produces are all independent of each other, making the assumption that the spatial pattern of functional connectivity is the same across all the time points. ICA is successfully able to reproduce resting state connectivity patterns for both one subject and a 16 subject concatenated data set.

Using principal component analysis, the dimensionality of the data is compressed to find the directions in which the variance of the data is most significant. This method utilizes the same basic matrix math as ICA with a few important differences that will be outlined later in this text. Using this method, sometimes different functional connectivity patterns are identifiable but with a large amount of noise and variability.

To begin to investigate the dynamics of the functional connectivity, the correlation technique is used to compare the first and second halves of a scan session. Minor differences are discernable between the correlation results of the scan session halves. Further, a sliding window technique is implemented to study the correlation coefficients through different sizes of correlation windows throughout time. From this technique it is apparent that the correlation level with the seed region is not static throughout the scan length.

The last method introduced, a point processing method, is one of the more novel techniques because it does not require analysis of the continuous time points. Here, network information is extracted based on brief occurrences of high or low amplitude signals within a seed region. Because point processing utilizes less time points from the data, the statistical power of the results is lower. There are also larger variations in DMN patterns between subjects. In addition to boosted computational efficiency, the benefit of using a point-process method is that the patterns produced for different seed regions do not have to be independent of one another.

This work compares four unique methods of identifying functional connectivity patterns. ICA is a technique that is currently used by many scientists studying functional connectivity patterns. The PCA technique is not optimal for the level of noise and the distribution of the data sets. The correlation technique is simple and obtains good results, however a seed region is needed and the method assumes that the DMN regions is correlated throughout the entire scan. Looking at the more dynamic aspects of correlation changing patterns of correlation were evident. The last point-processing method produces a promising results of identifying functional connectivity networks using only low and high amplitude BOLD signals.

Temporal Regulation of LMP1 and Apoptosis Resistance After Primary EBV Infection

Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is a ubiquitous human pathogen that establishes a lifelong latent infection in over ninety percent of all adult humans worldwide. While typically benign, EBV has been causally associated with a number of human malignancies in the settings of immune suppression, genetic, and/or environmental factors. While a highly successful pathogen based on prevalence, the ability of the virus to immortalize human B cells (a stage of infection thought to be critical for the establishment of latency) is quite poor. We hypothesize that the interactions between the virus and the human host early after infection are ultimately important for the outcome of viral latency establishment. To answer this question we broadly profiled primary human B cells at both early and late times after EBV infection to assay both host mRNA expression and the host-driven response to apoptotic stimuli. We found that EBV infection induces host gene expression signatures early after infection that are functionally distinct from the gene expression program late after infection. These studies also led to the novel discovery that viral gene expression is controlled differently early after infection, including the delayed expression of a viral protein that is critical for the establishment of latency. Furthermore, we have also shown that EBV can use a single viral protein to alter and repress host apoptotic sensitivity in the face of an anti-viral apoptotic response.