Religious Anthropology: An Archetypal Hermeneutics of Baptismal Symbolic Imagery for the Emergence of the Religious and the Poetic Consciousness

The following dissertation arose out of the Theology and Society Program offered by the Theology Department at Marquette University. This program allowed me to combine the disciplines of Theology and English Literature which I had studied separately up to that time. It was in the con­text of the TAS Program that my doctoral courses enabled me to form an interdisciplinary approach to the role of symbol as fundamental in expressing divine and human mystery. In particular, the Christian symbolic imagery of baptism emerged as foundational to an understanding of the religious and poetic consciousness and to a proper understanding of the interrelationship between theology and literature