Faculty Commons: Recent Publications by La Verne Faculty

The moving, richly allegorical poem Pearl was likely written by the anonymous poet who also penned Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In it, a man in a garden, grieving the loss of a beloved pearl, dreams of the Pearl-Maiden, who appears across a stream. She teaches him the nature of innocence, God's grace, meekness, and purity. Though granted a vision of the New Jerusalem by the Pearl-Maiden, the dreamer is pained to discover that he cannot cross the stream himself and join her in bliss--at least not yet. This extraordinary poem is a door into late medieval poetics and Catholic piety.

This book's theological and philosophical construction of a God of enjoyment poetically remaps divine love. Posing a critique to the Aristotelian unmoved mover whose intellective enjoyment is self-enclosed, this book's affective tones depict a passionate God who intermingles with the cosmos to suffer and yearn out of love-- even improper love. Divine Enjoyment leads the reader to a path of excess, first in the form of an intellective appetite that for Aquinas places God beyond the divine self, then more erotically in the silhouette of a lover whose love is like the delectable pain of mystics. Culminating with banqueting, fiesta, and carnival, the book deterritorializes God's affect, conceiving of an expansively hospitable enjoyment stemming from many life forms.

Through the lens of a Christian minister, immersed in the global interfaith movement and trained in the discipline of religious philosophy, this book develops a social ethic that is based on function. By using the concept of a functional paradigm, the book explores the way religious language works to create subjective mental states. These mental states rep-resent various degrees of truth for the adherents, but due to their subjective nature, the truths cannot be objectively verified. This results in conflicting truth claims by religious adherents from different religious traditions. However, because the truth claims function in the various traditions to teach social values, function and morality are areas in which common ground can be found and explored.

Provides well-organized coverage of statistical analysis and applications in biology, kinesiology, and physical anthropology with comprehensive insights into the techniques and interpretations of R, SPSS#65533;, Excel#65533;, and Numbers#65533; output An Introduction to Statistical Analysis in Research: With Applications in the Biological and Life Sciences develops a conceptual foundation in statistical analysis while providing readers with opportunities to practice these skills via research-based data sets in biology, kinesiology, and physical anthropology.

This book analyzes both local and national House and Senate campaigns in the 2016 election to reveal how distinctive campaign dynamics have a collective national impact. Featuring detailed case studies of ten competitive House races and twelve high-profile U.S. Senate campaigns, the volume provides a deep analysis of campaign dynamics and the polarizing effects of the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. These studies are contextualized by four thematic chapters that cover the most salient talking points of the 2016 elections, including voter registration laws and congressional candidates' use of Twitter. As penetrating as it is comprehensive, this volume provides readers with a fuller understanding of the divided landscape of contemporary American political campaigns. 

In 1758, Rousseau announced that he had adopted "vitam impendere vero" (dedicate life to truth) as a personal pledge. Despite the dramatic nature of this declaration, no scholar has yet approached Rousseau's work through the lens of truth or truthseeking. What did it mean for Rousseau to lead a life dedicated to truth? This book presents Rousseau's normative account of truthseeking, his account of what human beings must do if they hope to discover the truths essential to human happiness. Rousseau's writings constitute a practical guide to these truths; they describe how he arrived at them and how others might as well. In reading Rousseau through the lens of truth, Neidleman traverses the entirety of Rousseau's corpus, and, in the process, reveals a series of symmetries among the disparate themes treated in those texts.

Success: The Psychology of Achievement is a dynamic infographic guide that equips you with the tools you need to drive yourself toward success, whether you are seeking improvement in your career, relationships, or in your overall performance. From positive thinking to work-life balance to learning how to say no, the lessons learned from this guide are tailored to your personal situation through questionnaires and self-analysis exercises

In the course of research, most scholars have known moments of surprise, catastrophe, or good fortune, though they seldom refer to these occurrences in reports or discuss them with students. Serendipity in Rhetoric, Writing, and Literacy Research reveals the different kinds of work scholars, particularly those in rhetoric, writing, and literacy, need to do in order to recognize a serendipitous discovery or a missed opportunity.

This volume provides readers with a broad view on the variety of issues related to the educational research and practices in the field of Creativity in Mathematics and Mathematical Giftedness. The book explores (a) the relationship between creativity and giftedness; (b) empirical work with high ability (or gifted) students in the classroom and its implications for teaching mathematics; (c) interdisciplinary work which views creativity as a complex phenomena that cannot be understood from within the borders of disciplines, i.e., to present research and theorists from disciplines such as neuroscience and complexity theory; and (d) findings from psychology that pertain the creatively gifted students.

The cross-informing relevancy of the theatrical arts and the art of legal advocacy are identified and illustrated through a pedagogical comparative analysis of the two disciplines.

Looks at all aspects of the pivotal intellectual relationship between two key figures of the Enlightenment. This collection brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau scholars to explore the key shared concerns of these two great thinkers in politics, philosophy, economics, history and literature.