Hope : pedagogy in a despairing world
- UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
- William M. McLaurin (Creator)
- Institution
- The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
- Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
- Advisor
- David E. Purpel
Abstract: The first chapter asserts that we have exhausted our cultural repertoire, careening through both modem certainty and postmodern disorder without finding hope-the things in and for which we have been told to hope do not keep us from despair. The chapter critiques failed definitions of "hope" and proposes boundaries for this work which lead to a quest theme, and a series of questions against which to test whatever might be found in that quest. The second chapter expands the theme of cultural exhaustion, maintaining that, if one is to avoid despair, the discovery by an individual of this cultural failure must be intentional, the product of a search which involves bringing conscious awareness to what are usually automatistic behaviors. The necessary type of consciousness for that search is found to occur in an eclectic group of anthropologists, critical theorists, psychologists and iconoclasts-a group whose work generally includes a critique of modernist rationality, scientism, and control, as well as a critique of the relativism endemic in postmodernism. To render this search more generally accessible, a similar type of consciousness is sought-and found-in several Christian theologians, of a generally prophetic or liberation bent. Others, who stand against such "God talk", are acknowledged, and a path around some of their objections sought in a negative theology, requiring the sort of approach most familiar as "skillful means" in Zen practice.
Hope : pedagogy in a despairing world
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Created on 1/1/1996
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Additional Information
- Publication
- Dissertation
- Language: English
- Date: 1996
- Subjects
- Hope
- Teaching
- Despair