Browsing by Subject "Comparative religion"

When the Roman Emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus—better known to many as Julian the Apostate—perished on a Persian battlefield in 363 CE, his efforts to turn back the Christianizing currents of the Roman Empire died with him. In the final decades of the fourth century, subsequent Christian emperors only further solidified the political and social status of Christianity. Julian’s intellectual challenges, however, lingered longer. In the 420s, Cyril, the new bishop of Alexandria, composed a colossal response to one of Julian’s final compositions, the anti-Christian Against the Galileans. My dissertation is a study of Cyril’s little-examined and untranslated text, known as Against Julian, and of the intellectual conflict that he and Julian engaged.Drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre’s analysis of conflict between strong traditions, I argue that the rivalry that obtains between Julian and Cyril is “narrative conflict.” Close reading reveals that Julian and Cyril did not share adequate criteria by which their most central intellectual disagreements could be adjudicated, and as a result their arguments most fundamentally disputed the details of the narrative backdrops to their traditions and rationalities. Neither of their texts are narratives per se, but the implicit framework that makes their arguments intelligible lie in their respective maximal narratives. Through philosophical arguments, historical vignettes, ad hominem insults, and more, Julian and Cyril each attempted to outnarrate their rival—they tried, that is, to reconstrue “episodes” from their rival’s tradition-constitutive narrative as episodes in their own tradition’s narrative. The first chapter opens with an illustrative case study of narrative conflict, focusing on Julian’s and Cyril’s competing and confident interpretations of an exceedingly vague biblical text. It then explains the conceptual apparatus of traditions, rationality, and narrative, before introducing the details of Julian’s and Cyril’s contexts and texts, and the relevant larger questions in scholarship on late antiquity. The second chapter is entirely devoted to a comprehensive, narrative-conflict analysis of Julian’s Against the Galileans, the rhetorical heft of which has regularly been overlooked by Julian’s modern readers. Chapters 3 through 5 focus on Cyril’s arguments in Against Julian, with Chapter 3 tracing key features of the narrative backdrop to Cyril’s arguments, and Chapters 4 and 5 focusing on clusters of renarrated “episodes.” These latter two chapters track how Cyril rebuts Julian’s attempts to subsume Christian episodes within the Hellenic narrative and how he simultaneously dislodges episodes from Julian’s narrative and re-explains them on Christian terms. The concluding chapter introduces Cyril’s Against Nestorius as a point of comparison with Against Julian—the striking formal similarities between Cyril’s two polemical texts provide a backdrop against which the features of his inter-tradition conflict with Julian stand out even more clearly, by contrast to his intra-tradition conflict with his fellow bishop, Nestorius. The comparison further clarifies the dynamics of intellectual conflict between narratives—dynamics which I then enumerate before, finally, concluding with suggestions about the implications of my study for scholarship not just on Julian and Cyril, but on the relationship between their respective traditions, Hellenism and Christianity.

This dissertation compares the responses of Italian Jewish and Catholic intellectuals to the process of secularization and modernization triggered by Italian national unification (1861-1870). Arguing that, in the case of Italy, the borders separating Jewish and Catholic communities have been more porous than generally thought, my research intends to destabilize simplistic historiographical oppositions based on a dichotomous anti-/philo-Semitic approach. In comparing Judaism and Catholicism vis à vis the new, modern, and secular nation-state, I offer a more complex picture of the relation between these two religions. In order to avoid presenting a one-sided account, my comparative approach brings together studies and perspectives from different fields. The first three chapters analyze a wide variety of sources, ranging from official speeches to journal articles, archival documents, and literature. I analyze the Commemoration of the Capture of Rome (1870) given by Roman mayor Ernesto Nathan in 1910 and Salvatore De Benedetti’s 1884 Opening Address at the University of Pisa on The Hebrew Bible as a source for Italian literature, as well as articles published in the Jewish journals Il Vessillo Israelitico and Il Corriere Israelitico, the Catholic journal La Civiltà Cattolica, and the anticlerical journal L’Asino. The last chapter focuses on the Jewish historical novel The Moncalvos, written by Enrico Castelnuovo in 1908, investigating the problematic appeal of secularism and Catholicism for a Jewish family settled in Rome. By drawing on this variety of sources, my dissertation both scrutinizes the interrelated role of Jewish, Catholic, and secular culture in Italian national identity and calls for a reconsideration of the starting point of modern Jewish-Catholic dialogue, well before the events following the Shoah, the rise of the State of Israel, and the Second Vatican Council declaration Nostra Aetate.

“Mountain at a Center of the World” examines the pilgrimage site of Sri Pada, or Adam’s Peak, in Sri Lanka, explaining its worldwide significance across multiple religious traditions over the past millennium. Drawing on a year of ethnographic fieldwork, as well as many historical sources, including original translations of Sinhala and Tamil texts, I present a history of the Peak that argues its multi-religious fame is due to its physical landscape—including prominent relief, visibility from sea, verdant woods, watershed, and wildlife. As these natural elements recur in past and present storytelling about the Peak, I suggest that the mountain helped structure human history by making its own myth.

Using a methodology that refashions geological theories of stratigraphy and crystallization for reading sources in the humanities, the Peak’s polytemporal multi-religious accounts are presented in a layered comparative perspective. The natural environment is the common denominator for tracking similarities and divergences across traditions, showing the Peak translated into Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Christian stories, with rhetorical ends ranging from political rule to spiritual attainment. As both commonalities and conflict exist in this landed history, I propose that religious pluralism at the Peak is best understood like the mountain’s ecology, describing environments that are cooperative, if not always harmonious. In turn, pilgrimage practices and ecological concerns meet in conservation projects at the Peak, where religious messages may be productively used for environmental ends if they recognize full pluralities—including all multi-religious actors sharing the pilgrimage, as well as other assemblages of living and nonliving forces shaping the planet

Contemporary Religious Music is a growing subsection of the music industry in the United States. Talented artists representing a vast array of religious groups in America express their religion through popular music styles. Christian Rock, Jewish Reggae and Muslim Hip-Hop are not anomalies; rather they are indicative of a larger subculture of radio-ready religious music. This pop music has a purpose but it is not a singular purpose. This music might enhance the worship experience, provide a wholesome alternative to the unsavory choices provided by secular artists, infiltrate the mainstream culture with a positive message, raise the level of musicianship in the religious subculture or appeal to a religious audience despite origins in the secular world. It is vital to categorize contemporary religious music based on the goals of three key players - the record labels, the musicians and the audience. In this paper I use data from all three key players in addition to analysis of music and lyrics to ascertain the placement of music within my organizational system. I arrange contemporary religious music into two functional categories based on these key factors. These categories create a framework for understanding the multi-purpose world of contemporary religious music and its role within American religious communities.