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Item Open Access A "Trinitarian" Theology of Religions? An Augustinian Assessment of Several Recent Proposals(2007-05-04T17:36:56Z) Johnson, Keith EdwardContemporary theology is driven by a quest to make the doctrine of the Trinity “relevant” to a wide variety of concerns. Books and articles abound on the Trinity and personhood, the Trinity and ecclesiology, the Trinity and gender, the Trinity and marriage, the Trinity and societal relations, the Trinity and politics, the Trinity and ecology, etc. Recently a number of theologians have suggested that a doctrine of the Trinity may provide the key to a Christian theology of religions. The purpose of this study is to evaluate critically the claim that a proper understanding of “the Trinity” provides the basis for a new understanding of religious diversity. Drawing upon the trinitarian theology of Augustine (principally De Trinitate), I critically examine the trinitarian doctrine in Mark Heim’s trinitarian theology of multiple religious ends, Amos Yong’s pneumatological theology of religions, Jacques Dupuis’ Christian theology of religious pluralism and Raimundo Panikkar’s trinitarian account of religious experience (along with Ewert Cousins’ efforts to link Panikkar’s proposal to the vestige tradition). My Augustinian assessment is structured around three trinitarian issues in the Christian theology of religions: (1) the relationship of the “immanent” and the “economic” Trinity, (2) the relations among the divine persons (both ad intra and ad extra) and (3) the vestigia trinitatis. In conversation with Augustine, I argue (1) that there is good reason to question the claim that the “Trinity” represents the key to a new understanding of religious diversity, (2) that current “use” of trinitarian theology in the Christian theology of religions appears to be having a deleterious effect upon the doctrine, and (3) that the trinitarian problems I document in the theology of religions also encumber attempts to relate trinitarian doctrine to a variety of other contemporary issues including personhood, ecclesiology, society, politics and science. I further argue that contemporary theology is driven by a problematic understanding of what it means for a doctrine of the Trinity to be “relevant” and that Augustine challenges us to rethink the “relevancy” of trinitarian doctrine.Item Open Access A Beautiful Noise: A History of Contemporary Worship Music in Modern America(2015) Reagan, WenHow did rock and roll, the best music for worshipping the devil, become the finest music for worshipping God? This study narrates the import of rock music into church sanctuaries across America via the rise of contemporary worship music (CWM). While white evangelicals derided rock n' roll as the "devil's music" in the 1950s, it slowly made its way into their churches and beyond over the next fifty years, emerging as a multi-million dollar industry by the twenty-first century.
This study is a cultural history of CWM, chronicling the rise of rock music in the worship life of American Christians. Pulling from several different primary and secondary sources, I argue that three main motivations fueled the rise of CWM in America: the desire to reach the lost, to commune in emotional intimacy with God, and to grow the flock. These three motivations evolved among different actors and movements at different times. In the 1970s, the Jesus People movement anchored in Southern California, adopted the music of the counterculture to attract hippies to church. In the early 1980s, the Vineyard Fellowship combined rock forms with lyrics that spoke of God in the second person in order to facilitate intimate worship with the divine. In the late 1980s, the church growth movement embraced CWM as a tool to attract disaffected baby boomers back to church. By the 1990s, these three motivations had begun to energize an entire industry built around the merger between rock and worship.
Item Open Access A Contemporary Analysis of Shifting Contours of Jewish and Christian Identities(2021) Orenstein, DavidThis dissertation argues that the boundaries between ostensibly separable “Jewish” and “Christian” religious traditions were fluid in the past and remain so today through examination of four contemporary case studies evidencing two general phenomena. One phenomenon explored is how varieties of self-identified Jesus-believers have incorporated rituals and ideas that have traditionally been associated with Judaism into their contemporary religious practice and understanding of the New Testament. The other phenomenon explored is how varieties of self-identified Jews have incorporated practices and figures that have traditionally been associated with Christianity into features of the contemporary Jewish landscape. In exploring the first phenomenon, I examine the following two case studies: (1) attempts by Christians of varying denominational affiliations to incorporate Jewish rituals associated with Shabbat (Jewish Sabbath) observance into Christian practice and (2) attempts by academic Jesus-believers, self-identified as Gentile Christians and Messianic Jews, to underscore the continuing significance of the territoriality of the land of Israel in the New Testament. In exploring the second phenomenon, I examine the following two cases studies: (1) attempts by Jews of varying denominational affiliations to incorporate a sense of mission traditionally associated with Christianity into Jewish practice for the purpose of Jewish outreach or advocacy in support or opposition to the State of Israel and (2) attempts by Jewish filmmakers to incorporate the figure of Jesus into Israeli films. In analyzing the aforementioned case studies relating to ritual observance, biblical exegesis, ideological identity, and visual arts, I hope to show how the supposed boundaries between self-identified Christians and Jews remain, as in the past, fluid and contested.
Item Open Access A New and Living Way: Atonement and the Logic of Resurrection in the Epistle to the Hebrews(2010) Moffitt, David McCheyneThe New Testament book known as the epistle to the Hebrews contains little obvious reference to Jesus' resurrection. Modern interpreters generally account for this relative silence by noting that the author's soteriological and christological concerns have led him to emphasize Jesus' death and exaltation while ignoring, spiritualizing, or even denying his resurrection. In particular, the writer's metaphorical appeal to the Yom Kippur sacrifice, with its dual emphasis on the slaughter of the victim and the presentation of the victim's blood by the high priest, allows him to explain the salvific significance of Jesus' death and exaltation. The crucifixion can be likened to the slaughter of the victim, while Jesus' exaltation in heaven can be likened to the high priest entering the holy of holies. In this way the cross can be understood as an atoning sacrifice. Such a model leaves little room for positive or distinct reflection on the soteriological or christological significance of the resurrection.
This study argues that the soteriology and high-priestly Christology the author develops depend upon Jesus' bodily resurrection and ascension into heaven. The work begins with a survey of positions on Jesus' resurrection in Hebrews. I then present a case for the presence and role of Jesus' bodily resurrection in the text. First, I demonstrate that the writer's argument in Heb 1-2 for the elevation of Jesus above the angelic spirits assumes that Jesus has his humanity--his blood and flesh--with him in heaven. Second, I show that in Heb 5-7 the writer identifies Jesus' resurrection to an indestructible life as the point when Jesus became a high priest. Third, I explain how this thesis makes coherent the author's consistent claims in Heb 8-10 that Jesus presented his offering to God in heaven. I conclude that Jesus' crucifixion is neither the place nor the moment of atonement for the author of Hebrews. Rather, in keeping with the equation in the Levitical sacrificial system of the presentation of blood to God with the presentation of life, Jesus obtained atonement where and when the writer says--when he presented himself in his ever-living, resurrected humanity before God in heaven. Jesus' bodily resurrection is, therefore, the hinge around which the high-priestly Christology and soteriology of Hebrews turns.
Item Open Access A Nonviolent Augustinianism?: History and Politics in the Theologies of St. Augustine and John Howard Yoder(2008-12-10) Collier, Charles MayoThe theologies of St. Augustine and John Howard Yoder are, if at all treated together, typically contrasted. This negative juxtaposition is in so small part due to the very different reputations of each theologian on the question of violence. This dissertation demonstrates that the standard contrast between the theopolitical visions of Yoder and Augustine is mistaken. An introduction portrays the cumulative work of the chapters as the unfolding of a question about the contemporary reception of Augustine and Yoder: Might John Howard Yoder's "pacifism of the messianic community" be received as a radical form of Augustinianism? The dissertation consists of four chapters, each dealing with some aspect of Yoder's or Augustine's thought which, under closer examination, reveals an interesting line of convergence with the thought of the other. The politics of historical interpretation, the challenge of interiority, the aims of historicism, and the nature of "the political" are taken up in succession. An affirmative answer to the overarching question is suggested, but the more important task is to render the question salient for contemporary theologians and ethicists.
Item Open Access A Prescription for the Future of Religious Studies: Second-Order Tradition and the Spirit of Modern Science(2016-06-20) Levy, DavidAn examination of the efficacy of religious studies scholarship through a Kuhnian lens.Item Open Access After Eden: Religion and Labor in the American West, 1868-1914(2018) Keegan, Brennan LynnVariously romanticized as the repository of American Protestantism, free market capitalism, and self-sufficient individualism, or defined by material actions of conquest and colonization, the history of the Rocky Mountain West is a complicated constellation of myth and reality. This dissertation evaluates the efforts of three religious communities to negotiate a place within that constellation. Northern Arapaho wage laborers in central Wyoming, Mormon merchants in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Roman Catholic hard-rock miners in Butte, Montana, leveraged their religious and ethnic identities to negotiate places of sovereignty in the western landscape. While each case study presents a distinct relationship between religion and labor, each is grounded in the materiality of exchange and economics in order to show the inseparability of religion from the economic practices that enabled the creation and endurance of nineteenth-century Western communities. Despite the concealing mechanisms of a single, idealized trajectory of American nationhood, the narration of national space was haunted and disrupted by the persistence of alternate, but interconnected, religious geographies, which re-scripted hegemonic narratives of American religious and economic exceptionalism. Using the tools of archival research and the collection of oral histories, this dissertation explores the tension of the familiar and the unfamiliar in the pastoral heartland of the American myth.
Item Open Access After Kiyozawa: A Study of Shin Buddhist Modernization, 1890-1956(2015) Schroeder, JeffThis dissertation examines the modern transformation of orthodoxy within the Otani denomination of Japanese Shin Buddhism. This history was set in motion by scholar-priest Kiyozawa Manshi (1863-1903), whose calls for free inquiry, introspection, and attainment of awakening in the present life represented major challenges to the prevailing orthodoxy. Judging him a principal player in forging a distinctively modern Buddhism, many scholars have examined Kiyozawa's life and writings. However, it is critical to recognize that during his life Kiyozawa remained a marginal figure within his sect, his various reform initiatives ending in failure. It was not until 1956 that Otani leaders officially endorsed and disseminated Kiyozawa's views. Taking my cue from Talal Asad's critique of Clifford Geertz's definition of religion, I move beyond interpretation of the "meaning" of Kiyozawa's life and writings to the historical study of how they came to be invested with authority, impacting the lives of millions of sect members and influencing the perception of him among scholars.
I approach this history on three levels. On an individual level, I examine the lives and writings of Kiyozawa, his followers, and his critics, as revealed in their books, journal articles, newspaper articles, diaries, and letters. On an institutional level, I examine the transformation of the Otani organization's educational, administrative, and judicial systems, as documented in institutional histories, denominational by-laws, official statements, and administrators' writings. Finally, on a national level, I examine the effect of major political events and social trends on Kiyozawa's followers and the Otani organization.
This study reveals that one critical factor in the transformation of Otani orthodoxy was the strategic use of a discourse of "empiricism" by Kiyozawa's followers. As the Otani organization's modern university gradually came to supercede its traditional seminary, Kiyozawa's followers positioned themselves as authoritative modern scholars. At the same time, this study shows that the transformation of Otani orthodoxy was contingent upon broader historical developments far outside the control of Kiyozawa's followers or Otani leaders. Specifically, the state's persecution of Communists, war mobilization policies, and the post-war context of democracy building all shaped the views and fortunes of Kiyozawa's followers. I argue that by better acknowledging and examining the contingent nature of religious history, scholars can approach a more realistic view of how religions are formed and reformed. Specifically in regard to modern Buddhist studies, I also argue that more attention should be paid to how sectarian institutions continue to grow and evolve, shaping all aspects of Buddhist thought and practice.
Item Open Access American Manna: Religious Responses to the American Industrial Food System(2016) Krone, Adrienne Michelle“American Manna: Religious Responses to the American Industrial Food System” is an investigation of the religious complexity present in religious food reform movements. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork at four field sites. These field sites are a Jewish organic vegetable farm where the farmers begin their days with meditation, a Christian raw vegan diet center run by Messianic Jews, a Christian family that raises their cattle on pastures and sends them to a halal processing plant for slaughter, and a Jewish farm where Christian and Buddhist farm staff helped to implement shmita, the biblical agricultural sabbatical year.
The religious people of America do not exist in neatly bound silos, so in my research I move with the religious people to the spaces that are less clearly defined as “Christian” or “Jewish.” I study religious food reformers within the framework of what I have termed “free-range religion” because they organize in groups outside the traditional religious organizational structures. My argument regarding free-range religion has three parts. I show that (1) perceived injustices within the American industrial food system have motivated some religious people to take action; (2) that when they do, they direct their efforts against the American food industry, and tend to do so outside traditional religious institutions; and finally, (3) in creating alternatives to the American food industry, religious people engage in inter-religious and extra-religious activism.
Chapter 1 serves as the introduction, literature review, and methodology overview. Chapter 2 focuses on the food-centered Judaism at the Adamah Environmental Fellowship at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Falls Village, CT. In Chapter 3, I discuss the Hallelujah Diet as prescriptive literature and as it is put into practice at the Hallelujah Diet Retreat Center in Lake Lure, NC. Chapter 4 follows cows as they move from the grassy hills of Baldwin Family Farms in Yanceyville, NC to the meat counter at Whole Foods Markets. In Chapter 5, I consider the shmita year, the biblical agricultural sabbatical practice that was reimagined and implemented at Pearlstone Center in Baltimore, MD during 2014-2015. Chapter 6 will conclude this dissertation with a discussion of where religious food reform has been, where it is now, and a glimpse of what the future holds.
Item Open Access Aphrahat's Christology. A Contextual Reading(2010) Fiano, Emanuel AngeloThe present study represents an attempt at reading the views on Christ of fourth-century Syriac writer Aphrahat, author of 23 Demonstrations, within the context of coeval developments in Christian thought, especially in Syria. Given the breadth of the set of questions posed by the topic, these pages are not conceived as an exhaustive treatment, but rather as a series of incursions into a complicated terrain. The first chapter shows how scholars studying Aphrahat's Christology have often worked, more or less outspokenly, on the basis of confessional and dogmatic assumptions. I will argue for a change in this regard. The second chapter discusses the Syriac version of the so-called "Eunomian interpolation" found in Pseudoclementine Recognitions 3.2-11, and attested in Latin and Syriac. Through a work of contrasting and comparing the two versions of the text, I will examine the strategies of which the Syriac translator availed himself to moderate the anti-Nicene peaks of the Greek original. The peculiar characteristics of this translation need to be understood, I will suggest, as a token of the livelihood and conflictiveness of Syriac Christianity around the half of the fourth century. Against the same backdrop, presenting competing models for understanding the figure of Christ, I will propose that we read the complex Christological speculation developed by Aphrahat in his Dem. 17. The third chapter of the study interprets the seventh paragraph of this Demonstration, recounting the story of the creation of Adam in a highly unusual manner, as a coherent Christological discourse, rather than a mere digression. In that section we witness, I will argue, a synthetic integration of Adamitic Christology with the scheme of the prolatio of the Logos, and a dynamic engagement, on the part of the Persian Sage, with contemporary theological debates. The study does not reach overall conclusions about the tenets of Aphrahat's Christology, rather presenting itself as an invitation to take this author out of the intellectual isolation in which he has long been kept by scholars.
Item Open Access Asceticism and the Other: Angels and Animals in the Egyptian Ascetic Tradition(2019) Becerra, DanielThe study of Christian asceticism in late antiquity has traditionally been anthropocentric, meaning there is a pervasive focus on ascetic practice as experienced and undertaken by humans in pursuit of a more holy self. More recent scholarly efforts have begun to examine the role non-human agents in this process, a methodological turn consonant with larger “Post-Humanist” trends in scholarship which seek to redefine humanity’s place in the world as merely one life form among many. To date, however, the majority of these works have been limited in scope and have dealt primarily with the ways in which non-humans, such as angels and animals, were participants in the ascetic lives of humans in various capacities (e.g. as companions, guardians, exemplars, food, etc.), to the neglect of how they were also portrayed as beneficiaries of their involvement.
This dissertation more fully situates non-humans within scholarly narratives of Christian asceticism by investigating the ways in which late ancient Christian authors implicated non-humans—specifically angels and animals—as beneficiaries of their involvement in the lives of human ascetics. I limit my analysis to literary works associated with the Egyptian ascetic tradition, meaning those which espouse ascetic ideals, inculcate ascetic practices, or model the ascetic lives of Christians living in Egypt during approximately the third through sixth centuries C.E. I make a historical argument which 1) articulates the most prominent discourses relating to non-human benefaction, 2) places these discourses within their social and theological contexts, and 3) attends to the possible reasons for their similarities and particularities across time and space. I argue that ascetic life was understood by some ancient Christians to provide a context in which both humans and non-humans could advance toward a more ideal state of being. By tracing how authors depict positive changes in the nature and circumstances of non-humans in ascetic contexts, a portrait of early Christian ascetic life emerges in which humans are neither the sole practitioners nor beneficiaries.
Item Open Access Attention to Suffering in the Work of Simone Weil and Käthe Kollwitz(2018) Gehring, StephanieThis dissertation traces the ethical and conceptual connections between Weil’s account of attention and Kollwitz’s artistic practice of attention, especially attention to suffering. Attention, in Weil’s view, is a strenuous surrender to things as they are, which involves the difficult work of letting those things be other than we desire (or even need) them to be. For both Weil and Kollwitz, attention is the only meaningful way of engaging human suffering, one’s own or that of others. My dissertation explores their ethically risky claim, and argues that attention is not only interesting or valuable but necessary when it comes to suffering: any genuine attempt to engage with suffering must begin with a discipline substantially similar to the one Weil writes about as attention and Kollwitz practices in her art. I show how Kollwitz visually extends Weil’s philosophy and theology of attention to suffering in two distinct ways: first, by attending in her art to her own suffering as well as the suffering of others; and second, by investing her art with a wholehearted and tactile focus on the human body.
For Weil, it is attention (as opposed to the will) that is at the heart of human agency. Meaningful action is, for her, impossible without attention. This means that actions intended to alleviate suffering cannot be effective unless they begin (and remain grounded) in attention. This is true especially because one of the effects of suffering (especially the extreme suffering Weil calls malheur, or affliction) is to disfigure the sufferer so much that she is no longer recognizable (even to herself) as a human being, and becomes invisible. Weil writes that attention, which is a form of love, is able to see sufferers even when suffering has made them invisible. Because attention is an exercise of the image of God in human beings, and is a participation in God’s work in the world, it can restore to those whom suffering has reduced to the status of objects a sense of their own human value and dignity. When it comes to our own suffering, the discipline of attention involves accepting it rather than attempting to evade it by passing it on to others. Weil argues that because of the way God entered into suffering in Christ’s incarnation and passion, the nature of suffering has changed: suffering is no longer empty, but is instead a place where we can meet God.
Kollwitz’s two first series of prints (A Weavers’ Revolt and Peasants’ War) show her drawing on many of the strands of modern art that surround her in pursuit of one central goal: to attend to human beings, and to help her viewers learn such attention through her work. The many states of her prints show the rigor of her revisions and the resonance between her artistic process and Weil’s account of attention. Over the course of her career, her aim of seeing humans accurately becomes more and more an aim to see those who suffer. On the one hand, Kollwitz turns toward the industrial poor among whom she lived, whose sufferings tended to make them invisible to others. On the other hand, she turns toward her own suffering, particularly her grief over the death of her son in WWI. In a late series of woodcuts called War, and in her bronze sculpture Mother with Dead Son, she connects the two. Both the print series and the sculpture serve as an invitation to hesitate in a way that lets us attend to the crushing and disorienting reality of suffering. I argue that the series War shows humans meeting their own exposure to the possibility of affliction, and that Kollwitz’s self-described calling “to voice the sufferings of people” fits into a theological account of lament, which presents human suffering in the context of God’s hearing and care.
My dissertation contributes to theological aesthetics by proposing attention as a generally commendable practice of perception, and by offering Weil and Kollwitz’s way of engaging with suffering as an alternative to theodicy.
Item Open Access Authorship of 2 Timothy: Neglected Viewpoints on Genre and Dating(2017-05-04) Paley, JustinThis thesis will explore the authorship, genre, and date of Paul’s Second Letter to Timothy. 2 Timothy, alongside 1 Timothy and Titus, constitute what scholars term the “Pastoral Epistles”. The Pastoral Epistles identify themselves to be from the hand Paul. However, since the early 19th century, a majority of scholars have questioned this claim and argued in favor of a pseudonymous author who wrote in Paul’s name after his death. Consequently, they are often dated sometime after the death of Paul (~62 CE) and taken to be a reflection of late 1st century/2nd century Christianity. The differences between the Pastorals and Paul’s other letters in areas such as vocabulary, style, and theology are often cited in backing up this claim. This thesis first surveys what scholarship has to say about these differences and possible solutions. Subsequently, the case will be made for 2 Timothy’s uniqueness amongst the “Pastoral Epistles” and why the Pastoral Epistles should be studied as three separate letters rather than as a group. The focus will then turn to the consequences of grouping 2 Timothy with 1 Timothy and Titus and what consequences reconsideration of 2 Timothy’s dating and genre can have for our understanding of its nature and provenance.Item Open Access Belonging in Genesis: Biblical Israel and the Construction of Communal Identity(2008-06-25) Mbuvi, AmandaGenesis is central to both hegemonic and counterhegemonic conceptions of communal identity. Read one way, the book undergirds contemporary assumptions about the nature of communality and the categories through which it is constructed. Read another way, however, it undermines them. This project considers these two readings of Genesis, their asymmetrical approaches to the book, and the intersection between them.
Using family storytelling as an approach to biblical interpretation allows this study to hold together the constitution of the reading community and the interpretation of the biblical text. In a Eurocentric reading of Genesis, the constitution of the reading community governs engagement of the biblical text. Conversely, in the YHWH-centric reading advocated here, the biblical text governs the constitution of the reading community. This study reopens the question of what it means to be an "us" rather than leaving participation in an "us" as an (often unacknowledged) a priori condition of all interpretation. In doing so it does not deny the existence or the significance of such preexisting commitments, but rather it refuses to regard those commitments as fixed and final.
From an exegetical standpoint, this study challenges Eurocentrism by finding in Genesis a vision of communality that, in emphasizing the importance of living out the relatedness of all humans to one another and to God, holds the potential for more fruitful relationships between communities. From a methodological standpoint, it offers a reading of Genesis that incorporates features of the text that have been neglected by colonizing readings and avoids the difficulties and internal inconsistencies from which they suffer. Making use of Benedict Anderson's account of the relationship between the imagined community of the nation and religiously imagined communities, as well as Jonathan Sheehan's account of the Enlightenment Bible, this study argues that certain ways of reading the Bible arose to help the West articulate its sense of itself and its others. Drawing attention to the text's reception and the way in which Eurocentric approaches displace Jews and marginalize (the West's) others, this project considers alternative ways of conceptualizing the relationship between the Bible and those who call it their own.
Item Open Access Beyond Public and Private: A Theological Transfiguration(2013) Larsen, SeanIn this dissertation, I argue that the conceptual grammar of Augustine's thought provides a way of re-thinking the public/private distinction as it has been developed in modernity. The dissertation consists of two parts. The first part is a conceptual analysis and a genealogy of the distinction through focus on specific private characters produced in both antiquity and modernity. I focus on the characters of the "woman" and the "refugee." Conceptually, I argue that the public/private distinction can be seen both as an anthropological distinction and as a socio-political distinction: claims about the structure, nature, and history of selves have implications for how society ought to be organized, and claims about how society ought to be organized have implications about the structure, nature, and history of selves. I show how Christianity changed society by creating new character scripts and with them, new socio-political possibilities. The second part of the dissertation provides one Augustinian conceptual "grammar" that makes sense of the revolution Christianity effected possible, and it responds to problems raised by the genealogy in the first half by providing a close reading of Augustine's texts relating to God and creation, interiority, salvation and beatitude, and the Virgin Mary. I display the logic in Augustine's thought by which, in God, domestic and public come together, how God's relation to creation changes how to think about interiority, what that means for how Augustine understands salvation as a restoration of proper inwardness, and how the character of the Virgin Mary condenses the grammar as a sacrament of human salvation. I draw out the ways that Mary shows how Augustinian thought provides resources to think "beyond" the public/private distinction both as it was given to her in antiquity and how it has been received in modernity.
Item Open Access Beyond the Convent Walls: The Local and Japan-wide Activities of Daihongan’s Nuns in the Early Modern Period (c. 1550–1868)(2016) Mitchell, Matthew StevenThis dissertation examines the social and financial activities of Buddhist nuns to demonstrate how and why they deployed Buddhist doctrines, rituals, legends, and material culture to interact with society outside the convent. By examining the activities of the nuns of the Daihongan convent (one of the two administrative heads of the popular pilgrimage temple, Zenkōji) in Japan’s early modern period (roughly 1550 to 1868) as documented in the convent’s rich archival sources, I shed further light on the oft-overlooked political and financial activities of nuns, illustrate how Buddhist institutions interacted with the laity, provide further nuance to the discussion of how Buddhist women navigated patriarchal sectarian and secular hierarchies, and, within the field of Japanese history, give voice to women who were active outside of the household unit around which early modern Japanese society was organized.
Zenkōji temple, surrounded by the mountains of Nagano, has been one of Japan’s most popular pilgrimage sites since the medieval period. The abbesses of Daihongan, one Zenkōji’s main sub-temples, traveled widely to maintain connections with elite and common laypeople, participated in frequent country-wide displays of Zenkōji’s icon, and oversaw the creation of branch temples in Edo (now Tokyo), Osaka, Echigo (now Niigata), and Shinano (now Nagano). The abbesses of Daihongan were one of only a few women to hold the imperially sanctioned title of eminent person (shōnin 上人) and to wear purple robes. While this means that this Pure Land convent was in some ways not representative of all convents in early modern Japan, Daihongan’s position is particularly instructive because the existence of nuns and monks in a single temple complex allows us to see in detail how monastics of both genders interacted in close quarters.
This work draws heavily from the convent’s archival materials, which I used as a guide in framing my dissertation chapters. In the Introduction I discuss previous works on women in Buddhism. In Chapter 1, I briefly discuss the convent’s history and its place within the Zenkōji temple complex. In Chapter 2, I examine the convent’s regular economic bases and its expenditures. In Chapter 3, I highlight Daihongan’s branch temples and discuss the ways that they acted as nodes in a network connecting people in various areas to Daihongan and Zenkōji, thus demonstrating how a rural religious center extended its sphere of influence in urban settings. In Chapter 4, I discuss the nuns’ travels throughout the country to generate new and maintain old connections with the imperial court in Kyoto, confraternities in Osaka, influential women in the shogun’s castle, and commoners in Edo. In Chapter 5, I examine the convent’s reliance upon irregular means of income such as patronage, temple lotteries, loans, and displays of treasures, and how these were needed to balance irregular expenditures such as travel and the maintenance or reconstruction of temple buildings. Throughout the dissertation I describe Daihongan’s inner social structure comprised of abbesses, nuns, and administrators, and its local emplacement within Zenkōji and Zenkōji’s temple lands.
Exploring these themes sheds light on the lives of Japanese Buddhist nuns in this period. While the tensions between freedom and agency on the one hand and obligations to patrons, subordination to monks, or gender- and status-based restrictions on the other are important, and I discuss them in my work, my primary focus is on the nuns’ activities and lives. Doing so demonstrates that nuns were central figures in ever-changing economic and social networks as they made and maintained connections with the outside world through Buddhist practices and through precedents set centuries before. This research contributes to our understanding of nuns in Japan’s early modern period and will participate in and shape debates on the roles of women in patriarchal religious hierarchies.
Item Open Access Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel(2010) Bowler, Catherine ChristianeThis dissertation introduces readers to the major figures and features of the twentieth-century American prosperity gospel. It argues that these diverse expressions of Christian faith-fuelled abundance can be understood as a movement, for they stem from a cohesive set of shared understandings. First, the movement centered on Faith. It conceived of faith as an "activator," a power given to believers that bound and loosed spiritual forces and turned the spoken word into reality. Second and third respectively, the movement depicted faith as palpably demonstrated in wealth and health. It could be measured in both in the wallet--one's personal wealth--and in the body--one's personal health--making material reality the measure of the success of immaterial faith. Last, the movement expected faith to be marked by victory. Believers trusted that culture held no political, social, or economic impediment to faith, and no circumstance could stop believers from living in total victory here on earth. Though its origins lay in the late nineteenth century, the prosperity gospel took root in the Pentecostal revivals of the post-World War II years. It reached maturity by the late 1970s as a robust pan-denominational movement, garnering a national platform and a robust network of churches, ministries, publications, and media outlets. Using the tools of ethnography and cultural history, this dissertation argues that faith, wealth, health, and victory served as the hallmarks of this American phenomenon.
Item Open Access Building a Mountain of Light: Niẓām al-Dīn Gīlānī and Shīʿī Naturalism Between Safavid Iran and the Deccan(2019) Bandy, Hunter CasparianWith the revival of Imāmī or “Twelver” Shīʿa Islam in the Safavid Empire (1501- 1722) of Iran, histories of its clerical elite have emphasized the overt juridical mechanisms that they erected in support of their imperial project. Alternatively, many have also argued that gnostic counter-currents emerging in the same milieu reflected a wider disinterest in political activism. This dissertation provincializes the experience of the Safavid heartland to ask how Iranian émigré scholars working among the royal courts of the Deccan Sultanates (1490-1687) engineered an elite scholarly culture through alternative intellectual rubrics that were simultaneously gnostic in character and overtly political. Drawing on unstudied Arabic and Persian manuscripts trafficked within the Quṭbshāhī Sultanate of Golkonda-Hyderabad (1518-1687), I recover the intellectual career of one of these émigré scholars, Niẓām al-Dīn Aḥmad Gīlānī (b. 1585, d. after 1662), who forms the centerpiece of a nearly two-century story of evolving Shīʿī scholasticism in service of the state. Gīlānī’s intermittent sojourns between his homeland of Gilan, the academies of Safavid Iran, various courtly spaces in Mughal India, and his long-term home in the Deccan make him the perfect subject to refashion these territories into a contiguous intellectual terrain. In six chapters, I show how various medical, natural philosophical, and occult sciences practiced and theorized by Gīlānī and his colleagues as “Shīʿī naturalists” were not only legitimated by Muslim scripture, but were heavily patronized by Muslim rulers as a cornerstone of their political theologies. It demonstrates, furthermore, how Gīlānī’s mode of naturalist inquiry builds upon a speculative and
affective intimacy with non-human and non-Muslim others.
Item Open Access Building a Natya Shastra: Individual Voices in an Evolving Public Memory(2011) Salinas, AnandiIn this project, I reassess fundamental assumptions about tradition, classicality, and authenticity by exploring how artists of various Indian dance forms construct and engage these terms in the retelling of the history of their dance styles. To explore the nuances in the negotiation of terminology in the creation of oral histories, as well as to showcase the dancing itself, I have chosen to look at both dance and narrative in multiple formats of video and text. This paper serves both to survey the ethnographic process of making the film as well as to further explore the theoretical possibilities that were evoked in the many narrations in the film. I will eventually suggest that the formulations of classicality and authenticity in relation to text and temple point to the importance of concept of public memory in the creation of a dynamically constituted tradition rooted in foundational texts such as the Nāṭya Śāstra and living traditions connected to dance lineages and teachers.
Item Open Access Can a Hindu be Black?: A Study of Black Americans and Hinduism(2021) Metivier, KrishniNearly half a century ago, acclaimed jazz musician Alice Coltrane (1937-2007), marital partner of saxophonist John Coltrane, began disseminating Hindu (Vedanta) teachings and jazz-inflected bhajans (songs of praise) in her predominately Black, though multiracial, spiritual community in Southern California. Despite all her accomplishments–becoming the first African American guru, authoring two revelatory sacred texts, composing fifteen devotional albums (many on major record labels), and founding and directing a Vedantic center and quasi-monastic community for over thirty years–the highly acclaimed Alice Coltrane is overlooked by scholars of religion, especially of Asian religions. Similarly, Cleveland-born, Princeton graduate Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950-2005)–who initiated hundreds of disciples across North America, Africa and Eastern Europe into a Hindu religious tradition (Gaudiya Vaishnavism), authored nineteen books, and acted as a consultant to several world leaders–has also passed away hardly noticed. Since at least the 1960s, Black Americans have made lifelong religious commitments to Vedantic teachings and South Asian religious practices such as performing kirtans and bhajans. Despite this, their presence and contributions remain virtually invisible to scholars. My dissertation seeks to disclose Black Americans’ presence and influence in Hinduism since the 1960s as well as raise an urgent ethical and theoretical question for the study of religion: Can a Hindu be Black?
Through intellectual and aesthetic artifacts, literary publications, and twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Black Americans across several U.S. Hindu communities, my doctoral research illustrates Black Americans’ participation in Hinduism since the 1960s through the charismatic leaders Alice “Swamini Turiyasangitananda” Coltrane, John “Bhakti Tirtha Swami” Favors, Clarissa “Krsnanandini Devi Dasi” Jones, and a successive generation of Black practitioners. Thus, my study answers the above question affirmatively; yet, building on recent scholarship on the racialization of religion and genealogies of religion, my study also provokes an indispensable examination of race, ethnicity, and geography in academic constructions of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Hinduism,’ assessing how theory and discourse have, at times, foreclosed the possibility of a Black Hindu.