Monday, April 25, 2022
1:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Lundring Events Center
This session features student capstone and research presentations, along with a Roundtable Discussion on Indigenous Rights and Practices. Students will share what they have learned about issues facing Native peoples in the U.S., as well as the impact of Indigenous knowledge on their self-understanding as students.
Student Abstracts
Ears to Hear: Understanding the Parables of Jesus
Parable, from the Greek παραβολή, was the preeminent pedagogical tool of one of history’s greatest teachers, Jesus of Nazareth. Depending on how it is defined, parable comprises up to 35% of Jesus’s teaching in the synoptic gospels, with between 37 and 65 instances of its use. Understanding how Jesus used parable is essential to understanding his message. Christians have tended to use Jesus’s parables, commonly thought of as “explainer stories,” to answer contemporary questions of faith. However, reading Jesus’s parables in their narrative context reveals their true purpose: to inaugurate ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ Θεοῦ (the kingdom of God). Because parable, as a form, has no contemporary equivalent, this essay builds a categorical construction of parable in order to understand Jesus’s stories in the same way as his first century audience.
Student(s):
Cordray Crabbe
Faculty Mentor:
Julia Fogg
Religion and the AIDS Crisis: Historical Analysis of the AIDS Crisis and Its Impact on Gay Men’s Faith
Gay men have not always had the best history with religions and the communities surrounding them. But there are some gay men who have strong ties to their faith even with this previous history. As a young gay man, I have talked to older members of the gay community from both sides of the spectrum, with those who are close to their religious beliefs, and those who dislike religion. Their ties to religion seem to stem from several different sources, with one of them being what happened during the AIDS crisis. This sparked an interest to dive into the history of the AIDS crisis and the historical significance it played in impacting gay men and their faith. To collect information, I used historical sources to piece together how religion played a part in the AIDS crisis and how it affected the treatment of gay men. By using these historical sources, I was able to find that religious groups were for the most part split, even within single denominations, on how they should treat gay men. Some saw gay men’s humanity and sought to ease the pain and burdens they faced, while others saw the AIDS crisis as an act of God punishing them for their “sins.” Gay men found themselves either having great experiences, or having horrible experiences, leading to a split in the gay community's outlook on religion.