Content area
Abstract
This dissertation is an ethnographic study of one evangelical community—a Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) college community located in the Midwest—and the significance of its epistemological views for its younger members and for those who teach or mentor these kinds of students in public educational spaces. I conducted a three year investigation in which I studied the intellectual and social practices of this culture. What I found is that SDAs are shaped powerfully by a discourse grounded in opposition and counterculturalism. I use the term “great controversy thinking” to try and capture central metaphors inherent within the SDA worldview, and from where the church's language practices are more fully understood. Even as I argue that Adventism needs to think critically about this discourse if its young people are going to serve as persuasive witnesses for their church, I feel that we as compositionists might be able to tap into it, also, and examine the ways that it shapes students' learning. My work is an extension of that already done by such scholars as Thomas Newkirk, Amy Goodburn, and Priscilla Perkins, who call for more sensitive readings of religious forms of identity.
