Browsing by Subject "Christianity"

This dissertation charts the history of evangelical Christian influence in American criminal justice and prisons in the second half of the twentieth century. A work of cultural history that draws upon archival sources, newspapers and magazines, governmental records, and interviews, it explores the connection of the dramatic rise in imprisonment and the surge in evangelicalism’s popularity during this period. Evangelicals outpaced nearly all other religious and social constituencies in their interest in crime and punishment. They led the way on all sides of political battles regarding criminal justice and incarceration: some pushed for “law and order,” while others launched reform efforts. They built ministries to delinquents and inmates, revolutionizing prisons’ religious culture. In sum, this dissertation’s central argument is that crime and prison concern are central to evangelical entry into American public life, and that one cannot understand the creation, maintenance, or reform of modern American criminal justice without accounting for evangelicalism’s impact. This dissertation makes two additional arguments about the precise relationship of evangelicalism to mass incarceration. First, evangelicals not only lobbied for policies and voted for politicians that helped build America’s carceral state, they also helped make these changes appealing to other citizens. Unlike much of the previous work on twentieth-century evangelicalism (particularly their influence in politics), this dissertation frames the movement not in terms of backlash or culture warring, but consensus. Postwar evangelicals framed their own religious movement as reputable, racially moderate, and politically savvy, and they helped to do the same for the cause of punishment, bolstering law enforcement’s “neutral” quality, colorblind aspirations, and respectable status. Second, this dissertation argues for the political import of evangelical soul saving, often overlooked by scholars who characterize the movement’s conversionism as individualistic or neglectful of issues of social change. I show how, though unapologetically spiritual in focus, evangelical concern with crime and punishment opened the eyes of some conservative Protestants to the needs of juvenile delinquents and prison inmates, leading them to solidarity with offenders and new forms of reform work.

“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.

In academia in general, and in the humanistic social sciences in particular, there is a problem. The "cruel optimism" of concepts is a problem faced by every specialization, and every discipline (Berlant 2011). In the social sciences, and history especially, cruel optimism takes the form of an endless quest to prove that our concepts today are superior to the concepts of yesterday, that if we work hard enough and get our methods just right, we will finally find pure, objective, true concepts to express historical reality. I use this dissertation in order to reconfigure our relationship with our concepts, to try to grapple with and ultimately subdue the cruel optimism of concepts. I employ discourse analysis, a method of analyzing knowledge as the imprint of dynamic relations of force and friction between institutions and human beings. Rather than seeing our social scientific concepts as the result of methodical research applied to a critical mass of archival documents, I see them as the result of power relations that are used to control reality as much as they purport to describe it. My materials are documentary sources—published social science scholarship and declassified intelligence reports using social scientific analysis. My conclusion is that we can use our concepts in a way that releases us from the dread of cruel optimism, so long as we see them as "snapshots of processes" (Levins 2006) rather than things in themselves.

The Evangelical Covenant Church, like so many Christian denominations, is embroiled in conflict over homosexuality and gay marriage. This small North American denomination cannot afford a split, not only due to its small size, but because doing so would fundamentally deny its very identity. Thankfully, it is the denomination’s shared identity that gives the church, and sexual minorities, hope for the future.

The ECC is a gathering of churches that covenant together for the sake of God’s mission in the world. It’s pietistic history and ethos values relational unity over doctrinal uniformity, making gracious space for theological diversity for the purpose of that mission. It’s affirmations and distinctives provide a strong DNA for the church to flourish in the midst of a rapidly changing culture.

Homosexuality and gay marriage are complex problems in the church. They challenge fundamental beliefs, values and identities, and they are inherently personal and emotional topics. In order to address this challenge, church leaders must learn new ways of leading.

This paper proposes that an adaptive leadership framework provides the tools necessary for the Evangelical Covenant Church to faithfully and fully take on the challenge without compromising its commitment to Christ and the authority of the Bible. It offers practical resources to assist local congregations in discussing the topic. And, it suggests ways that denominational leadership can support the work of the local congregation.

Despite general consensus among scholars that race in the West is an early modern phenomenon that dates to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, late medieval English texts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries expend no small amount of effort depicting the differences between people—individuals and groups—and categorizing those people accordingly. The contexts for the English literary concern with human difference were the Crusades and associated economic expansion and travel into Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Scholars who have argued that race is present in medieval texts have generally claimed that race is subordinate to religion, the dominant cultural force in medieval Europe. In “Race and Conversion in Late Medieval England,” I argue that race is not necessarily subordinate to religion. Rather, racial and religious discourses compete with one another for ideological dominance. I examine three texts, juxtaposed in only one extant manuscript, London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian E.16; the Three Kings of Cologne, the Siege of Jerusalem, and the physiognomy portion of the Secretum Secretorum together narrate competition between race and religion as community–forming ideologies in England through their treatments of religious identity and physical characteristics. In addition, I study Chaucer’s Man of Law's Tale, which distills down questions of religious difference to genealogy and the interpretation of blood. “Race and Conversion in Late Medieval England” argues that racial ideology emerges from and competes with religion in late medieval English literature as a means of consolidating power in crusading Western Europe, even as the ever present possibility of Christian conversion threatens to undermine the essentializing work of race.

Reconciliation language, however well-intentioned, is neither innocent nor innocuous. In this dissertation, I argue that reconciliation is part of a grammar of whiteness. This word, particularly when spoken and enacted by White people, works violence upon Black life. I argue that reconciliation grammar is a performance of whiteness that banks on racial difference properly managed to assuage White anxiety of otherness. This performance is explored in three acts. The first act concerns the theo-economics of reconciliation accounting and its afterlife in Luca Pacioli. The second act concerns the theo-patriarchy of Lethal Weapon fantasies of racial reconciliation that is real if men are really men, and if the explosions of violence upon muscular White male flesh look real enough. The final act concerns the theo-technology of the human found in White feminist theological writings of Letty Russell, revealing a reconciling humanism that renders difference an “ism” to be overcome by Jesus’ singular humanity. Each of these acts works violence upon Black life in different, and yet intersecting ways. Each of these acts performs reconciliation in such a way that inequitable power relationships result. Reckoning with reconciliation entails a reckoning not only with the words White people use, but also with the ways those words have a material effect on relationships, imaginations, and bodies. I show how reconciliation as a grammar of whiteness has been performed on Black life to account for it as fungible and expendable, to profit from a Black Madonna attending a manly White hero Jesus, and to render the Black woman as plastic material from which any manner of White theologies and ontologies might be built. I then point toward the excess and otherwise life that can never fully be consumed by reconciliation grammar; I argue for the liberative possibilities of life unreconciled.

Popular expressions of contemporary Christianity emphasize a version of the faith is not a religion, but a relationship. What would such a statement mean for people on the autism spectrum whose diagnosis in DSM-5 describes their kind of relating with words like disability, deficiency, and disorder? Are they to be considered disabled in their ability to relate to God? The answer is no. By first identifying the way that projection is at play in our phenomenology of relationships, this project takes the diagnostic criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder found in DSM-5 and locates examples where the Bible witnesses to God behaving in a similar manner. This overlap of neurodiverse relational patterns and divine conduct does two things: First, it provides an opportunity for people on the spectrum to find their kind of relating in the God of the Bible. Second, it expands the palette of language and metaphor the church can draw upon to describe how people relate to God and how God relates to people. The final chapter includes captured learnings and examples for how a work like this can be implemented in parish ministry. In all this, autism reveals both where our relational theology is insufficient, as well as where new avenues of Christian faithfulness lie.

Popular expressions of contemporary Christianity emphasize a version of the faith is not a religion, but a relationship. What would such a statement mean for people on the autism spectrum whose diagnosis in DSM-5 describes their kind of relating with words like disability, deficiency, and disorder? Are they to be considered disabled in their ability to relate to God? The answer is no. By first identifying the way that projection is at play in our phenomenology of relationships, this project takes the diagnostic criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder found in DSM-5 and locates examples where the Bible witnesses to God behaving in a similar manner. This overlap of neurodiverse relational patterns and divine conduct does two things: First, it provides an opportunity for people on the spectrum to find their kind of relating in the God of the Bible. Second, it expands the palette of language and metaphor the church can draw upon to describe how people relate to God and how God relates to people. The final chapter includes captured learnings and examples for how a work like this can be implemented in parish ministry. In all this, autism reveals both where our relational theology is insufficient, as well as where new avenues of Christian faithfulness lie.

This thesis introduces a new interpretation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s religionless Christianity from a missiological perspective. It will argue that religionless Christianity reflects Bonhoeffer’s theology of mission for the modernized and globalized world. Bonhoeffer observed the world becoming nonreligious in all aspects of life and challenged the church to prepare for a generation of people without religious a priori knowledge, whose language would be vastly different from the language of the church. Advances in science and technology have precipitated modernization and globalization, which result in a movement toward human autonomy. The authority of God in the public sphere has lost its significance and influence, and Christianity is considered an individual preference in the private sphere. The world appears to operate just fine even if God does not exist.

The conventional method of mission focuses on communicating the Gospel to individuals residing in a secular environment. This is achieved by adapting the core tenets of Christianity into a vernacular that resonates with them, with the ultimate aim of converting the nonreligious world into a Christian one. In other words, the objective of the mission is to transform the context (secular world) by contextualizing the content (Christianity). Bonhoeffer’s approach is unique in that he attempted to transform Christianity to make it meaningful and relevant for nonreligious people. Bonhoeffer’s theology of mission challenges the church to embrace religionless Christianity as a new form of Christianity for a nonreligious world. Instead of requiring nonreligious people to accept religious doctrines and traditions to become Christians, religionless Christianity offers them to remain in a nonreligious world by becoming religionless Christians.

The term “religionless Christianity” is difficult to reconcile when “Christianity” is already understood as a religion and if Bonhoeffer’s concept of a “completely religionless age” is interpreted as a world without religion. Efforts have been made to resolve this logical fallacy by (1) removing religious aspects in Christianity to make it secular and calling it “secular Christianity,” (2) claiming that Bonhoeffer’s prediction of the religionless age has been proven wrong by presenting the statistical evidence of religious revivalism, (3) suggesting religionless Christianity as Bonhoeffer’s apologetics to explain and defend the core beliefs of Christianity to nonreligious people, and (4) interpreting “religionless” to mean “without legalistic religious traditions of the church” and suggesting that religionless Christianity is Bonhoeffer’s version of a “seeker-sensitive” church.

In this thesis, I will argue that Bonhoeffer’s religionless Christianity is vastly misinterpreted because anthropological, sociological, and theological approaches to Bonhoeffer’s concepts of “religion,” “religionlessness,” and “Christianity” are not adequate to explain Bonhoeffer’s motivation in exploring the necessity of religionless Christianity. I will present Bonhoeffer as a missionary who stood between two worlds—the world of the religious and the nonreligious—struggling to transform Christianity for the religious and the nonreligious by restoring the centrality of Jesus Christ as the Lord of the world. By analyzing key aspects of religionless Christianity from a missiological perspective, I will establish religionless Christianity as Bonhoeffer’s proposal of a new form of Christianity for today’s church.

This dissertation examines how three ancient Christian poets scripted female biblical figures as models of emboldened faith for all to emulate. Through imagined speech and narrative embellishment, they brought familiar figures to life for the entertainment, edification, and instruction of their audiences. These male poets, writing in Syriac and Greek, explored the hermeneutical possibilities of female voices and perspectives. While previous scholars have shown that early Christian authors portrayed female martyrs and ascetics subverting normative behavioral expectations, I argue that poetic depictions of biblical women form an additional category of exempla who pressed the bounds of acceptable speech and action. Through attending to the underexplored genre of poetry, this dissertation brings greater depth and nuance to previous accounts of how late ancient Christians constructed holiness and gender.

The dissertation investigates the poetry of three roughly contemporaneous authors from the late fifth and early sixth centuries: Narsai, Jacob of Serugh, and Romanos Melodos. While these three helped to set the interpretative and theological trajectories of their respective ecclesial communities in the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamian regions, they have never been brought into sustained conversation. Writing in Syriac, Narsai and Jacob were heirs to common literary and theological traditions, while the poems of Romanos Melodos, a Syrian composing in Greek, show thematic and artistic affinities with Syriac poetry, thus pointing to the interconnectedness of the multilingual regions of the eastern Roman and Persian empires.

Selecting from the sizeable extant corpora of these authors, I focus on poems recounting New Testament narratives about four unnamed women: the Canaanite woman, the Hemorrhaging woman, the Sinful woman, and the Samaritan woman. In the initial three chapters I trace the interrelated themes of the body, ethnicity, and the voice to illuminate the distinct interpretative approaches and exegetical concerns of the three poets. Each of these themes supplies a lens through which the three poets underscore the tenacity of biblical women. Narsai and Jacob emphasize the moral agency of biblical women more consistently than Romanos, in part due to their poetic style as well as their strategies of characterization.

At the heart of the dissertation is a chapter on representations of women’s voices, in which I show how the three poets alternatively depicted transgressive female speech and curbed potential dangers of female audacity. The penultimate chapter examines the constellation of terms the poets use to speak about boldness, employing the tools of feminist and philological analysis to show how idealized religious boldness was created through language subject to the ambiguities of gender. The final chapter reflects on the significance of this reception history for understanding the dynamics of verse exegesis in Late Antiquity. While Narsai, Jacob, and Romanos stand as three independent artists, they jointly contribute to the poetic mode of biblical interpretation. Inhabiting the voices and vantage points of female biblical characters, the poets produce complex portraits of bold, self-assertive women pursuing the life of faith.

Drawing upon the literary treasury of Syriac and Greek poetry, this study contributes to the historiography of late ancient literature and the construction of gender. It maps new territory in the reception history of these biblical narratives through close, comparative readings that reveal the distinctive portraits of biblical women painted by Syriac and Greek poetic literature. Within liturgical and academic settings where women’s activity and speech were strictly curtailed, these representations of tenacious, outspoken women provide invaluable insights into how Christian authors inhabited marginalized subject positions to imagine idealized models of faith.

Fundamentalist Christians loosely affiliated with Bob Jones University (Greenville, SC) teach that music influences listeners’ faith and moral characters for both good and evil, expounding their views since the evangelical Worship Wars began in the 1960s over the use of popular music styles in church services. In their dichotomous moral view, good music reveals God’s nature, allowing born-again listeners to draw closer to God and witness their salvation to unbelievers, and bad music pulls listeners away from God by promoting immorality and false worship. Fundamentalists also prioritize mental engagement with music over emotional and physical responses to it because they believe that people more directly relate to God through their conscious minds and only indirectly with their bodies, as when fundamentalist musicians make music with their bodies, an activity that they believe glorifies God. Considering their discourse and practices from ethnographic and theological perspectives, I argue that these reveal a view that all musical sound is dangerous in its insistent entrance into listeners’ bodies: music is like fire—useful under control but devastating if unrestrained.

I examine the outworkings of their beliefs in three primary areas: recorded music, congregational singing (both aloud and silent as congregants practice inner singing while listening to instrumental hymn arrangements), and solo and soloistic vocal music. Musicians’ invisibility on recordings underscores how fundamentalists’ beliefs are primarily about musical sound, not performers’ movements or appearances. Robust congregational singing reflects believers’ “joy of salvation,” but their collective emotional affects are limited, and they are physically constrained to small movements that almost never bloom into something fuller. Finally, although fundamentalist leaders consider classical music and its associated performance practice to be “excellent,” even this musical style must be restrained for classically trained vocalists to minister in their churches. These arguments are based on my fieldwork and my analyses of fundamentalists’ extensive written and recorded discourse on music.

There continues to be strong interest in the arena of Christian formation, which is

primarily concerned with developing mature Christians in light of shifts in contemporary

views on religion and its relationship to ethics. The field of Christian formation has many

facets one of which is the field of Christian practices. Those who work in this field are

primarily concerned with relating Christian beliefs to the every day lives of Christians in

the interest of providing a stronger witness to the faith. Also, Christian practices are a

means to provide a response to other forms of identity formation provided by a hyper

individualistic consumer driven culture.

This thesis is concerned with the question of how the work of the Holy Spirit is

understood to function in Christian practices? In short, “Does Pentecost have anything to

do with how Christians live their daily lives?” To answer these questions a brief

investigation of present work in Christian practices will be provided to ascertain how the

work of the Holy Spirit is present. Thereafter, an example of how the focus on the Holy

Spirit in the work of Christian practices may be enhanced indebted to Eugene Rogers’

work on the Holy Spirit and James K. A. Smith’s work on the formation of Christian

desire will be proposed

This dissertation approaches the question of Christian self-sacrifice through a particular problematic of race in the United States; specifically, where white supremacy “divides and conquers” by creating conditions for antagonistic relations between minoritized populations, broadly referred to as “racial triangulation” (Claire Jean Kim). As I demonstrate, theological logics mimic and reinforce this American sacrifice of racialized and gendered difference. My intervention provides an account of how two kinds of substitutionary logic are at play, rather than just the one-to-one logic that is typically assumed. I critically identify a substitutionary logic of equivalencies that allow for theological thinking to be interchanged with multiple trajectories of thought, in turn reinforcing the one-to-one thinking that contributes to the American liberal narrative of assimilative sacrifice.

In Chapter 1, I look closely at theological analyses of sacrifice, both that reject it for liberative possibilities, and those that attempt to retrieve it as a vital aspect of Christian practice. Focusing on the figure of the martyr as an image or stereotype of sacrifice allows me to articulate the mimetic assumptions that underlie both rejections and retrievals. Chapter 2 expands upon the ontological assumptions animating the stereotype, via the logic of surrogacy and mammy stereotype. I delve into the domestic space as a site for sacrifice, and how prevailing sacrificial narratives commodified the realities of black motherhood and family for the sake of economically ordering the domestic spaces of white households.

Chapter 3 continues to focus on the domestic space, but more explicitly examines the religious character of sacrifice as a logic of domestication. More specifically, the transformation of Asian Americans from yellow peril to model minority reveals the interchange of theological, economic, and political logics in the mission of Christian domesticity. Finally, Chapter 4 pushes into the question of sacrifice as one of genealogy. I attend to this problem by turning to the genealogical problems and promise of baptism, specifically as seen in Daniel Boyarin and Karl Barth. Constructively drawing upon Anne Anlin Cheng’s idea of “unlikely affinities” and Judith Butler, I offer up an undomesticated account of sacrifice.

Ambrose, bishop of Milan, was one of the most outspoken advocates of Christian female virginity in the fourth century C.E. This dissertation examines his writings on virginity in the interest of illuminating the historical and social contexts of his teachings. Considering Ambrose's treatises on virginity as literary productions with social, political, and theological functions in Milanese society, I look at the various ways in which the bishop of Milan formulated ascetic discourse in response to the needs and expectations of his audience. Furthermore, I attend to the various discontinuities in Ambrose's ascetic writings in the hope of illuminating what kinds of ideological work these texts were intended to perform by the bishop within Milanese society and beyond.

In the first part of this dissertation, I consider the mechanisms of language and rhetoric promoting virginity in context of the Nicene-Homoian debate, highlighting the fluidity and flexibility of ascetic language in the late fourth century. While in his earliest teachings Ambrose expounds virginity in ways that reflect and support a Nicene understanding of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, his later ascetic writings display his use of anti-Homoian rhetoric in order to support his virginal ideals when they are challenged by Jovinian and others. In the second part, I examine some of the various ways in which the bishop formulated his teachings of virginity in response to the complaints and criticisms of lay members of the Christian community in Milan and elsewhere. I scrutinize the bishop's rhetorical expositions of Biblical figures such as Mary, Eve, the bride of the Song of Songs, and the Jews as a means of furthering his ascetic agenda, and consider his adaptation of a female voice to avoid incurring further criticism. Finally, I consider the role that the bishop's ascetic interests may have played in the so-called Altar of Victory controversy of 384. Largely at stake in Ambrose's dispute with the Roman senator Symmachus, I argue, were the rights and privileges of the Vestal Virgins, a well-established pagan ideology of virginity whose continued prominence and existence was largely unconscionable to the bishop. Ambrose's involvement in the controversy was partly attributable to his interest in ensuring the restriction of Vestal privileges as he perceived the cult to be in direct social and ideological competition with Christian virginity. Together, these three parts attempt to demonstrate the highly fluid and flexible nature of virginity discourse in the late fourth century and to draw attention to some of the socio-theological negotiations that took place as the cult of virginity gained increasing prominence in the Christian church.