Master of Arts Research

M.A., (with distinction), Religion, Culture and Gender, December 2004 
The University of Manchester, England

M.A., Theology and Biblical Studies, June 2003
Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California

Brief description:

Over the course of my Master of Arts degree in Theology at Fuller Seminary and Political Culture at the University of Manchester, I was primarily interested in developing methods appropriate to a theological interpretation of culture. Initially, this entailed investigations into the philosophical hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer, but then moved on to the cultural and political theory of Pierre Bourdieu, Zygmunt Bauman, Manuel Castells, David Harvey, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Georgio Agamben, Slavoj Zizek and Louis Althusser. The essays I was writing during this time attempted to adapt cultural theory to my theological interest in religious pluralism, gender, cyberspace and urban surveillance. However, by the end of my Master of Arts dissertation, The Urban God and Surveillance Society, I realized that I was often uncritically inheriting certain theological outlooks from the cultural theory I was working with. It was for this reason that my doctoral research after this time turned to more critically examine the theological assumptions of contemporary cultural theory itself. Although my thinking has progressed beyond my outlook during this time, some of the essays from my Master of Arts research have subsequently been published and/or presented at academic conferences.