Browsing by Subject "Religious history"
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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 Maladjusted King: Theological Resistance and Nonconformity in an American Prophet(2018) Butler, Don DariusIn response to Nassir Ghaemi, an academic psychiatrist who presumes a mental illness and genetic abnormality in Martin Luther King, Jr., this project contends that King was a decidedly maladjusted prophet who dramatized his resistance to the evil triumvirate of racism, materialism, and militarism pervasive in American public life. Using the sermonic trope, “Creative Maladjustment,” a theological reconstruction of King’s prophetic meliorism is sustained in order to reclaim his legacy from the facile memory of the nation. The essential writings, speeches, and sermons of the revered Baptist clergyman source the work, giving insight into his personal thoughts about the method he chose specifically for the purpose of pricking the conscience of the America during the Civil Rights Movement. Relevant commentary and critical analyses of scholars and historians also support the claim of this thesis, pointing to King’s well-reasoned moral stance against social iniquity. The project traces the roots of King’s resistance in the biblical witness of the Old Testament prophets, the religion of the black church in America, and his early humiliations borne of racial segregation. Attention is also given to his intellectual assent to the theory of civil disobedience and philosophy of nonviolence, with critical examination of his conversion to the same. Finally, the project delves into the maturing path of King’s resistance vis-à-vis the widening economic inequities observed across the national landscape and spreading global strife, which formed the basis of his “world house” doctrine. The implications of King’s legacy upon contemporary moral leaders are offered as concluding thoughts.
Item Open Access A Semipelagian in King Charles's Court: Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda on Nature, Grace, and the Conquest of the Americas(2018) Benjamin, Katie MarieIn 1526, a Spaniard in the papal court of Clement VII addressed a treatise against Luther’s Bondage of the Will, calling it On Fate and Free Will and arguing good works are not only possible before one receives God’s grace but a necessary prerequisite to that grace. The position, which acknowledges a human need for grace but assigns the beginning of salvation to human effort, is one church historians conventionally refer to as semipelagianism. The Spaniard, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, went on to serve Charles V as royal historian, and to defend the latter’s conquest of the Americas and subjugation of those contintents’ indigenous populations at the Valladolid debates in 1550–1551. The logic by which he did so is generally attributed to a high view of plenary papal authority in the temporal world, combined with an Aristotelian hierarchy of being that conveniently labeled the indigenous peoples of the Americas “natural slaves.” This dissertation uses Sepúlveda’s published treatises in order to trace his treatment of themes such as natural reason, natural law, divine law, human free will, and divine grace, in order to demonstrate that Sepúlveda's logic in his defense of the conquest was actually rooted precisely in the semipelagian theology he deployed in his writings against Luther. He argued that the indigenous peoples of the Americas were barbarians and appropriately labeled according to Aristotle's natural slave category, but he began with the theological conviction that they had failed to embrace what natural reason alone could teach them about God, and failed moreover to “do what is in one” by turning to God and obeying the divine law as revealed in nature, all of which Sepúlveda took to be prerequisite for the receipt of grace. The indigenous peoples of the Americas were not barbarians in Sepúlveda’s mind because they belonged to Aristotle’s natural slave category, but “natural slave” was a useful term he deployed to further describe those who had failed to take the initiative for their salvation, as required by the semipelagian theology he deployed against Luther.
Item Open Access "All Hail King Jesus": The International Worship Symposium and the Making of Praise and Worship History, 1977–1989(2021) Perez, AdamSince the late 1940s, Praise and Worship has emerged as a new mode of liturgical expression out of North American Pentecostalism. Despite a variety of conflicts that have marked its adoption, it has found a home in a wide swath of global Protestant churches and it is estimated that nearly a quarter of the world’s Christians practice some form of Praise and Worship today. Praise and Worship today is known primarily by the expectation that participants will encounter God’s presence through music.This dissertation presents a historical case study of the International Worship Symposium (IWS) as a lens into Praise and Worship history. The IWS was an annual Praise and Worship teaching event that began in 1977 and peaked in the late 1980s. The theology and practice of IWS worship was built on the central claim that God “inhabits” or “is enthroned upon” the praises of God’s people (from Psalm 22:3)—an insight first popularized by Latter Rain theologian and pastoral leader Reg Layzell. I begin with the background of the Latter Rain Revival of 1948 and the impact of Reg Layzell’s theology on the churches and individuals that birthed the IWS. Through conference teaching materials, personal interviews, and other primary sources, I explore how IWS teachers expanded on this theology by the 1980s and used the Tabernacle of David as typological prism for understanding worshipers’ special access to God through Praise and Worship, especially music. My argument concludes with a case study of the critical, early influence that the IWS had on the theology and music of a major—though little-researched—player in the worship music industry: Integrity’s Hosanna! Music. Through its influence both on the thousands of individual conference participants and on the leadership of this one major company, the IWS had a central role in the dissemination or Praise and Worship’s practices and theology. In summary, I suggest that it is precisely the biblically-derived theological and liturgical understandings of the IWS that were central to the development of Praise and Worship (and its music) in the 1980s. Despite its importance, liturgical studies scholarship has largely ignored the role of Latter Rain Pentecostals and the IWS. Instead, scholars have constructed a music-industrial history of Praise and Worship that focuses primarily on musical style and attributes Praise and Worship’s origins to the Jesus People Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. I argue that is actually Pentecostals affiliated with the Latter Rain Revival of 1948, including those who originated and led the IWS, who were most critical to the construction and mainstream dissemination of Praise and Worship during the critical period of development, which was the 1980s. In addition to focusing on the wrong people and the wrong time period, scholars have often overlooked the underlying liturgical theology of Praise and Worship, which is, I suggest, the most critical element in its historical development. Thus, the dissertation offers liturgical history as a productive frame for engaging musicological and ethnomusicological research on present-day sites while expanding the scholarship of liturgical history on the Latter Rain stream of Pentecostal worship that has contributed to contemporary transformations in global Protestant worship today.
Item Open Access "All Hail King Jesus": The International Worship Symposium and the Making of Praise and Worship History, 1977–1989(2021) Perez, AdamSince the late 1940s, Praise and Worship has emerged as a new mode of liturgical expression out of North American Pentecostalism. Despite a variety of conflicts that have marked its adoption, it has found a home in a wide swath of global Protestant churches and it is estimated that nearly a quarter of the world’s Christians practice some form of Praise and Worship today. Praise and Worship today is known primarily by the expectation that participants will encounter God’s presence through music.This dissertation presents a historical case study of the International Worship Symposium (IWS) as a lens into Praise and Worship history. The IWS was an annual Praise and Worship teaching event that began in 1977 and peaked in the late 1980s. The theology and practice of IWS worship was built on the central claim that God “inhabits” or “is enthroned upon” the praises of God’s people (from Psalm 22:3)—an insight first popularized by Latter Rain theologian and pastoral leader Reg Layzell. I begin with the background of the Latter Rain Revival of 1948 and the impact of Reg Layzell’s theology on the churches and individuals that birthed the IWS. Through conference teaching materials, personal interviews, and other primary sources, I explore how IWS teachers expanded on this theology by the 1980s and used the Tabernacle of David as typological prism for understanding worshipers’ special access to God through Praise and Worship, especially music. My argument concludes with a case study of the critical, early influence that the IWS had on the theology and music of a major—though little-researched—player in the worship music industry: Integrity’s Hosanna! Music. Through its influence both on the thousands of individual conference participants and on the leadership of this one major company, the IWS had a central role in the dissemination or Praise and Worship’s practices and theology. In summary, I suggest that it is precisely the biblically-derived theological and liturgical understandings of the IWS that were central to the development of Praise and Worship (and its music) in the 1980s. Despite its importance, liturgical studies scholarship has largely ignored the role of Latter Rain Pentecostals and the IWS. Instead, scholars have constructed a music-industrial history of Praise and Worship that focuses primarily on musical style and attributes Praise and Worship’s origins to the Jesus People Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. I argue that is actually Pentecostals affiliated with the Latter Rain Revival of 1948, including those who originated and led the IWS, who were most critical to the construction and mainstream dissemination of Praise and Worship during the critical period of development, which was the 1980s. In addition to focusing on the wrong people and the wrong time period, scholars have often overlooked the underlying liturgical theology of Praise and Worship, which is, I suggest, the most critical element in its historical development. Thus, the dissertation offers liturgical history as a productive frame for engaging musicological and ethnomusicological research on present-day sites while expanding the scholarship of liturgical history on the Latter Rain stream of Pentecostal worship that has contributed to contemporary transformations in global Protestant worship today.
Item Open Access American Law and Gospel: Evangelicals in the Age of Mass Incarceration(2018) Griffith, AaronThis 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.
Item Open Access Bad Christians and Hanging Toads: Witch Trials in Early Modern Spain, 1525-1675(2016) Rojas, Rochelle EThis dissertation challenges depictions of witchcraft as a sensational or disruptive phenomenon, presenting witch beliefs instead as organically woven into everyday community life, religious beliefs, and village culture. It argues that witch beliefs were adaptive, normal, and rational in regions that never suffered convulsive witch persecutions. Furthermore, this dissertation, the first to work systematically through Spanish secular court witch trials, upends scholars’ views about the dominance of the Spanish Inquisition in witchcraft prosecutions. Through a serial study of secular court records, this dissertation reveals that the local court of Navarra poached dozens of witch trials from the Spanish Inquisition, and independently prosecuted over one hundred accused witches over one hundred-and-fifty years. These overlooked local sources document witch beliefs in far greater detail than Inquisition records and allow the first reconstruction of village-level witch beliefs in Spain. Drawing from historical, anthropological, and literary methods, this dissertation employs a transdisciplinary approach to examine the reports from villagers, parish priests, and jurists, produced under the specific local and older accusatorial judicial procedure. Free of the Inquisitorial filter that has dominated previous studies of Spanish witchcraft, these sources reveal the way villagers—not Inquisitors—conceived of, created, feared, and survived in a world with witches and sorceresses.
Using these local sources, this dissertation illuminates the complex social webs of witchcraft accusations, the pathways of village gossip, and the inner logic of witch beliefs. It reveals the central role of Catholic performativity and the grave consequences of being marked as a mala cristiana, the importance of fama and kin ties, and reveals the rationality of the curious and pervasive presence of the common toad (Bufo bufo) in Navarra’s witch trials. By moving away from the prevalent focus given to the more spectacular witch panics and trials, this work demonstrates the value of local trial records. This dissertation argues that far from irrational or absurd, witchcraft beliefs in early modern Navarra were internally coherent and intellectually informed by an amalgamation of religious, social, and legal forces.
Item Open Access Beholding the Image: Vision in John Calvin's Theology(2018) Capps, Franklin TannerThe aim of this dissertation is to expound the role of vision in John Calvin’s theology. Given the many-sided and often confusing—sometimes even apparently contradictory—nature of Calvin’s account and use of the category of vision, I set out to illuminate the implicit and deeply rooted coherence of his thought on this topic. Calvin’s treatment of vision consistently intertwines two fundamental elements: (1) a theological interpretation of the literal, bodily sense of sight, and (2) the use of sight as a metaphor for comprehensive, penetrating ‘spiritual’ understanding. A dominant strand of scholarship, along with much popular thinking about Calvin, tends to regard him as either an extreme iconoclast or, if the visual is acknowledged as playing a role in his theology, as always insisting on recourse to ‘the word’ over against the visual. (The word, for Calvin, encompasses both Jesus Christ as ‘Word’ and ‘words’ proclaimed or spoken about Christ, including, for example, the Christian sermon and sacred Scripture.) By contrast, I contend that visual patterns of thinking pervade his thought, even without recourse to the word, which is to say the use of language to describe or clarify the visual. To this end, I propose that his theological use of vision is best elicited according to an implicit distinction between simply ‘seeing’ (frequently, specere) things as they appear to present themselves—that is to say, perceiving a thing isolated from God and all other created things; and ‘beholding’ (frequently, aspicere) things as they truly are—that is to say, understanding a thing in relation to God and, by extension, to all other created things. Seeing indicates the superficial perception of some thing, grounded in mere physical perception, while beholding indicates dynamic vision, which may also be called ‘insight,’ involving the exercise of faith, in which some thing is comprehended in relation to the divine and thereby to all other created things. While beholding may or may not entail physically seeing an object, it does require that a thing be understood in relation to its source and end, which, according to Calvin, is God. Seeing and beholding are related in that both are modes of visual comprehension—involving a range of modes of visual encounter, from literal sight to mental picturing to singular visual manifestations of the divine—though seeing is a relatively diminished mode of visual comprehension in relation to beholding. Around this seeing-beholding distinction I organize what I call Calvin’s ‘theology of vision.’
The bulk of this dissertation is occupied with an exposition of Calvin’s theology of vision. After developing an account of it, I close by drawing out some of its implications for current debate in theological aesthetics. I suggest that Calvin gives us theological tools for articulating the mystery of humanity’s visually mediated encounter with divinity in a way that encompasses but is not reducible to the traditional concepts of aesthetic experience and aesthetic action.
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 Embargo “Building Community Across Walls: A History of an Integrated Church Amid a Gentrifying Neighborhood in Charleston, South Carolina”(2019) Shoemaker, Adam James“Building Community Across Walls: A History of an Integrated Church Amid a Gentrifying Neighborhood in Charleston, South Carolina” is a study focused upon the integrated history of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, the congregation I serve in downtown Charleston. The church, which was an African American congregation for much of the twentieth century, integrated in the late 1980’s following the gentrification of our Ansonborough neighborhood. This ethnographic study, centered upon formal interviews with both black and white members of my church who experienced this integration together, in addition to clergy and community leaders, is an attempt to both accurately share this history and to critically examine it to mine how it might inform St. Stephen’s present and future. This study makes the argument that St. Stephen’s history of integration must be understood amid the backdrop of urban gentrification and the ways in which this social phenomenon is impacting downtown congregation’s like my own.
This project will therefore be critically examining the intersection of race and gentrification and the ways in which these forces impact any church trying to build community across the “walls” of various social boundaries in urban areas. The argument of this thesis is that no such community can be sustained without awareness of these forces and an ongoing and intentional commitment to diversity, to combating racism and the ongoing reality of white supremacy in our country.
This thesis will have four parts. The first part will aim to offer critical background meant to put St. Stephen’s story into proper context. Chapter one will detail a short overview of the issue of gentrification and focus specifically on its impact upon African Americans. Chapter two will offer a brief reflection on the significance of the black church to African American identity, culture, and collective memory. This chapter intends to impress upon the reader what is at stake and what is potentially lost when an all-black church wrestles with whether to integrate. These chapters will enable a better understanding and more accurate interpretation of St. Stephen’s story of integration.
The St. Stephen’s story will be explored through a series of ethnographic interviews I’ve conducted with nearly twenty-five black and white members of the church – lay and ordained – who lived through that history together. Archival material will also be utilized and woven into a reflection on the interview responses to deepen learnings and glean insights. Prior to parts two, three, and four pertaining to St. Stephen’s, a brief author’s note will appear. This note will include a fuller description of my interview sample and size along with an acknowledgement of potential biases and the fallibility inherent in a project based upon memory.
The second part will outline and detail St. Stephen’s history leading up to integration. It will include a third chapter that consists of a short early history of my parish and a fourth chapter laying out St. Stephen’s eventful African American history from the early decades of the twentieth century to the late 1980’s. Chapter five will include a description of the gentrification of the church’s Ansonborough neighborhood through historic preservation efforts, spearheaded by the Historic Charleston Foundation, that led to the integration of the parish.
Part three will focus on the parish’s intentional integration. Chapters six through thirteen will constitute the heart of this thesis: an accounting of St. Stephen’s late 1980’s to early 1990’s collective experience and a critical reflection upon its successes, points of tension, and missed opportunities.
Part four will consist of a detailed accounting of St. Stephen’s story since its integrative period in chapter fourteen and fifteen. Chapters sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen will include reflections upon the what the lessons of our past offer us today. I will then highlight a few significant questions for further study and reflection in chapters nineteen and twenty followed by a conclusion.
Item Open Access Coming Home: A Historical Assessment of Private Domestic Space as the Primary Locus of Christian Hospitality(2016) Long, Benita ManningComing Home: A Historical Assessment of Private Domestic Space as the Primary Locus of Christian Hospitality
ABSTRACT
Subject
Contemporary Christian individuals and institutions seeking direction in a post-Constantinian world have begun turning to the earliest communities of faith for guidance. Theologians, scholars, ecclesial leaders, and laity alike are finding that the concept of hospitality frequently surfaces as an integral dynamic of Christian communal identity, discipleship, and Gospel transmission. They consistently argue that hospitality is a necessary component of Christian life and that it represents a lost discipline worthy of reclaiming. This thesis builds on previous work by arguing that not just in the beginning, but in every epoch of Christian faith, private domestic space has provided the most suitable and effective environment for such practices. Therefore, if there is hope to be found in reclaiming the discipline of hospitality, the home must be restored as integral to the concept. If private domestic space as the primary locus of hospitality disappears from the Christian cultural landscape, the essential and most basic model of the dynamic will disappear with it. Evidence will confirm that throughout its entire history, although in varying degrees, hospitality has served as a central tenet, a consistent thread, and an ongoing leitmotif of Christian faith and witness. It will be established that its ultimate expression has consistently been found in the intimacy of the personal home, and it is this environment that has most effectively provided a recognizable paradigm for various manifestations of the dynamic. The image of hospitality being offered and/or withheld can be found in numerous areas of human endeavor. The concept emerges politically, socially, economically, and theologically. Thus the question is begged of Christians, “What are the implications of a diminished and weakened physical, incarnational, home-based hospitality, and how might history offer the help necessary in restoring its authenticity?”
Materials and Methods
Because readers are encouraged to rethink Christian hospitality as a lost legacy whose original potency has diminished over the course of history, each epoch will be deconstructed, examined and analyzed for clues as to when, how, and why this change occurred. What will emerge are clear and continuous patterns of activity and behavior, patterns that only a historical perspective can bring to light. The evidence, consisting of over one hundred books, peer reviewed articles, and primary sources will not be presented as a simple chronology of “proofs.” In some instances, literary metaphor is considered an acceptable form of persuasion whereas in others concrete models and paradigms are more effective tools. Whereas dozens of voices will enrich the conversation of some periods, individual life models will dominate the discussion of others. Early evidence will not necessarily represent Eastern or Western Christianity, but as the faith expands, geography will become more of a factor. Some evidence is historically accurate; some is ancient but venerated hagiography.
Conclusion
The conclusion of the paper is that although the centrality of private domestic space has clearly declined, there are signs of hope for the recovery of authentic home-based Christian hospitality, as communities of worship and individuals alike are encouraged to seek and find inspiration in successful past practices.
Item Open Access Common Bound: The Small Groups of Methodism(2016) Mobley, Matthew AlanThe system of small groups John Wesley established to promote a proper life of discipleship in early Methodist converts was, in many respects, the strength of the Methodist movement. Those who responded to Wesley’s initial invitation to “flee the wrath to come” were organized into large gatherings called “societies,” which were then subdivided into smaller bands, class meetings, select societies, and penitent bands. The smaller groups gave Wesley the opportunity, through a system of appointed leaders, to keep track of the spiritual progress of every member in his movement, which grew to tens of thousands by the time of his death in 1791. As Methodism shifted from renewal movement to institutional church in the nineteenth century, however, growth slowed, and participation in such groups declined rapidly. By the early twentieth century, classes and bands were virtually extinct in every sector of Methodism save the African-American tradition. In recent years, scholars in various sectors of the Wesleyan tradition, particularly David Lowes Watson and Kevin Watson, have called for a recovery of these small groups for purposes of renewal in the church. There is no consensus, however, concerning what exactly contributed to the vitality of these groups during Wesley’s ministry.
Over the last century, sociological studies of group dynamics have revealed three common traits that are crucial to highly functioning groups: interdependence created by the existence of a common goal, interaction among group members that is “promotive” or cooperative in nature, and high levels of feedback associated with personal responsibility and individual accountability. All three of these were prevalent in the early Methodist groups. Interdependence existed around a shared goal, which for Wesley and the Methodists was holiness. That interdependence was cooperative in nature; individuals experienced the empowering grace of God as they each pursued the goal in the company of fellow pilgrims. Finally, the groups existed for purposes of feedback and accountability as individuals took responsibility both for themselves and others as they progressed together toward the goal of holy living. Wesley seemed to instinctively understand the essential nature of each of these characteristics in maintaining the vitality of the movement when he spoke of the importance of preserving the “doctrine, spirit and discipline” of early Methodism. Analysis of some of the present-day attempts to restore Wesley’s groups reveals frequent neglect to one or more of these three components. Perhaps most critical to recovering the vitality of the early Methodist groups will be reclaiming the goal of sanctification and coming to a consensus on what its pursuit means in the present day.
Item Open Access Designer Science: A History of Intelligent Design in America(2021) Howell, Christopher WilliamDesigner Science: A History of Intelligent Design in America undertakes the first full-length historical overview of the intelligent design movement (ID), a popular and influential antievolutionary ideology prominent at the turn of the 21st century. To date, on one hand, full length treatments of ID have been primarily polemical, consisting of either critical refutations or hagiographic defenses. The scholarly, non-polemical assessments, on the other hand, have folded ID into a larger story of American creationism and in general do not focus on ID on its own. Rather than making ID a small part of a history of creationism or engaging in polemical conflict, this dissertation treats intelligent design it as its own subject.
In contrast to some critics and scholars who have interpreted intelligent design as a sleeker, deceptive, or “stealth” version of creationism, I find that ID is better understood as an evolution of creationist views into a distinct movement and ideology. The differences are especially stark if creationism is understood as young-Earth creationism, from which ID’s worldview was a significant departure. ID was animated less by the Biblical literalism and geological focus of young-Earth creationism and more by theistic metaphysics, the argument from design, and post-WWII intellectual conservatism. Its minimalist theological principles entailed a jettisoning of many of young-Earth creationism’s most important features, and its resultant lowest-common-denominator approach to antievolution (and reluctance to engage in doctrinal disputes) allowed ID to build a broad but shallow political coalition across antievolutionary movements. It was an expansive “big tent” with influence across the spectrum of antievolutionists and conservative political groups, and so creationists of all kinds were welcome (provided they sidelined doctrinal issues). However, ID and its supporters met their Waterloo in 2005, at the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial in Pennsylvania, where ID’s leaders struggled to clearly articulate a scientific vision for the concept and were dealt a disastrous legal defeat. Though ID did not disappear after the Dover trial, it was considerably reduced. Media interest declined, scientists reveled in their victory, and ID’s intellectual leaders responded by doubling down on existing arguments. ID’s general appeal meant that its leaders’ allegations of scientific bias legitimated a narrative of persecution that found great receptivity with its conservative religious supporters. In spite of its public decline, ID’s influence continued to be felt from the cultural margins, and the movement’s transition from an empirical challenge against Darwin to a radical rejection of scientific expertise is an illuminating development in the popular perception of science in the early 21st century. ID had little impact on the way science was practiced in America, but its influence on culture persists.
In order to chart a historical narrative of the movement’s rise, climax, and fall, I have focused primarily on ID’s intellectual history, for it was a movement concerned about the origins and effects of ideas. Supplemental research into the history of American conservatism and populist creationism is incorporated into a fuller picture of ID’s similarities and differences from the antievolutionary movements that came before it, and the latter half of the dissertation focuses on the legal and cultural context of ID in conjunction with its intellectual history. This project aims for a better understanding of what ID was—and what it was not—so as to make sense of its socio-political consequences, which are still being felt in 21st century America.
Item Open Access Dispensational Modernism(2011) Pietsch, BrendanThis dissertation begins with questions about the epistemic methods that late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century American Protestants used to create confidence in new religious ideas, and particularly the role of scientific rhetoric in this confidence making. It concentrates on early Protestant fundamentalists and the emergence of dispensationalism modernism. Distinct from dispensational premillennialism--a set of theological ideas about prophecy belief and the end times--dispensational modernism was a constellation of epistemic ideas and methods used to interpret texts and time.
Historians have traditionally portrayed fundamentalists and dispensationalists as anti-modern, reactionary foes of modern scientific reasoning. Yet early dispensational thinkers created new, modernist methods for readings texts (particularly the Bible) and structuring time (through elaborate interpretations of prophecy). These ideas emerged amidst popular beliefs about the power of quantification, classification, and scientific analysis to construct firm religious knowledge. While liberal higher critics adopted practices of interpreting texts in light of the times--particularly historicism--dispensationalists took a contrary approach and interpreted the times in light of the text of the Bible. Seeing time as divinely ordered and classified with distinct divisions, dispensationalists argued that the meaning of time came from without, through supernatural ruptures in the temporal order.
Dispensationalism thrived in the interdenominational networks of mainstream and conservative Protestant clergy who sought to retain intellectual authority for biblical interpretation. As knowledge production became increasingly specialized and professionalized--the domain of elites--dispensational methods provided clergy means to navigate the tension between the need for specialized expertise and popular appeal. These ideas took canonical form in the Scofield Reference Bible, first published in 1909 and still the best-selling reference Bible in American history. The reference notes in Scofield's Bible--condensed expert interpretations and taxonomic divisions--promised methodological proficiency and theological confidence to anyone who studied it.
Item Open Access Eruditio et Religio: A Comparative History of Religious Life on Four Campuses(2018) Muir, ScottThis dissertation examines the relationship between religion and higher education in the United States through analyses of the religious histories of four distinct educational institutions in North Carolina’s Research Triangle—Duke University, Meredith College, North Carolina Central University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It places three seemingly contradictory scholarly representations of this relationship in conversation with one another. The first, represented by evangelical historians George Marsden and John Sommerville, claims that American higher education has come to be characterized by exclusive secularism. The second, represented by scholars of education, including Tricia Seifert, Lewis Schlosser, and Sherry Watt et al. claims by contrast that Christian privilege continues to obstruct the full inclusion of religious and non-religious minorities. And a third, represented by Rhonda and Jake Jacobsen, contends that historical Protestant and secularist predominance have been transcended by inclusive pluralism in the “postsecular” 21st century. This dissertation draws on archival research, participant observation, interviews, quantitative survey analysis, and secondary sources to demonstrate how Protestant, secular, and pluralist forces have coexisted and interacted throughout these four institutions’ histories. It illuminates how their campus religious climates have evolved in distinct ways through contingent interactions among these forces conditioned by a variety of institutional identity factors, including race, gender, affiliation, prestige, and geographical reach. As a result, we see that the relationship between religion and higher education is not uniformly characterized by either Christian privilege, exclusive secularism, or inclusive pluralism. Distinct institutional trajectories shape coexisting forms of privilege, secularism, and pluralism that interact in specific contexts, producing unique campus religious climates that shape undergraduate identity formation.
Item Open Access Fierce Practice, Courageous Spirit, and Spiritual Cultivation: The Rise of Lay Rinzai Zen in Modern Japan(2020) Mendelson, RebeccaIn this dissertation, I examine the development of lay Rinzai Zen in modern Japan, a transformation that entailed a large-scale opening of Zen practices to non-clerics and eventually contributed to Zen’s worldwide spread. I detail the historical shift between 1868 and 1945, which saw the emergence of hundreds of lay Zen groups throughout Japan, the proliferation of literature targeting a popular audience, and a new paradigm of practice amidst imperial Japan’s changing zeitgeist. Although Rinzai Zen was only one of thirteen Buddhist schools in Japan at the time, lay Rinzai Zen became disproportionately significant through its dissemination among educated, relatively elite young men, and through the success of its popularizers in associating modern lay Rinzai Zen with “traditional” Buddhism and Japanese culture itself.
In order to investigate this phenomenon, I conducted archival research, focusing on the following genres: contemporaneous periodicals and books aimed at a popular Zen audience, and the publications of lay Zen groups, such as their commemorative histories that included detailed activity logs, personal testimonials, and institutional histories. In my analysis, I integrate the dimensions of intellectual and social history (e.g., situating modern lay Rinzai Zen practitioners in imperial Japan) with religious and doctrinal concerns (e.g., situating modern Rinzai Zen in traditional Zen narratives). Although I consider teachers’ prescriptions for ideal Zen practice, I emphasize the perspective of ordinary practitioners from a variety of practice contexts in order to examine the nature of Rinzai Zen’s popularization in modern Japan: the emergence of lay groups, the religious practices in which practitioners engaged, the ways in which lay practitioners articulated their motivations, and how such motivations reflected the historical context.
My conclusions include the following: First, the scale of the lay Rinzai movement in modern Japan was far larger than research until this point suggests, in terms of numbers of groups and practitioners and the amount of popular literature. Given the diversity among the emerging Rinzai lay groups, I propose a typology to highlight the groups’ qualitative differences, ranging from more “traditional” to more radically divergent from normative Rinzai. Second, I found that even while the lay Zen audience expanded to an unprecedented level in Japan, the average lay Rinzai practitioner was educated and relatively elite; therefore, Rinzai Zen’s popularization did not amount to full democratization. Moreover, students and other youth played a sizable and significant role in modern lay Rinzai. Third, I show that despite divergent ideology and rhetoric among modern lay Rinzai Zen groups and figures, a specific pattern of activities became standard among nearly all such groups. This pattern centered on sitting meditation, kōan practice, encountering the master one-on-one, dharma discourses, and practice intensives, with far less emphasis on aspects that have been historically important in Rinzai monastic training, such as ritual, liturgy, manual labor, and literary study in advanced kōan practice. This new lay Rinzai pattern functioned to increase an emphasis on personal experience and kōan practice. Finally, in contrast to idealized notions about pursuing Zen primarily for the sake of enlightenment, most modern lay Rinzai practitioners examined here pursued Zen for this-worldly benefits, such as improved health, improved swordsmanship abilities, or as a means of strengthening the Japanese nation. Such goals were particularly expressed following 1905, amidst the nationalism and interest in personal cultivation movements that surged after Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War. Moreover, for many practitioners, there was a convergence among lay Rinzai practice, nation-protecting self-cultivation movements, “way of the warrior” rhetoric, and modern Japanese ideals of masculinity: a convergence that likely attracted many practitioners but was inherently at odds with Zen’s rhetoric of equality.
Item Open Access From Strength to Strength: Reclaiming the Planks and Pillars of St. Ambrose of Milan’s Outlooks on the Virtue of Liberality in Philanthropic Leadership(2021) Moore, Regina HendersonSt. Ambrose of Milan led the church to seek ministry with the poor as a mark of virtuous Christian life. With an emphasis on the sacrament of holy baptism, Ambrose demonstrated how to reciprocate God’s love by clarifying the poor as treasures in God’s economy.
While there is great reason to laud its innovative economic development and valiant leadership, this research shows how the Roman Empire failed humanity with exploitive treatment of the poor. Likewise, this research exemplifies how Ambrose’s pedagogical leadership exposes the church’s failure to lead, paving a road of justice for the poor with equality, charity, and sacrificial giving.
This thesis argues Ambrose sought to contextually reframe the church’s understanding of incarnational leadership as a form of liberality. Ambrose’s On Joseph sermon revealed the threat of prodigality and greed when Joseph is faced with his own leadership power in the pit, in the prison, and in the palace. The thesis provides substantial evidence how God’s justice and Joseph’s leadership grounded in liberality create space for grace and empathy in family relations, human social consciousness, and community economic empowerment. This work argues that Ambrose’s exemplary contextual reframing of church resources and ministry practices proves as a model for philanthropic leadership against the unintended practice of toxic charity. This work also illustrates strategic practices to identify toxic charity and to embrace a virtuous life of giving. Furthermore, this research exhibits how the virtue of liberality plays an impactful role in philanthropic traditions as strong pillars in Christian ministry today.
Item Open Access From Strength to Strength: Reclaiming the Planks and Pillars of St. Ambrose of Milan’s Outlooks on the Virtue of Liberality in Philanthropic Leadership(2021) Moore, Regina HendersonSt. Ambrose of Milan led the church to seek ministry with the poor as a mark of virtuous Christian life. With an emphasis on the sacrament of holy baptism, Ambrose demonstrated how to reciprocate God’s love by clarifying the poor as treasures in God’s economy.
While there is great reason to laud its innovative economic development and valiant leadership, this research shows how the Roman Empire failed humanity with exploitive treatment of the poor. Likewise, this research exemplifies how Ambrose’s pedagogical leadership exposes the church’s failure to lead, paving a road of justice for the poor with equality, charity, and sacrificial giving.
This thesis argues Ambrose sought to contextually reframe the church’s understanding of incarnational leadership as a form of liberality. Ambrose’s On Joseph sermon revealed the threat of prodigality and greed when Joseph is faced with his own leadership power in the pit, in the prison, and in the palace. The thesis provides substantial evidence how God’s justice and Joseph’s leadership grounded in liberality create space for grace and empathy in family relations, human social consciousness, and community economic empowerment. This work argues that Ambrose’s exemplary contextual reframing of church resources and ministry practices proves as a model for philanthropic leadership against the unintended practice of toxic charity. This work also illustrates strategic practices to identify toxic charity and to embrace a virtuous life of giving. Furthermore, this research exhibits how the virtue of liberality plays an impactful role in philanthropic traditions as strong pillars in Christian ministry today.
Item Open Access Haunted Paradise: Remembering and Forgetting Among Ascetics of the Egyptian Desert(2012) Luckritz Marquis, ChristineMy dissertation explores how constructions of memory, space, and violence intersected in the history of early Christianity. It analyzes the crucial roles of memory and space/place in the formation, practice, and understanding of late ancient asceticism in Egypt's northwestern desert (Scetis, Kellia, Nitria, and Pherme). After a "barbarian" raid of Scetis in the early fifth century supposedly exiled Christian monks from the desert, Egypt came to be remembered as the birthplace of ascetic practice. Interpreting texts (in Coptic, Latin, Greek, Syriac, and Classical Arabic) and archaeological remains associated with the northwestern Egyptian desert, my dissertation investigates ascetic ideas about the relationship between memories and places: memory-acts as preserved in the liturgical and literary texts, memory in the liturgical contexts of church and cell, the ascetic use of Scriptural interpretation to thwart "worldly" recollection caused by demonic incitement to abandon the desert, and remembrance of a past moment through the perceived loss of Scetis. Wedding textual evidence, material culture, and theoretical insights, I highlight how the memorialization of a particular moment in the history of early Christian asceticism overshadowed other, contemporary late ancient asceticisms. My dissertation produces a new understanding of the negotiations between memory and space, often a process of contestation, and sheds new light not only on how violence was performed in late antiquity, but also on modern struggles over memorialized locales.
Item Open Access History and Hope: The Agrarian Wisdom of Isaiah 28–35(2017) Stulac, Daniel JohnThroughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, modern historical-critical study of the book of Isaiah succeeded in showing that the text emerged in stages over perhaps three hundred years, rather than as the fully formed product of a preexilic prophet. This mode of inquiry resulted in the widespread assumption that Isaiah is best approached as at least three distinct texts that express little if any intrinsic relationship with each other. The rise of literary criticism in the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, reminded readers that the Bible deserves to be studied as a body of theological literature regardless of the multiplicity of authorial contexts from which it derives. Overcoming Isaiah’s well-established diachronic fragmentation, however, has proven no straightforward task; readers have often and understandably resorted to thematic generalizations in their effort to describe the whole. The differences characteristic of these two approaches to Isaiah reflect the methodological splintering of biblical studies at large, where analysis of a text’s literary shape and theological message is frequently pitted against its rich history of composition.
Recent research has begun to ask a more profitable, interdisciplinary set of questions: What is the relationship between Isaiah’s diachronic development and its final form, and what might synchronic analysis of its final form teach us about its history of composition? Indeed, as several scholars have pointed out, a synchronic examination of Isaiah’s language and argument is a necessary first step in making accurate judgments regarding its diachronic development. Fresh inquiry into the book’s synchronic shape that does not ignore the history and culture from which it arose therefore represents a leading edge in Isaiah studies today.
History and Hope: The Agrarian Wisdom of Isaiah 28–35 examines the rhetorical function of Isa 28–35, a relatively overlooked series of six woe-oracles, in relation to the reader’s encounter with the book of Isaiah as a whole. At a diachronic level, the project seeks to improve the historical model that typically informs scholars’ perceptions of Isaiah’s construction. Through comparisons to the thought and practice of several contemporary agrarian thinkers, it draws attention to the holistic, agrarian worldview of the people who wrote and transmitted the Bible. This comparison suggests that an “agrarian hermeneutic” provides a historically- and phenomenologically-appropriate lens by which to examine the eight chapters in question. At a synchronic level, the project uses modern literary theory to describe the written text’s “epistemological layering,” thereby accounting for important differences between characters and readers. When combined with an agrarian hermeneutic, this move opens scholarly understanding of Isaiah’s written rhetoric to the associative logic by which it is constructed, and which is everywhere evident in the “intratextual” web of Leitwörter, motifs, and recurring ideas that run throughout the book. Through careful, exegetical analysis of Isa 28–35 in its sequential unfolding relative to the book as a whole, the project argues that these eight chapters use the language of agrarian wisdom to issue a call to obedience that transports the reader from prior reflections on historical destruction into a vision of ultimate hope.