Confession and Forgiveness: A Pastoral Reading of <Emphasis Type="Italic">A Father’s Son</Emphasis> by Lionel Dahmer

This paper offers a pastoral reading of the memoir written by Lionel Dahmer, the father of the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. I suggest that the literary genre of the memoir provided Lionel with a means of confession that enabled him to process three particular experiences related to his son—namely, grief, shame, and regret. I also suggest that the writing of this confession enabled Lionel to forgive his son for his son’s various failures and, potentially, to forgive himself for his own failures as a father, though this latter point can only be offered speculatively. This memoir is inherently pastoral and theological because it deals with the themes of confession and forgiveness, and, theologically, the memoir also may be viewed as a work of penance. One theological upshot, based on Lionel’s experience, entails challenging the idea that God the Father abandoned God the Son on the cross: A more divine model of fatherhood would be one in which a father could embrace the shame of standing by his son when the chips are down.     

The Craftsman and His Apprentice: A Kohutian Interpretation of the Gospel Narratives of Jesus Christ

Kohutian theory suggests that relationships play a central role in structuring and sustaining the psychological self. In this article, we apply self psychology to the Father-Son dyad found in the Synoptic and Johannine narratives in order to understand the Jesus of the gospels in a new, psychologically informed manner. Conclusions are drawn related to how self psychology can help to elucidate the biblical relationship between God the Father and Son, or the craftsman and his apprentice, as well as how, conversely, the Father-Son dyad described in the gospels can inform self psychology.     

Contextual Inequalities in Religious Youth Programming

Religious congregations are hypothesized to be a community organization affected by contextual inequalities. Survey and interview data are analyzed to investigate the type and prevalence of youth programming in a geographic area. Rather than drawing a sample of religious congregations in the area, the telephone survey was conducted with every congregation located in the three contiguous cities. Coupled with the high response rate (98.9%), this allows for a unique analysis of a total population of congregations in the specified area. In-person interviews were also conducted with religious youth ministers sampled from the broader population of congregations. U.S. Census (American Factfinder, 2000) data on the areas in which the congregations were located was linked to survey and interview data. Results demonstrate contextual effects in religious youth programming, net of denomination, congregation size, and budget. The availability and type of youth programming in different locations relates to the inequalities embedded in these contexts. This study indicates that social disorganization theories apply to religious organizations not in inequalities of the number of congregations located in any particular area but in inequalities in the level of youth programming density available within those congregations.     

Measuring Latent Quantities

A distinction is proposed between measures and predictors of latent variables. The discussion addresses the consequences of the distinction for the true-score model, the linear factor model, Structural Equation Models, longitudinal and multilevel models, and item-response models. A distribution-free treatment of calibration and error-of-measurement is given, and the contrasting properties of measures and predictors are examined.     

Speaking Well of the Dead: On the Aesthetics of Eulogies

Robert Solomon criticized the philosophy of death for abstracting from human reality to treat our mortality as a collection of metaphysical puzzles. Nowhere is death less abstract than in our response to the death of our loved ones. The public face of our response is the memorial service and the eulogies that move us. Our experience of a eulogy can be as cathartic as Aristotle theorized as part of great tragedy. However, treating the oration as a work of art seems inappropriate; seeking to understand our engagement in aesthetic terms disrespectful to the grieving. This paper attempts to resolve this paradox by exploring analogies between the structures of eulogies and those of tragedy, and showing that, rather than traditional aesthetics' "promise of happiness," our engagement is concerned with the "promise of meaning." Psychological research on the nature of empathy theorizes that humans are hard-wired to feel the experiences of others and this is undoubtedly at work in our emotional responses to literature and eulogies. Drawing on the work of Dacher Keltner, the paper argues that the key to the aesthetics of eulogies and literature lies in their power to invoke our "awe" in response to their words.     

Camus’s Algerian in Paris: A Prose Poetic Reading of <Emphasis Type="Italic">L’Étranger</Emphasis>

This paper demonstrates that L'étranger, Camus's famous novel about an outsider, had by as early as 1946 become just as much of an 'insider' in terms of its affiliation to the Parisian literary tradition. More than an insider simply by virtue of its contemporary place in the French canon, then, the novel is also intertextually bound to a tradition of oxymoronic poetics dating back to Charles Baudelaire's Paris Spleen (Les Petits poèmes en prose). I shall examine the way in which L'étranger performs its prose poetics, thereby establishing it as exemplary of a Parisian model of modernity. Additionally, the famous scene on the beach will be considered as a liminal space and as a literary translation of Paris into the desert, which, once a joke for Paris's relationship to provincial France, became after the Second World War a new allegory for the capital's self-alterity.