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Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
This study is about the formation of elite lay Buddhist societies in late 16th-century and early 17th century Hangzhou. In this era, many classically trained Confucian scholars were not only philosophically inclined to Buddhist doctrines...
My thesis is a profile of the Tibetan Buddhist protector deity Rāhula (Tib: Khyab 'jug chen po), particularly the ritual/magic and mythic complex that surrounds the cult of this deity. However, I will be using Rāhula as a case study to...
Christian communities in the first four centuries struggled to construct and maintain a sense of social identity in a time when there were no stable descriptions for Christianity or Judaism. Competing social identities emerged among...
This project is an examination of the War against al-Qaeda from the field of religious ethics. In response to September Eleventh, the United States has spent the last decade fighting a war against a diffuse and elusive network of...
This study examines clergy in colonial New England and how they depicted dead bodies in their funeral sermons. Whether it was second generation Puritan ministers like William Hubbard and Samuel Willard, or third generation ministers like...
This dissertation offers an answer to the question of how the Midwest, specifically the middle Mississippi Valley, came to be the American heartland. In this dissertation, I argue that evangelicalism was instrumental in the making of the...
This dissertation examines the dynamic relationship between apocalypticism and social reform as manifested within the abolitionist movement in antebellum America. A prevalent argument contends that during the nineteenth century a liberal...
I propose to examine the mythological and ritual significance of an important yet little-known Tibetan protector deity named Tsiu Marpo (Tsi'u dmar po). Tsiu Marpo is the protector deity of Samyé (Bsam yas) monastery (est. 779 C.E.), the...
This project explores the relationship between American biblical archaeologists in the mid-twentieth century and the most pressing political issue of the context in which they lived and worked, Zionism. It focuses on a set of American...
Given the interest in both late antique historiography and the emperor Julian, there is a surprising lack of scholarship concerning the image of Julian presented by Theodoret, the fifth-century bishop of Cyrus, whose Historia...
In the inchoate field of comparative genocide studies, religion and sexual violence remain largely understudied. Using typologies as an investigative tool, this study examines the 1995 Bosnian and 1994 Rwandan genocides as case studies....
The right to religious liberty and the tolerance of difference that this right engenders are central components of the American national identity. As a result, many in the United States are perplexed by current events in the Middle East....
While many histories of the long Progressive Era acknowledge that faith mattered to President Woodrow Wilson, few seriously consider the crucial role religion played in shaping his foreign policy specifically and twentieth-century U.S....
Historically-oriented and revisionist scholars advance two main approaches to contemporary just war thinking. Historically-oriented scholars argue for the continued use of historic just war thinking as it has provided sufficient, ...
Muslims in Morocco and across the globe practice a form of healing and exorcism known as al-ruqya al-shar‘iyya. The primary technique in this system of healing consists of Qur’anic recitation. In order to understand the role of the Qur...
This dissertation examines the role of musical training in scribal education and its implication for Ben Sira’s pedagogy. Chapter One surveys the scholarship regarding the function of hymns in the book of Sirach and their role in Ben...
In the nineteenth century, American Transcendentalists and other environmental religionists redefined notions of religion, nature, and humanity as a creative and sometimes effective means to manage the various social, cultural, and...
This thesis is about nineteenth-century American Methodist circuit riders. They wrote autobiographies in order to define the denomination in response to changes it underwent during the first half of the nineteenth century.
This dissertation examines the John of the Cross' (1542-1591) construction of a uniquely "Discalced Carmelite identity" in his writings, with particular emphasis on his works, the Ascent of Mount Carmel and the Dark Night. The focus of...
My dissertation analyzes how New England Baptists, and specifically Baptist minister John Leland (1754-1841), participated in local, statewide, and national politics to attempt to overturn the Congregational Church in Massachusetts from...
This dissertation investigates the relationship between religion, slavery, and evolving notions of humanity in eighteenth-century colonial New England. During the seventeenth-century, New Englanders largely conceived of slavery in terms...
This dissertation examines early Enochic literature, namely the Astronomical Book and the Book of the Watchers, in the context of traditions concerning Greco-Roman culture heroes and the debates about the origins of civilization during...
Through both persuasive and prescriptive texts from church library advocates and contemporaneous academic work from scholars of library and information studies, this dissertation examines the twentieth century mainline Protestant church...
In this dissertation I analyze the reception of Josephus in Ethiopia by way of the Hebrew Sefer Yosippon, its Latin sources, and its subsequent Arabic translations. I provide the first English translations and comparative analysis of...
The ethnic and national melange that characterized the Pacific Northwest in the first half of the nineteenth century (Native Americans, Metis, Hawaiians, British, Americans, and French-Canadians all called it home) facilitated a wide...
Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) is the largest Christian broadcasting entity in the world. Through its programming and global satellite outreach, TBN has grown and nurtured the pentecostal Faith movement. Affirming the divine right to...
Despite their value as sources attesting to the reception of Buddhism by Chinese laypeople, miracle tale literature has escaped the attention of all but a few scholars of Chinese Buddhism. These scholars have tended to discuss this...
This dissertation examines the roles of religious sincerity and “sincerely held religious belief” in the U.S. state’s regulation of “religion” and interactions with believers. My central concern is how contested conceptualizations of...
This dissertation examines published work of Raymond Brown, a prominent Catholic New Testament scholar, between the years 1960–1998 in regard to his analysis of anti-Judaism in the Gospel of John. It contextualizes his work by putting...
The book examines the roles Protestant affective norms played the commercial development of the American country music industry. From the 1925 birth of the Grand Ole Opry and Ralph Peer's 1927 "discovery" of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter...
The dissertation argues that the disablement and "repair" of Job's body in T. Job mark the transformations of his masculine identity over the course of the narrative. In the chapters leading up to his ordeal, Job represents the...
This dissertation examines Southern civil religion in the post-Reconstruction era (c. 1877-1920). Geographically, it focuses on the "unfinished South" – an area encompassing Middle and West Florida, Southwest Alabama, and Southwest...
Joseph B. Soloveitchik and George A. Lindbeck both constructed postliberal, religious methodologies that drew on modern resources as a basis for the retrieval of tradition. In the proposed dissertation, I argue that their attempts, ...
This is a study of the practice of the Roman Catholic priesthood and a history of French missionaries in the United States. From 1789 to 1865—from the beginning of the French Revolution to the end of the American Civil War—hundreds of...
The late fourth-century work often called Pseudo-Hegesippus, or De Excidio Hierosolymitano (On the Destruction of Jerusalem), is a rendition of Jewish history from the second century BCE to 70/74 CE. It ends with the destruction of...
This dissertation explores the different ways in which early Jews understood demonic entities in their ancient and antique historical contexts. Unlike traditional scholarly studies which have often approached the topic primarily from the...
This dissertation traces changes in pentecostal healing practices within the United States since pentecostalism's inception in the early 1900s. Though divine healing has always served as a hallmark of pentecostal spirituality, changing...
This dissertation focuses on the beliefs and practices of confessional Lutherans in North America (particularly those of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, and the Evangelical Lutheran Synod) as...
This project elucidates how gendered notions of prosperity and labor within postwar Christianity provided highly saleable and successful modes, models, and technologies of self-production aimed at creating fiscal and emotional success...
This dissertation explores what is religious about transhumanism, a cultural and intellectual movement that seeks to transcend the limits of the human condition by means of new science and technology. Specifically, I examine how...
This thesis examines the Church of St. Benedict the Moor from 1883 to 1920. St. Benedict's was the first black Catholic church in the North. I argue that supporters of the Catholic mission to African Americans sought to incorporate the...
Although religious innovation in America historically has been the norm rather than the exception, mainstream Americans have often viewed new religious movements with suspicion and occasionally with outright alarm. The question...
This paper examines the Emerging Church Movement (ECM), a milieu of progressive evangelical groups focused upon the inclusion of postmodern ideas and concepts into evangelical Christian structures. The argument in this paper is that, as...
This thesis examines the Catholic Worker movement’s understanding of antimodernism and modernity through its first farming commune, Maryfarm. Created during the middle of the Great Depression, Maryfarm became the initial foray into Peter...
This thesis analyzes both the material phenomena channeled by antebellum Spiritualists, and the attendant séance form. Sitter accounts, emphasizing the desire for emotional and material points of connection with spirits, challenge...
This dissertation seeks to shed light on the broad range of practices that Vietnamese Buddhism has contributed to the American religious landscape since its arrival due to the impact of the Vietnam War. Despite the presence of almost one...
In this study, I investigate the history and ethical implications of Christian discourses of political power, expressed through the modern phenomenon of bureaucracies. I argue that as a technical system of political power there is little...
In the early twentieth century America witnessed the emergence of a new form of political, social, and religious leader: the Christian anticommunist crusader. Crusaders fused patriotism, capitalism, conservative politics, theories of...
Though previous scholarship has placed emphasis on the anti-familial rhetoric employed by ancient Christians, Christian discourse on motherhood was actually quite mixed. I demonstrate this point by examining specific representations of...
This paper will discuss the interaction between renowned Hindu reformer Rammohun Roy, and Christian Unitarians, in the early 19th century. Roy, while predominately known as a Hindu theologian and social reformer, also demonstrated a...
Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
