Religious literacy: Hermeneutics, experience, and cognitive worlds in Catholic narrative and metaphor.

摘要

This dissertation investigates religious literacy through the methodology of cognitive discourse studies. Using research from cognitive theology, a discipline that investigates the specifics of religious interpretation and religious "feeling" through the empirical methods of cognitive science, I apply this research to the cognitive parameters and processes of reading as defined by cognitive discourse studies, which often investigates ordinary and literary reading by creating an ideal or model reader. In utilizing research into cognitive theology, this dissertation treats religious experience and interpretation as utilizing the schemas of ordinary cognition, with cognitive constraints added from cognitive theology to limit the ideal reader to aspects of religious literacy.;After building an ideal religious reader, I examine the hermeneutics of Catholicism, focusing on the distinction between chronos and Christian kairos, finding that the difference in logics of time is one major difference between an ideal Catholic reader and a reader using chronos as a logic's time construal.;I investigate a variety of texts. The medieval four senses provide semantic and conceptual possibilities that exist as a gestalt and individually for the ideal Catholic reader. I also analyze St. Augustine's treatise on Time and Eternity from his Confessions, finding that Augustine explains Christian kairos by denying one-dimensional cognitive language models and constructing an alternative concept of time through a two-dimensional cognitive language model. To continue this une of thought, I analyze Kenneth Burke's own analysis of Augustine, and I suggest that Burke's own rhetoric privileges the one-dimensional model of time. Because of Burke's one-dimensional analytical model, he cannot sympathetically or objectively analyze Christian chronos. Finally, I investigate three examples of anaphora taken from political, religious public, and Scriptural texts to identify what aspects of religious discourse and religious literacy do not transition into the arena of public discourse. Each of these texts is chosen for its textual features, which, when analyzed through the lens of a cognitive religious discourse study, illustrate aspects of Catholic hermeneutics important to a religious reading position distinct from other reading positions. In doing this, the dissertation constructs a framework for cognitive discourse investigations of religious literacy in general.