Date of Award

2018

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Theology (ThD)

Abstract

The National Football League (NFL) has been encumbered with a plethora of brain injury cases due to the incidence of on-field acute linear impact, ostensibly sustained by its participants. According to medical examiner, Dr. Bennett Omalu, these occurrences have spawned the onset of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease, which may be the catalyst to discursive tendencies that are redolent to the occupation of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), anxiety, aggression, and reclusion. Since the majority of professional football players originate from socially violent contexts, such as Miami, Los Angeles, Detroit, Dallas, and Houston, however, it is conceivable that the incivilities perpetrated by these athletes may be attributable to more than CTE. Perhaps, recurrent exposure to such grievous conditions and/or forms of social disaffection clarifies the cognitive volatility extant today and additionally, the protuberances of illicit violence. It is believed, nonetheless, that the mystical themes resonant in the prose of Meister Eckhart, Oswald McCall, and Howard Thurman, which seemingly are consonant with the French School of Spirituality, provide some gratuity to these psychological exigencies. Thus, this research aims to explore how mystical themes commendable to the French School, Eckhart, McCall, and Thurman, may ameliorate, or abate altogether, behavioral tendencies redolent to the onset of PTSD in professional football players.

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