Here are a few select refereed publications that I have elsewhere linked and located on the web! You can comment here or through email. Or I can always start a post thread on a related issue if you would like.
Parallelism of U.S. Religious Trends and Christian Higher Education Enrollment from the 1960’s through 2001 (2006) presented at The Association for the Study of Higher Education
Abstract
On the edges of the theological-historical narratives of both the decline or revitalization of Christian higher education is a spate of research that has been done on the social changes occurring in the post-WWII baby boom generation and the concurrent changes in value orientation of students from the student movement through the renewed conservativism in the early 1980’s which we will see below. The problem with both the study of the religiously-affiliated college and the social and cultural trends in the 20th century that elicited an apparent shift in patterns of religious behavior is that the research has not been linked or sufficiently related. What is needed is a more acute contextualization of the stagnation and even decline of the mainline denominationally-affiliated institutions and the more recent rise in the enrollment and popularity of the more conservative Christian colleges – particularly in the cases of those member institutions of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU).
PowerPoint Presentation from ASHE 2006
Copy of Paper Accepted to ASHE 2006
Transgressing Boundaries in the Nine Inch Nails: The Grotesque as a Means to the Sacred (2005) in The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture
Abstract
The grotesque is often viewed as a subversive element injected into the fabric of social and religious structures for subversive and offensive purposes intended to garner increased market share and media exposure. As such it has been seen as barbaric or even demonic. However, other theories of the grotesque show that it is often a combination of social and aesthetic criticism that disrupts the ordered structure of experience in terms of boundaries and categories that compose that structure often in terms of explicit traditions, but also in terms of hidden assumptions and values that compose this structure. To this end, there is a connection of the grotesque to the sublime and the ambiguous. There is thus an element of the grotesque that lays claim to mystery and so, can act as a vehicle for understanding crucial concepts in studying divinity. Examples of religious ambiguity and the grotesque in popular culture disclose both aspects of the grotesque and also offer a fructuous medium from which the critical engagement of tradition, boundaries, and the grotesque itself can emerge. The grotesque aesthetic and explicitly religious quoting of the Nine Inch Nails provides a clear medium through which the tentative structure of boundaries is expressed creating creative space for the mystery of the sacred to emerge.
http://www.usask.ca/relst/jrpc/art11-nineinchnails.html
The Tacit Media Pedagogy as Praxial Critique: A Critique of Postmodern Theory for Higher Education Curriculum (2005) in The Teacher’s College Record
Abstract
Employing Calvin O. Schrag’s response to postmodernism-transversal rationality engaged through praxial critique-the constructive side of postmodern theories can be highlighted in higher education while at the same time answering the pundits who see little to no constructive side to postmodern theories. Using praxial critique through media literacy is a proposed way to construct a curriculum that is centered around transversal rationality as a way to answer the challenges of postmodernism in a constructive way that neither dimisses nor blindly accepts its conclusions. In this way the limits of postmodern theory are critiqued. Some shortcomings of key postmodern theories are drawn out in relation to educational theory while aspects of some of these theories for a constructive employment in higher education are affirmed.
http://www.tcrecord.org/content.asp?contentid=11691
Rootlessness and Simulacra: The Loss and Recovery of Cultural Foundations (2000) in Quodlibet
Excerpt
In recent years Marshall McLuhan’s ideas concerning mass media on the one hand and Derridian post-structuralist literary theory on the other have strongly influenced cultural studies. Perhaps the most prominent philosopher/theorist of culture to integrate both of these arenas in his theory of culture is French theorist Jean Baudrillard primarily through his notion of the “simulacra.” While Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacra is a compelling notion for postmodern cultural studies, it is also quite limited in its scope. That is to say, even if we are able to affirm that the simulacra is an adequate appraisal of modern (or “postmodern”) culture, it is very difficult to ascertain why the simulacra exists and therefore what the outcome of the simulacra may be. In this essay I will argue that Simone Weil offers us a far more persuasive and adequate philosophy of culture through her metaphor of roots.
http://www.quodlibet.net/tatusko-culture.shtml
The Theological Challenge of Cyberspace and the Logic of Simulation (2000) in The Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory
Excerpt
The technologies we create and the cultures in which they are embedded are strikingly similar. The Western expansion and frontier mentality finds its expression in the constable where large caravans of families would move together to find a new home in new land. The clock that arose out of monasteries fit in perfectly with regimented monastic schedules and made scheduling the day easier and more standardized. With the clock and the assembly line, among others for sure, we may locate a distinctly linear, fixed, and foundational mode of rationality that we have christened with the blanket term “modernity.” It is both a temporal disposition in culture and a cultural movement itself that crept into our civilization roughly with the emergence of the vernacular Bible that, for all intents and purposes, would not have been possible without Gutenberg’s moveable-type press. Thus, we shall reasonably say that the seismic shift in civilization to a distinctly modern framework cannot be removed from its technological milieu.
