The Ministry of Evil" An Examination of the Popular Bitter-Sweet Theology

Sermon by William Fairfield Warren.

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.

The Cyclone Server Architecture: Streamlining Delivery of Popular Content

We propose a new technique for efficiently delivering popular content from information repositories with bounded file caches. Our strategy relies on the use of fast erasure codes (a.k.a. forward error correcting codes) to generate encodings of popular files, of which only a small sliding window is cached at any time instant, even to satisfy an unbounded number of asynchronous requests for the file. Our approach capitalizes on concurrency to maximize sharing of state across different request threads while minimizing cache memory utilization. Additional reduction in resource requirements arises from providing for a lightweight version of the network stack. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of our Cyclone server as a Linux kernel subsystem.

History, revolution and the British popular novel: historical fiction in the romantic age

“History, Revolution and the British Popular Novel” takes as its focus the significant role which historical fiction played within the French Revolution debate and its aftermath. Examining the complex intersection of the genre with the political and historical dialogue generated by the French Revolution crisis, the thesis contends that contemporary fascination with the historical episode of the Revolution, and the fundamental importance of history to the disputes which raged about questions of tradition and change, and the meaning of the British national past, led to the emergence of increasingly complex forms of fictional historical narrative during the “war of ideas.” Considering the varying ways in which novelists such as Charlotte Smith, William Godwin, Mary Robinson, Helen Craik, Clara Reeve, John Moore, Edward Sayer, Mary Charlton, Ann Thomas, George Walker and Jane West engaged with the historical contexts of the Revolution debate, my discussion juxtaposes the manner in which English Jacobin novelists inserted the radical critique of the Jacobin novel into the wider arena of history with anti-Jacobin deployments of the historical to combat the revolutionary threat and internal moves for socio-political restructuring. I argue that the use of imaginative historical narrative to contribute to the ongoing dialogue surrounding the Revolution, and offer political and historical guidance to readers, represented a significant element within the literature of the Revolution crisis. The thesis also identifies the diverse body of historical fiction which materialised amidst the Revolution controversy as a key context within which to understand the emergence of Scott’s national historical novel in 1814, and the broader field of historical fiction in the era of Waterloo. Tracing the continued engagement with revolutionary and political concerns evident in the early Waverley novels, Frances Burney’s The Wanderer (1814), William Godwin’s Mandeville (1816), and Mary Shelley’s Valperga (1823), my discussion concludes by arguing that Godwin’s and Shelley’s extension of the mode of historical fiction initially envisioned by Godwin in the revolutionary decade, and their shared endeavour to retrieve the possibility enshrined within the republican past, appeared as a significant counter to the model of history and fiction developed by Walter Scott in the post-revolutionary epoch.

Canon Ulick Bourke: cultural nationalism, popular politics and the Knock apparition

Accounts of the Knock Apparition, academic and devotional, always start by relating that the Virgin Mary, St Joseph, and St John the Evangelist appeared to fifteen people on a rainy Thursday evening at the south gable of Knock chapel, Co. Mayo, on 21 August 1879. They usually mention that the Land War was in progress. Despite the fact Knock supposedly receives one and a half million visitors a year, until three decades ago no scholar had examined accounts of the apparition. Recent work has sought to define the Knock Apparition in light of the Land War, the ‘devotional revolution’, which took place in Irish Catholicism in the quarter century prior to the apparition, and the influence of the parish priest, Archdeacon Bartholomew Cavanagh. This thesis acknowledges these factors, but contends that the single greatest force in shaping accounts of the apparition was Canon Ulick Joseph Bourke, one of the three priests on the commission of investigation into Knock. Furthermore, this thesis proves that Bourke’s role as a central figure in influencing the later Gaelic revival has been overlooked by scholars of cultural nationalism. By examining Bourke’s cultural nationalism and views on antiquity and language, as well as his politics and reaction to the Land War, this thesis argues that Bourke sought to create an orthodox version of the apparition which could be reconciled to his views on Irish Catholic identity, while serving as a bulwark against threats to the temporal power of the clergy. In addition to influencing accounts of the apparition through his role in interviewing the witnesses and recording their testimony, Bourke further shaped the narrative of the apparition by controlling its dissemination, to the extent that all accounts of Knock are based on a text largely created by him.

Popular culture, relational history, and the question of power in Palestine and Israel

The marginalization of popular culture in radical scholarship on Palestine and Israel is symptomatic of the conceptual limits that still define much Middle East studies scholarship: namely, the prevailing logic of the nation-state on the one hand and the analytic tools of classical Marxist historiography and political economy on the other. This essay offers a polemic about the form that alternative scholarly projects might take through recourse to questions of popular culture. The authors argue that close allention to the ways that popular culture "articulates" with broader political, social, and economic processes can expand scholarly understandings of the terrain of power in Palestine and Israel, and hence the possible arenas and modalities of struggle. © 2004 by the Institute for Palestine Studies. All rights reserved.

El saber técnico popular en la investigación y desarrollo de tecnologías apropiadas : el caso de los horticultores del parque Pereyra Iraola

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La proporción en la música

Presentamos parte de un trabajo de exploración en la didáctica de la matemática, en el cual desarrollamos un tema de gran importancia, como es la proporcionalidad, desde otras áreas, que si bien tienen este concepto como elemento fundamental, no han sido aprovechadas ni puestas en evidencia suficientemente dentro del campo de la enseñanza de la matemática, nos referimos a la música y al dibujo. También se toma la vida cotidiana como un campo de aplicación natural del concepto de proporcionalidad.

Aproximación matemática a la música

El presente trabajo profudiza sobre las nociones de nota musical e intervalo musical en sentido geométrico y aritmético. El concepto aritmético de nota musical aporta a los alumnos la idea de que una misma cosa (una nota) se puede mostrar con distintas apariencias(diferentes frecuencias), el concepto de nota musical se expone a partir del movimiento de dos móviles con movimiento uniforme. A partir de estos problemas dinámicos se da un procedimiento geométrico para determinar cuatro puntos en cuaterna armónica. Esta construcción proporciona un método para dividir armónicamente el intervalo de una octava mediante las notas tercera y quinta y permite construir acordes perfectos y comprender la razón de la diferente separación entre los trastes de una guitarra.

Níveis de conhecimentos matemáticos esperados dos estudiantes para acesso na universidade brasileira

O objetivo desde trabalho é relatar uma análise buscando identificar os conhecimentos matemáticos institucionalmente esperados pelo sistema educacional brasileiro para os estudantes concluintes do Ensino Médio do ano de 2011 tomando como base a avaliação do Exame Nacional do Ensino Médio – ENEM 2011, que atualmente é utilizada para o acesso pela grande maioria das universidades pública e privada. Para construir nosso instrumento de análise consideramos elementos da Teoria Antropológica do Didático de Chevallard (2001), as abordagens teóricas em termos de quadros segundo definição de Douady (1992) e níveis de conhecimento esperados dos estudantes conforme definição de Robert (1997). Nessa análise, buscamos identificar uma visão geral das relações pessoais institucionalmente esperadas dos estudantes, no que se refere aos conteúdos matemáticos, que tenham sido estudados pelos mesmos durante os 12 anos que compõem a Educação Básica no Brasil.

Investigação das habilidades e competências estatísticas de estudantes recém-ingressos em uma universidade pública brasileira

Educadores e pesquisadores, em âmbito internacional, vêm consolidando um campo de estudo a Educação Estatística. Suas principais discussões elucidam a importância da Estatística nas diversas áreas de conhecimento, em contraste à incompreensão de seu ensino descontextualizado e focado em cálculos. Para retratar essa realidade delineou-se essa pesquisa, com objetivo de identificar as habilidades e competências, atinentes ao Letramento Estatístico. Aplicou-se um instrumento com 20 itens em uma amostra de 200 estudantes. Ao realizar a análise de dados constatou-se que apresentaram mais habilidades para fazer inferências a partir de informações expressas em gráficos e para calcular medidas estatísticas. Já suas habilidades para resolver situações problemas e interpretar medidas estatísticas, são menores. A partir dessa pequisa, pode-se observar que as competências esperadas ainda não são plenamente contempladas, justificando a continuidade das pesquisas a fim de diagnosticar e nortear ações na Educação Estatística.

El problema isoperimétrico en la arquitectura, literatura, música…, en la naturaleza

Siempre me ha interesado la historia de las matemáticas cuando la resolución de problemas ha sido su columna vertebral. Ahora que estamos en el 2000, tenemos muy presente aquella famosa lista de 23 problemas dados por Hilbert hace 100 años.

Popular lectures report

This is a report of two lectures held by the London Mathematical Society: a) What Computers Cannot Do by Dr Alan Slomson; b) The Mathematics of Shrek by Dr Joan Lazenby.

Aplicación de modelos semióticos al análisis de poesía narrativa popular ecuatoriana difundida en audiovisuales

Se expone una fundamentación teórica, lógica y metodológica de tres modelos semióticos: los elementos y funciones de la comunicación de Jakobson; el modelo actancial de Greimas; y los mundos: real, referencia y posible de Eco, aplicados al análisis de poesía narrativa popular difundida en distintos formatos audiovisuales.