Messianic freedom and the secular academy: educating the affections in a technological culture

Paper presented at the conf Faith, freedom and the academy: the idea of the university in the 21st century, Univ of Prince Edward Island, O 1-3 2004

Mediated Bodies: The construction of a Wife, Mother, and the Female Body in Television Sitcoms: Roseanne

After first examining several theoretical concepts related to the construction of gender on television and the way in which women are characterized, this paper examines the television show Roseanne to explore the way it changed the representation of a feminist on television. No longer did women have to be childless and career-minded to be equal to men or in some cases better than men, as the character Roseanne Conner reveals on the show. Rather, women were able to articulate their feminist outlooks through their opinions, expressions, and actions. I break the show into four distinct notions of gendered representations: socioeconomic status: the “choice” to work; women and the body: disrupting the “imperative” to be thin; husbands and wives: navigating the “second shift” in the home; and women as parents: resisting the “perfect parenting/perfect children” discourse

A Comedy of Errors or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Sensibility‐Invariantism about ‘Funny’

In this article, I argue that sensibility‐invariantism about ‘funny’ is defensible, not just as a descriptive hypothesis, but, as a normative position as well. What I aim to do is to make the realist commitments of the sensibility‐invariantist out to be much more tenable than one might initially think them to be. I do so by addressing the two major sources of discontent with sensibility‐invariantism: the observation that discourse about comedy exhibits significant divergence in judgment, and the fact that disagreements about comedy, unlike disagreements about, say, geography, often strike us as fundamentally intractable

Prisons, pipelines, and pedagogy: Diary of the birth of a behind-bars college program Part 2

The second in a two-part series on beginning a college program for prisoners

Dionysus Torn to Pieces: An Examination of The Sound and the Fury in Light of the Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche

Over the course of this thesis the author considers the problem of truth in life as manifested in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury by means of the Nietzschean conception of the Dionysian. The examination unfolds in a sequential analysis of the novel’s four sections, an analysis framed by Nietzsche’s four theses on “‘Reason’ in Philosophy:” the author considers the first section (Ben) symbolic of man’s subversion to what is directly before his eyes, and yet discovers in Ben’s idiocy a refutation of that same apparent reality in a presently-realized past, personified in Ben’s sister, Caddy; the bounds and liberties of perspective realized, the author considers how in the second section (Quentin) the limits and illusions of perspective defy rationality, and turn cultural truths into the heralds of their own apparent destruction yet aesthetic apotheosis; in the third section (Jason), the author discovers the hollow core of Jason’s morality, and ultimately recognizes in the final brother’s illusions and rationalities a meaningless martyrdom of a present believed by Jason to be denied him by the past; the author ultimately discovers what meaning the three brothers’ perspectives signify—namely, Pandora’s solace—in the novel’s blacks—specifically, Dilsey—before confronting the nihilistic implications of Ben’s recurring agony and bliss in the novel’s torturous final scene. The author concludes that the ultimate depravity of the novel, when considered the effect of the artist’s journey through the brothers’ purely perspectival realities, renders both truth and appearance moot in the fruitfulness, agony, and destruction of life. This allows the author not to deprive The Sound and the Fury of its depths of experience, but actually celebrate those depths as the necessary effect of life within a culture hostile to life

Crisis and philosophy: Aeschylus and Euripides on Orestes' crimes

Since the XIX century, a pleiad of philosophers and historians support the idea that Greek philosophy, usually reported to have started with the presocratics, lays its basis in a previous moment: the Greek myths – systematized by Homer and Hesiod – and the Greek arts, in particular the lyric and tragedy literature. According to this, it is important to retrieve philosophical elements even before the pre-Socratics to understand the genesis of specific concepts in Philosophy of Law. Besides, assuming that the Western’s core values are inherited from Ancient Greece, it is essential to recuperate the basis of our own justice idea, through the Greek myths and tragedy literature. As a case study, this paper aims on the comparison of two key-works, each one representing a phase of the Greek tragedy: The Orestea, by Aeschylus, and Orestes, by Euripides. Both contain the same story, telling how the Greeks understood the necessity of solving their conflicts not by blood revenge, but through a political way, and also the political drama. Although, in Aeschylus’s one, men still leashed by their fate, while the gods play a major role, in order to punish human pride (hybris). In a different way, on Euripides’s work men face their own loneliness, in a world fulfilled with gods, each one demanding divergent actions. That represents a necessary moment to the flourishing freedom and human subjectivity, and, once the exterior divinity is unable to resolve human problems, men will need to discover their interior divinity: that is how the Philosophy emerges

The Power of Nonverbal Communication

“Donald Sessions said, “Connection even for a brief moment produces the powerful enchantment of presence,” (Baumgardner, 2017). The connection an individual makes with one another is through communication; whether it is verbal or nonverbal. A review of current journals on the effects nonverbal communication has on religion, workplace interactions, peer friendships, and family relationships was conducted. During the review it was found nonverbal communication makes an impact on the type of individuals in another’s life whether it is consciously or unconsciously done. It was discovered individuals leave a lasting impression with their audience and they do so with the type of communication that they use and only seven percent of communication is what is verbally spoken. The type of nonverbal cues a person demonstrates tells his audience what he is really thinking or feeling without any verbally spoken words. This is done through smiling, nodding your head, eye contact and other forms of nonverbal cues

Ben Okri’s Spirit Child: Abiku Migration and Postmodernity

The widespread notion of the abiku in Nigerian culture says volumes about the heartrending deaths of countless newborns throughout the region\u27s history. It also testifies to a belief in the permeability of the membrane separating the spirit world from our world. As the abiku puts it, in his family he is surrounded by people who are seeded in rich lands, who still believe in mysteries (F am 6), people who hold that one world contains glimpses of others (F am 1 0), and people who acknowledge a personal relationship with these spirits in the course of daily life. In western Nigeria, however, a mother who suspects that her newborn is one of these child-spirits must do whatever she can to persuade the baby to stay in this difficult world, rather than have it return to the spirit-world where it will be bathed in the ecstasy of an everlasting love (F am 18). Mothers will give such children names like Malomo-Do Not Go Again ; Banjoko-Sit Down And Stay With Us ; Duro oro ike-Wait And See How You Will Be Petted ; and Please Stay And Bury Me (Maclean 51, 57). Special jewelry and foods are prepared to tempt the baby to choose life, and circumcision for such young boys is frequently postponed (56)