Theology

Theology is about God and Creation, or more precisely perhaps about our ideas of them, how they are formed and somewhat justified, although it is stressed that they can be neither proved nor disproved. This book is a thematic compilation drawn from past works by the author over a period of thirteen years

Child As Metaphor: Colonialism, Psy-Governance, and Epistemicide

This paper mobilizes transdisciplinary inquiry to explore and deconstruct the often-used comparison of racialized/colonized people, intellectually disabled people and mad people as being like children. To be childlike is a metaphor that is used to denigrate, to classify as irrational and incompetent, to dismiss as not being knowledge holders, to justify governance and action on others’ behalf, to deem as being animistic, as undeveloped, underdeveloped or wrongly developed, and, hence, to subjugate. We explore the political work done by the metaphorical appeal to childhood, and particularly the centrality of the metaphor of childhood to legitimizing colonialism and white supremacy. The article attends to the ways in which this metaphor contributes to the shaping of the material and discursive realities of racialized and colonized others, as well as those who have been psychiatrized and deemed “intellectually disabled”. Further, we explore specific metaphors of child-colony, and child-mad-“crip”. We then detail the developmental logic underlying the historical and continued use of the metaphorics of childhood, and explore how this makes possible an infantilization of colonized peoples and the global South more widely. The material and discursive impact of this metaphor on children’s lives, and particularly children who are racialized, colonized, and/or deemed mad or “crip”, is then considered. We argue that complex adult-child relations, sane-mad relations and Western-majority world relations within global psychiatry, are situated firmly within pejorative notions of what it means to be childlike, and reproduce multi-systemic forms of oppression that, ostensibly in their “best interests”, govern children and all those deemed childlike

The Information Literacy Imperative in Higher Education

This article contends that information literacy should be considered a standard component in a 21st century liberal education. It explores the role of libraries and librarians within this context while contrasting the Google it mentality with deep researching and critical thinking about information and the information-seeking process, both in libraries and in the free online environment

Memory in the Apocalyptic Archive: A Literary and Computer Textual Analysis of A Canticle for Leibowitz

This thesis analyzes A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. to argue that traditional literary analysis and digital humanities methods are often more effective when used in combination. Beginning with a literary analysis of memory and materiality in Canticle, this thesis also examines the same themes in a corpus of post-apocalyptic science fiction texts using topic modeling and compares the results of the two methods. Although previous scholarship on Canticle emphasizes the struggle between religion and science, examining cultural memory through the material remnants of the pre-apocalyptic society foregrounds the struggle between the Leibowitzean monks—who wish to preserve cultural memory—and the government—who plan to use pre-apocalyptic knowledge to gain the upper hand in conflict. Their struggle does not find a clear resolution in the novel and humanity seems doomed to an endless cycle of nuclear destruction. However, comparing Canticle to a topic model of a post-apocalyptic science fiction corpus suggests an explanation to Canticle’s ambiguous ending. By statistically determining the latent topics within a corpus of science fiction texts, a topic model produced the word children as the most significant term within a topic consisting of memory and materiality words such as book, story, year, and future. Passing on cultural memory to children therefore plays a significant role in many post-apocalyptic science fiction novels, but there are few children in Canticle to learn such lessons. Only the Leibowitzean monks concern themselves with the future that children represent, which leads humanity to destruction in the search for gratification

The Underappreciated Intersection of Science Fiction and Satire

This thesis considers, from a creative writer’s perspective, the largely untapped potential for combining the strengths of satire and science fiction to create stories that provide both escapism and real-world commentary without sacrificing one for the other. It discusses background information and examples of both genres, and then illustrates the principles discussed with three original short stories

Femininity in the position of the oppressed in Nino Ricci's "Lives of the Saints" : a Comparison to Nelly Arcan's "Putain" in Canadian and Quebec literary portrayals of contemporary womanhood

Nino Ricci, an award-winning English-speaking Italian descendant, and Nelly Arcan, suicidal Quebecker from Montreal, portray contemporary womanhood as seen through the lenses of oppression. In Ricci’s Lives of the Saints the figure of mother becomes a curse of the woman’s son, whose whole existence is conditioned by his mother’s incidental and adulterous pregnancy. The mother shifts from the position of an individual to the position of a symbol by becoming sinful representation of her disobedience in the relation to social rules. She is dominated by masculine gaze and rules established by men. Inversely acts Cynthia, the prostitute in Nelly Arcan’s Putain, who chooses her fate intentionally but who is equally conditioned by the social environment in which she grew up. Being a prostitute is an act of succumbing to masculine tyranny