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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 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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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 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...
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 Atlantic world of the eighteenth century, revivalists in Europe, North America, South America, and the Caribbean centered their theology around the doctrine of the new birth. The new birth was the unifying, if contested, theme of...
This dissertation examines the ways in which institutions of theological higher learning cultivated particular spatial perspectives among reformed evangelicals committed to the success of America’s republican, democratic experiment....
This study examines the development of apocalypticism in Mormon culture from the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Specifically, it argues that a major shift in apocalyptic thought in the twentieth century was essential...
For my creative dissertation I have written a memoir, titled Approaching Rapture. The memoir is a somewhat traditionally structured coming-of-age story. In particular, it details the long ordeal of coming to terms with my sexuality and...
This project considers the relationship between religion and politics in the early republic period of the United States. The goal of this project is to uncover the ways the inchoate federal government provided support for religion in an...
This thesis analyzes the 35-year-run of the Ladies' Repository, and Gatherings of the West, a monthly periodical distributed by the Methodist Episcopal Church from 1841-1876. This thesis will first look at the publication history of The...
Florida's Department of Corrections (DOC) currently operates the largest state-run faith-based correctional facilities program in the United States. In these facilities, the state sequesters inmates from the larger inmate population and...
The demands of a global Cold War led the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and its successor organization, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to forge unprecedented relationships with Catholics, Buddhists, and Muslims around the...
“Savage Saints” historiographically reconfigures “Muscular Christianity.” It studies the close and positive relations of martial arts and combat sports to Muscular Christianity, and it argues the central importance of the concept of ...
In 2015, Pope Francis published his second encyclical entitled Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home. The encyclical’s primary purpose was to address the widespread inequality, poverty and injustice that threatens to worsen as we...
This dissertation defamiliarizes early "evangelicalism" as a sturdy set of culturally siloed theological convictions. Historians of the so-called "Great Awakening" or "Evangelical Revival" have often distinguished awakeners by belief....
Focusing on the Theosophical Society, founded in 1875 and headquartered in Adyar, India, this dissertation traces how the emplaced body, variously understood and experienced, and discourses of science, as appropriated and applied to...
Sustaining Ethnicity, Expanding the Community, and Engaging Evangelicalism: Dutch-Americans in the Christian Reformed Church in North America, 1945-1995
Following the Second World War and through the end of the twentieth century, the Christian Reformed Church in North America experienced massive changes, beginning with unified institutional growth and a wave of new migration and ending...
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.
