2024-03-28T16:49:50Z
http://surface.syr.edu/do/oai/
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1000
2010-09-14T18:19:57Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Guru love: On the tropes of eroticism in the spiritual relationship between master and disciple
Beritela, Gerard Frederick
2009-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Ann Grodzins Gold
Spiritual relationship
Sigmund Freud and Carl G. Jung
Starets
Georges Bataille
Symeon the New Theologian
Ramakrishna
Master-disciple relationship
Arts and Humanities
Religion
This dissertation places in conversation a number of cross-cultural instantiations of the spiritual relationship between a master and disciple, examining the tropes of eroticism that may be discerned within them. The first chapter discusses the psychoanalytic concept of transference, and its similar functions in the psychoanalytic relationship and in the guru-disciple relationship. In addition to examining transference as a possible lens with which to view the guru-disciple relationship, certain aspects of both Freud's theory and his relationship with his disciple Jung are examined. The second chapter discusses the guru-disciple relationship as it is experienced in India. Major sources include the Kularnava Tantra and accounts of specific gurus such as Ramakrishna, Yoganada's guru Yuktesvar and Anandamayi Ma. In addition to exhibiting a similar process of idealization and mirroring as in psychoanalysis, Hindu tradition often images these relationships in erotic terms and frequently emphasizes the experiential ecstasy and transformation the disciple achieves at the hands of the guru. The third chapter traces similar motifs in Eastern Christianity. Major sources include the work of John Climacus and Symeon the New Theologian. Within the relationship of abba or starets to disciple, similar themes of idealization, the ecstasy of the disciple, and the disciple's transformation (theosis) are found. The fourth chapter contextualizes the spiritual master-disciple relationship in the light of various scholarly discussions of the relationship between the erotic and the mystical, placing such relationships in conversation with specific modern erotic practices and pleasures. Major sources for this final chapter include the work of Bataille and MacKendrick.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/1
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1001
2010-09-16T17:13:10Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Listening to places: A comparative study of Zen, Sufism, & cosmology
Snow, Joseph A.
2009-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Joanne P. Waghorne
Zen
Sufism
Place
Listening
Vibration
Cosmology
Arts and Humanities
Religion
This dissertation is a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary analysis of "place," especially with respect to comparative modes of listening. I orient my work around a 1923 meeting in San Francisco of the Japanese Zen Buddhist priest, Nyogen Senzaki, and the Indian Sufi mystic and musician, Hazrat Inayat Khan. I begin by examining the notion of what at first appears rather paradoxical--namely, Senzaki's original conception of what took place between he and Khan and its eventual publication under the title of "Mohammedan Zen." I engage recent topological studies in order to make sense of the surprising spatial analogies and cosmological metaphors used by Senzaki and Khan to articulate their mutual and provocatively displaced "senses of place" in the United States at the turn of the 20 th century. I then implicate Senzaki's Zen and Khan's Sufism in the wider methodological context of the comparative history and philosophy of religions and the "new places" fostered by rapid international globalization.
Furthermore, I explore the textual roots and ritual foundations of Zen and Sufism, and argue that they share certain aural traditions that help to facilitate their universal claims. I ferret out deeply emplaced Indian esotericisms in each case, and specifically the "Doctrine of Vibration" found in the Spanda school of Kashmiri Shaivism. I then establish acoustic and resonant links between Indian Tantra and the tensions created between both local and global conceptions of place within Japanese Zen and Indian Chishti thought and practice. I speculate upon how the "vibratory" worldview of ancient Shaivism might harmonize with 20th century modernity and the worldviews of current science, and inquire into how that might have helped foster Senzaki and Khan's receptions in and to the West. Finally, I build comparative, mandalic (relating to place), and mantric (relating to sound) cosmologies, finding striking familiarities between the Zen of Nyogen Senzaki, the Sufism of Inayat Khan, and the "string theory" of contemporary theoretical physics. In conclusion, I show how the inter-connected and inter-dependent places Senzaki and Khan continuously call "home" portray lyric relationships between persons, places, and sounds that cultivate a more ethical sense of global, rhythmic citizenship.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/5
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1002
2010-09-16T18:08:28Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Promoting research ethics training: Understandings of community, partnership, virtue and diversity
Quigley, Dianne
2009-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Ann Gold
Research ethics
Community-based
Research partnership
Cultural diversity
Environmental justice
Ethical philosophy
Arts and Humanities
Ethics in Religion
Religion
In this dissertation, "Promoting Research Ethics Training: Understandings of Community, Partnership, Virtue and Diversity," I argue for expanding traditional research ethics training beyond a sole focus on the individual for human subjects protections to protections and beneficence for the geographic community as a subject of research. Health and environmental researchers who conduct interventions in geographic communities require new ethics training on community-based engagement and participatory research approaches. These new approaches are being implemented to overcome past research experiences that produced too few benefits for many geographic communities with multiple disparity conditions and multiracial groups. Researchers now need to engage community members in partnerships; learn about local contextual conditions and subjective meanings of the community of study; and conduct cultural appropriate interventions with diverse groups.
I argue for expanded training on meanings of community, on ethical theories that can support community-based partnerships and on intercultural models of community research to promote more respect with diverse cultural groups. I demonstrate the value of Religious Studies training, its texts and methods for conducting this expanded ethics training. With an investigation of the varied meanings of community associated with health and environmental interventions, researchers can be more prepared for engaging community members for collaborative research designs and methods and for producing beneficent outcomes. A need for building community solidarity and capacities is dramatic in geographic communities with disadvantaged conditions. Understandings of moral solidarities, the movements of robust socialities and creative interpersonal relationships are extremely useful to the conduct of participatory research approaches. More integration of biomedical research principles in research reports of community-based studies can advance the acceptance of partnership approaches with research ethics committees and academic research disciplines. A development of virtue training and analyses in community-based approaches is also proposed. The design and conduct of intercultural or interworld research models can be developed with more study on culturally-based meanings of community and knowledge values. New case studies on culturally diverse research methods demonstrate new creative arrangements in participatory research. I urge Religious Studies scholars to offer more expertise to all these ethical dimensions of community-based approaches to health and environmental research.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/4
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1004
2010-09-16T19:27:40Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
The iconic book: The image of the Christian Bible in myth and ritual
Parmenter, Dorina Miller
2009-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
James W. Watts
Bible history
Heavenly book
Icons
Bible rituals
Materiality
Christian history
Arts and Humanities
Biblical Studies
Religion
In a 1980 address entitled "America's Iconic Book," Martin Marty claims the Bible is a ubiquitous image that is taken for granted in American culture. It structures and organizes experiences based on its prominent visibility as it is carried in rituals, enshrined in homes, illustrated in and as religious art, encapsulated in monuments, and lauded in miracle stories. This dissertation builds on Marty's identification of the Bible in America as an iconic book that often is revered as an object of power more than as words of instruction, information, or insight. However, my study covers a broader scope, showing the development of the image of the Bible in the history of Christianity. In various historical contexts, iconicity of the Bible is demonstrated through both myth and ritual, paralleling theory (i.e., verbal explanations) and practice (i.e., how people act). This dissertation concludes with Protestant American attitudes and actions similar to those that Marty analyzes.
My thesis is that the Bible as both text and physical entity has been and continues to function as an icon--an image that mediates between the material and spiritual world and thus is a locus of religious power. While most people would readily agree that the Bible is an iconic book, an immediately recognizable symbol with connotations of admiration or veneration, my argument is that a more careful and detailed examination of the Bible as an icon that functions as a material mediator enhances our understanding of the power and status given to this book
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/2
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1003
2010-09-16T18:42:25Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Spinoza's philosophy of divine order
Stahlberg, Benjamin B.
2009-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Zachary Braiterman
Benedictus de Spinoza
Politics
Religion
Secularism
Philosophy
Bible
Arts and Humanities
Religion
This dissertation argues that Baruch de Spinoza's conception of God plays a decisive, and often unappreciated, role in his conceptions of politics and religion. While Spinoza is often interpreted as an early secular or liberal thinker, this work argues that such interpretations neglect the senses of order and authority that are at the heart of Spinoza's idea of God. For Spinoza, God is an organized and directed totality of all that exists. Moreover, for Spinoza, God is entirely immanent to this totality, to such an extent that all things are fundamentally of God. When we fully appreciate the extent to which God permeates and orders every aspect of our reality, the full sense of Spinoza's theories of tolerance and the social contract come into view, for rather than assuming that the human beings involved in political relationships are independent, autonomous individuals, we can see that for Spinoza they are parts of a larger whole who are subject to distinct natural laws. Spinoza maintains that such laws manifest themselves equally and identically in the seemingly distinct realms of religion and politics. In this respect, then, Spinoza's theories of religion and biblical interpretation are not properly secular in character but rather blur the standard boundary between the religious and the political, as they try to recognize and codify the inviolable laws of nature--or God.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/3
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1006
2010-09-17T17:52:45Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Writing holiness, writing violence suffering and the construction of female sanctity
Beard, John Marcus
2009-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Patricia Cox Miller
Women and Christianity
Women and violence
Christian hagiography
Female saints
Medieval mysticism
Medieval Christianity
Arts and Humanities
Religion
This dissertation explores the correlation between violence, suffering, and female sanctity in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. I argue that due to changing ideas about Christian authority, the nature of women, and the body of Christ, suffering became a nearly exclusive component of female sanctity and one of the main ways women gained access to sainthood. Furthermore, the ideas of the suffering woman are connected to ideas of purgatory and women suffering for the salvation of others. I explore a wide range of texts, from early Christian martyrdoms, to late antique and medieval accounts of married female saints, to the writings of the mystics of the late Middle Ages. I argue that what once was a way for a male hagiographer to construct the holiness of a woman became so ingrained that women in the late Middle Ages began to see their own encounter with God as violent and view their own suffering as positive and redemptive.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/6
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1005
2010-09-17T17:50:22Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
When "bodhisattvas of the earth" become global citizens: Soka Gakkai in comparative perspective
Finucane, Juliana Kiyo
2009-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Joanne Punzo Waghorne
Buddhism in America
Soka Gakkai
Globalization
Religious pluralism
Religion in Singapore
New religious movements
Arts and Humanities
Religion
The contemporary lay Buddhist group Soka Gakkai promotes an image of itself as a group of religiously tolerant "global citizens" at the same time that it uses this public image in the pursuit of converts. Through its many efforts to communicate its message and values to the public, Soka Gakkai offers a model of transnational religious expansion based neither on religious fundamentalism nor on soft New Age-ism. This study is based on fieldwork in Singapore and Washington, D.C., two global capital cities in secular democracies with very different policies on religious freedom and religious harmony. I argue that members in these cities are able to hold sectarian religious beliefs deeply while still getting along with others, in part by redefining "dialogue" and placing themselves at the center of what it means to be global. Because the Singaporean government discourages proselytizing in order to maintain social harmony, members of Soka Gakkai have adjusted how they make incursions into the public so their activities do not seem coercive. Similarly, in the United States, because of its past associations with "cult-like" behavior, Soka Gakkai has publicly distanced itself from activities that appear aimed at proselytizing. The softening of the group's public image through its skillful use of media has contributed to its rapid growth in these two global cities, where potential converts are attracted to the group's (noncoercive) "universal values," including religious pluralism. Respect for these values becomes evidence not only of the group's success at accommodating itself to local contexts, but also of the religion's universal applicability, offering potential converts greater reason to join. Central to this study are questions about the freedom to disseminate one's religion in the global era, an urgent concern for minority religious groups like Soka Gakkai that strive to effectively communicate their religious messages and gain converts in increasingly crowded public spaces.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/7
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1007
2010-09-20T15:11:18Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
A Deleuzian feminism: Philosophy, theology and ethics
Clark, Judith F.
2006-08-01T07:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Gregg Lambert
Feminism
Philosophy
Theology
Ethics
Gilles Deleuze
Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion
Women's Studies
This dissertation is at once a critique of the historical development of Second Wave feminist theory and a proposal for a new image of feminist thought which finds its point of departure beyond the sexual binarism and reactive formations of identity that have traditionally framed this theoretical project. A Deleuzian Feminism offers a conceptual field in which the actualizations of woman may be viewed as singular events or unique conducts of embodied existence while feminist thought may be seen as the means to a more than personal life. Within this conceptual field sexual difference is no longer tied to structures of homogeneity but to heterogeneous assemblages that are inventions both of immediate encounters and the network of interdependent assemblages that make all experience possible. Far from being obligated to a specific order or held hostage to the functioning of a single signifier, sexuality is now an effect, an affect, a production of intensive relations which does not precede or exceed its immediate expression. In this sense "woman" becomes an experiment, a possibility, a possible world, while feminist ethics becomes an ethics of encounter focused on a sustainable future for both human society and the global ecosphere.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/8
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1008
2010-09-20T19:04:43Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Seeing the swarming dead: Of mushrooms, trees, and bees
Trinkauske, Eglute
2008-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Lithuania
Indigenous religion
Baltic
Environment
Arts and Humanities
Religion
The dissertation's main argument is that Lithuania's indigenous religiosity expresses itself most vitally in everyday material culture through a continuation of an ancient Baltic tradition into today. Though ancient Baltic religion ceased to function on the large-scale social level, such apparently secular, materially-oriented practices as mushroom-gathering, woodcarving and beekeeping survived because they have been deeply grounded in ancestral tradition. Passed from generation to generation, these practices continue to carry unspoken ancestral sanction. When examined in the light of the ancient Baltic ideas of the souls of the dead ( veles ) and reincarnation, the continuation of these practices proves to be based on human kinship to trees, mushrooms and other aspects of nature. From an Indigenous religions perspective, these bonds are religious bonds. Certain modern practices, environmental changes, desacralized understandings of nature, and changing human values have had an unsettling effect upon Lithuania's relationship with its environment. Indigenous sensibilities that are inherent in Lithuanian culture are competing with powerful globalizing forces. This dissertation is concerned with, and seeks to alter environmental degradation. A possible resacralization of nature through Lithuania's Indigenous religious perspective may promise the renewal of values that are necessary for the future.
The dissertation argues for the necessity of introducing the category of Indigenous religions to Lithuanian studies because only an Indigenous religions category can adequately describe traditional Lithuanian culture. At the core of the ancient Baltic tradition are indigenous sensibilities that effectively legitimate vital environmental and cultural values. However, these indigenous sensibilities are currently immobilized by the limited array of current academic categories that do not have the social power of effective legitimization. In a Lithuanian context, the categories of folklore or ethno-culture cannot address urgent cultural or environmental issues because of their strong associations with the past. The category of Indigenous religions is most appropriate to address current critical environmental and cultural issues in Lithuania today.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/9
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1010
2010-09-23T18:39:34Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Prolonged response: The Kyoto School and the new Confucian movement as products of the Western impact
Tu, Xiaofei
2007-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
New Confucianism
Japan
Buddhist philosophy
Kyoto School
Confucian
Buddhist
Arts and Humanities
History of Religions of Eastern Origins
Religion
This is a comparative and thematic study of the New Confucian movement of twentieth century China and the Kyoto School of twentieth century Japan, whose purpose is to show the two schools as a prolonged response to the Western impact.
This dissertation begins with considering the historical and cultural environments out of which the Kyoto School and New Confucianism came into being, and with discussing the evolution of the discourse of "tradition" in the debates between traditionalist and anti-traditionalist intellectuals in modern China and Japan.
Chapter two discusses the religious dimension of the New Confucians and Kyoto thinkers. Utilizing the works and bibliographical date of Tang Junyi, Mou Zongsan, Nishida Kitaro, and Nishitani Keiji, this chapter shows that their reappropriation of Confucianism and Buddhism was motivated as much by personal "spiritual" struggles as by the burning desire to preserve the nations' religious and cultural legacies.
New Confucianism and the Kyoto Philosophy are comparative religious philosophies par excellence. They stand or fall with the validity of the comparisons that these thinkers have made regarding Western and Asian religious and philosophical systems and conceptions. Chapter three discusses the "comparativist" endeavors of the two schools by showcasing the comparative philosophies of Mou Zongsan and Nishitani Keiji.
Chapter four discusses the political involvement of the two schools during the Chinese revolution and WWII, as well as the political implications for their philosophies.
This dissertation argues that the philosophies of New Confucianism and the Kyoto School ought to be viewed as a self-conscious reaction to the Western modernity, and to be evaluated with a sensitivity to their own reference systems, unique argumentation, and standards of rigor that are drastically distinct from those adopted in Western philosophical traditions. In the meantime, the political views of the New Confucians and Kyoto thinkers are best understood against the background of all the complexities surrounding the interplay between twentieth century Western imperialism and the East Asian response to it.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/11
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1009
2010-09-23T18:33:41Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Policing public/private borders: Religion, liberalism, and the 'private judgment of the magistrate'
Martin, Craig Edward
2007-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Separation of church and state
Political philosophy
Gay rights
Public-private borders
Religion
Liberalism
Arts and Humanities
Philosophy
Religion
Most scholarly texts on "church and state" are either histories of the relationship between "church and state," or political treatises arguing for more or less "separation." Unlike these approaches, which generally take for granted the principles of liberal democracy and its public/private distinction, this dissertation uses Foucauldian discourse analysis in order to interrogate the very idea of a "separation of church and state," or the very idea of a "private sphere" that could somehow be separate from a "public sphere." In addition, this discourse analysis will be paired with a Gramscian analysis, which identifies the "private" or "civil sphere" not as separate from or below the state, but as constitutive of the state itself. For Gramsci, the civil sphere is not regulated from above by the state so much as state regulations reflect the interests of dominate civil institutions. Similarly, through analyses of early modern history, early modern political philosophy, contemporary political philosophy, contemporary political rhetoric, and American legislation, this dissertation argues that circulation of power from civil institutions to the state holds true in liberal democracies, and that the public/private discourses designed to prevent it actually assist in masking the relationship between civil and state powers.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/12
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1011
2010-09-23T18:53:24Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Religion and the invention(s) of John Cage
Low, Sor Ching
2007-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Richard Pilgrim
Religion
John Cage
Inventions
Zen Buddhism
Orientalism
Arts and Humanities
Religion
The seminal encounter between East and West during the 1950s, in particular, between Zen Buddhism and avant-garde art is the framing context of this dissertation. By focusing on the writer, composer, musical philosopher and visual artist, John Cage, this thesis examines the extent to which Asian religions influenced his aesthetics and music. Cage was at the center of the avant-garde movement during the 1950s and had a profound impact on his contemporaries, including many who wrote music entirely different from his own. With his introduction of noise, the prepared piano and the percussion orchestra to contemporary music, and the adoption of chance and indeterminacy in his compositions, Cage overturned the concept of music from its Renaissance ideal of form and structure as the means or purveyor of a unique and personal artistic vision.
This dissertation demonstrates the significance of religion in Cage's music and art between 1946 and 1958, and delineates the earlier influence of Hinduism from the subsequent one of Zen Buddhism. Based on a close textual study of the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna , it shows how the Indian mystic's teaching transformed both Cage and his music, and how its importance endured even in the latter phases of Zen. This thesis argues that Cage played a substantial role in disseminating Zen through the ''invention'' of a Zen persona and his music but it also locates it as part of a strategy to undermine the old world, elevate the East, and ''invent'' an experimental music tradition. An analysis of Cage's interpretation of the key concept in Zen Buddhism---Emptiness---also reveals the disparity between the understanding of Cage and that of the normative Buddhistic one. It shows that, to a large extent, Cage was romancing Emptiness.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/10
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1012
2010-09-27T14:06:45Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Just speech: The grammar of an ethics beyond essence
Saldino, Andrew R.
2006-12-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Ernest Wallwork
Ethics
Essence
Grammatical therapy
Emmanuel Levinas
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Immanuel Kant
Ethics in Religion
Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion
This dissertation traces the entanglement of the problems of representation with the problems of ethics through the work of Immanuel Kant, Emmanuel Levinas, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The framework for this project is set by reading the ethical concerns of Kant's Second Critique in light of the issues of representation and adjudication in the First and Third Critiques. This work then moves to consider the development of Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy, through his engagement with Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida, as the culminating expression of these intertwined problematics. Finally, the grammatical therapy of Ludwig Wittgenstein's later work is juxtaposed with this line of inquiry to provide an alternative mode of approaching ethics after ethical discourse has become suspicious of itself.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/13
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1013
2010-09-28T19:54:09Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
A theory of purity from the perspective of comparative religion
Yoo, Yohan
2005-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
James W. Watts
Pollution
Purity
Comparative religion
Egypt
Greece
Israel
Arts and Humanities
Religion
Though systems regulating purity and pollution are found in almost every culture and across historical time periods, and though the similarities among the purity systems of different cultures have been noticed, the field of comparative religion has failed to develop sophisticated theories about the concepts of purity and pollution. Currently, social-functionalist theories are dominant in the study of purity and pollution. While the social-functionalist theories have focused almost exclusively on the social dimensions of purity, my work has highlighted the necessity of also taking seriously the religious dimensions of purity. This dissertation represents my attempt to offer a much-needed theory of purity and pollution from the perspective of comparative religion. A comparative study of three ancient Mediterranean cultures---ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, and ancient Israel---shows the usefulness of my framework for understanding purity in general, as well as the purity ideas of individual cultures, more specifically. According to my theory, purity refers to, first, the requisite conditions or necessary qualities of each realm within a cosmological worldview, and second, the rules that regulate the interrelationship among the various realms that constitute the total cosmological worldview. Impurity is understood as the failure of a realm to satisfy its requisite condition and pollution is the negative effects of one realm on another in cases when their rules cannot tolerate each other. In the cosmologies of these three cultures, realms were based on two basic distinctions---divine vs. non-divine, and life vs. death. These two distinctions generated four major realms: the divine realm of life; the divine realm of death; the non-divine realm of life; and the non-divine realm of death. While the specific way that the distinctions play out in a culture is variable, my theory of purity and pollution still holds, which will be affirmed through applying my theory to the Japanese case in the last chapter.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/14
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1014
2010-09-29T12:39:49Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Secret religion: Surrealism in the new era of religion
Brown, Timothy A.
2006-05-01T07:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
David L. Miller
Religion and literature
sacred
religion and politics
college of sociology
religion and revolution
Latin American Literature
Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion
The central proposition of the dissertation is that surrealism, which is conventionally understood as an avant-garde literary and artistic movement of the early twentieth century, is best grasped as a modern religious project or religiosity. The approach of the dissertation is two-fold. It both differentiates surrealist religiosity from the religion proper of its milieu and locates those aspects that mark it as an innovative religious assemblage.
Chapter 1 provides an insider's perspective on the secret religion of surrealism by considering the works of Octavio Paz, André Breton, and Louis Aragon. The chapter explores the romantic lineage of surrealism, its twin methodology of analogy and irony, and the surrealist desire to create a "modern mythology" based on "love, poetry, and rebellion."
Chapters 2 and 3 consider the work of two founders of the near contemporaneous movement of the "College of Sociology," Roger Caillois and Georges Bataille. Chapter 2 conveys Caillois's theory of a sacred economy and situates surrealism within this economy as a festive religiosity of transgression and creativity. Bataille's abandoned attempt at articulating a distinct surrealist religion is examined in chapter 3. The chapter develops surrealism as a radical religious endeavor directed against its capitalist enclosure and explores its creation of poetic effects analogous to those generated by what Bataille considers "primitive" religious mechanisms.
Chapters 4 and 5 consider the contributions of William James and Henri Bergson toward a rethinking of religion in the early twentieth century. Chapter 4 examines James's rehabilitations of religious experience, mysticism, asceticism, and verbal automatism and their resonances with surrealism. The chapter also situates the secret religion of surrealism within what James considers a "new era" in religion. Bergson's notion of a "new species" of dynamic, mystical, creative, and activist religionists and its applicability to the surrealists is taken up in chapter 5. Methods of religious composition and their continuities with surrealist poetic practices are also examined in the chapter.
In sum, the dissertation provides multiple theoretical perspectives for explicating surrealism as a distinctly modern religiosity assembled out of poetic exuberance and production, loving affects, and revolutionary politics.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/16
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1015
2010-09-29T14:47:01Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Theatron and theoria: Vision, visuality, and religious spectatorship
Conroy, Melissa S.
2006-06-01T07:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Patricia Cox Miller
Vision
Visuality
Religious spectatorship
Spectatorship
Queer
Ancient History, Greek and Roman through Late Antiquity
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies
Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion
Visual Studies
This dissertation concerns metaphors of vision as they relate to religious identity. Given the importance of "seeing" in religious practice in general, be it icons, statues, mandalas, or paintings, one may argue that there is a transformative experience at the heart of religious seeing. I argue that religious visuality is fundamentally involved with the negotiation and communication implicit in vision itself and I investigate this practice through the theory of identification. Contrary to models such that describe vision as a split between image and gaze, theories and metaphors found in ancient Greek and contemporary Queer film theory conceive of vision as a negotiation between seer and seen. This is an investigation into viewing practices, specifically practices that reject what Donna Haraway has called the "god-trick" of seeing, or what Michel Foucault has called a "Panopticonism" of sight. This dissertation aims to rethink the Panopticon, to argue that to understand a religious visuality one cannot theorize a complete severing of seer and seen.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/15
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1016
2010-09-30T19:26:17Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Relationship between religion and identity development: A study of second generation American Muslim adolescents
Kaplan, Hasan
2005-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Ernest E. Wallwork
Identity development
Muslim
Religion
Adolescents
Arts and Humanities
Psychology
Race and Ethnicity
Religion
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Social Psychology
Sociology
This dissertation examines the relationship between religion and identity formation of second-generation Muslim adolescents in the context of American culture. It assesses the effect that religious socialization has on adolescent identity formation. The investigator assumed that religiosity is an essential factor influencing second-generation Muslim adolescents' identity development and their integration into American society. In order to test this assumption, two separate studies were designed: a quantitative assessment (using self-report questionnaires) and a qualitative in-depth interview.
One hundred nineteen adolescents (65 Arabs, 54 Turks) participated in the first study. Participants completed three questionnaires in addition to answering demographic questions. (1) The Extended Objective Measure of Ego Identity Status-2 (Adams and Bennion, & Huh, 1989; Benninon and Adams, 1986) ("EOMEIS-2), (2) The Religiousness Measure (Seith and Seligman, 1993), and (3) Religious Fundamentalism Scale (Altemeyer & Hunsberger, 1992). Finally, six subjects who participated in the first study were selected for the second study. Participants were interviewed in depth about their identity as Muslims in the United States.
Of the 119 adolescent analyzed, all subjects were moderately religious. Yet, adolescents with Arabic backgrounds were found to be significantly more religious than their Turkish counterparts. Highly religious subjects from both Turkish and Arabic backgrounds were found to be less Diffused and also surprisingly, less Foreclosed. The majority of subjects from both ethnic backgrounds belong to the Moratorium identity status. However, Turkish subjects were slightly more Diffused than their Arabic counterparts. In-depth interviews revealed two distinct emerging identity patterns: Islamists who exclusively identify themselves with Islam and reject integration into American society; and American Muslims who loosely identify with Islam and try to be part of the American society without abandoning traditional values.
The study findings suggest that most American Muslim adolescents are not ready psychologically to make a binding life-long commitment. On the spectrum of identity formation, this signals that they have many unresolved questions that require ongoing personal exploration. These adolescents lack the calm conviction of those who have achieved a secure sense of themselves and their place in the social world. They are struggling between two conflicting worldviews to find their own niche in life.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/17
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1017
2010-10-01T13:25:06Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
The problem of phantasia in the history and study of religion
McVey, Geoffrey
2005-12-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
David Miller
Phantasia
Religion
Marsilio Ficino
Giordano Bruno
Imagination
middle ages
History of Religions of Western Origin
Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion
In this dissertation, I trace the development of concepts of imagination in the history of Western ideas and the impact of those concepts upon the study of religion. It is my contention that an early mistrust of imagination as a faculty that involved appearances rather than truths, that was considered vulnerable to external influences, and that was strongly connected to desire, led to its eventual separation into two forms: imagination proper, which was defined by its ability to reproduce or retain sense-impressions based upon reality, and phantasia, which creatively divided and recombined those impressions into phantasms that might have no relationship to reality. More and more, as theories of imagination and phantasia developed, phantasia became associated with the more negative qualities of imagination---instability, vulnerability, and transgression---until it was (sometimes literally) demonized as a source of temptation rather than inspiration.
The focus of my study is the representation of phantasia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, specifically in the work of Marsilio Ficino, in the Malleus maleficarum , and in several works by Giordano Bruno. In Bruno's De vinculis in genere in particular, I argue that he develops theories of the importance of phantasia as part of a more general network of bonds or connections by which human beings approach and interact with each other. It is by using this theory of bonds, or vincula , as a means to question the role of scholars of religion in relationship to the objects of their study that I examine the problem of whether phantasia continues to be treated with the same theologically-grounded suspicion that marked it in the late Middle Ages, and of what value it would be to scholars to reconsider it as a useful instrument.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/18
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1018
2010-10-01T20:34:32Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Remembering to forget: Theological tropologies of confession and disavowal
Magee, Neal E.
2004-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
M. Gail Hamner
Confession
Disavowal
Saint Augustine
Bishop of Hippo
Slavoj Zizek
Jacques Derrida
Arts and Humanities
Religion
This dissertation examines the philosophical nature of confession and how every confession is also a disavowal. In Book X of the Confessions , Augustine asks about the source of forgetting and proposes that some logic underwrites its operations. I contend that one name for this logic is "disavowal," a term Slavoj Zizek uses to mean consciously setting aside knowledge or holding two contradictory positions at the same time. For Zizek, disavowal operates like the fetish, in which the subject fashions a stand-in for the object of its real desires, which it can never fully attain. As an expression of desire, fetishistic disavowal functions to sustain what he calls "ideological fantasy," a positive means of structuring and framing experience. Thus disavowal does not emanate from knowledge, but as an expression of desire.
In the same way confession, which is both a profession of belief and an attempt to adjudicate a wrong, is concerned not with knowledge but with desire. And yet, as Augustine attests, the confessing subject is opaque to itself and so can never fully know what or how to confess. Following Jacques Derrida's Circumfession , I argue that desire and undecidability underwrite both disavowal and confession, revealing them not as dialectical and in need of resolution but rather as nonoppositional and productive phenomena.
The immediate application of my argument for theology is that, as an institution, theology is both problematized and enabled by disavowal. It is a problem for theology whenever concepts, words, habits and practices become fixed, hardened and taken to be "natural." Conversely, disavowal enables theology by allowing it to "forget itself" and its previous formulations through what Derrida calls "iterability," such that theology can continue its never-ending need for reconfiguration and reterritorialization. The aim, then, is not to overcome the structure of disavowal-confession, but rather to negotiate it in such a way that avows its inherent risks but also the abiding desires motivating it in the first place.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/19
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1019
2010-10-04T14:07:38Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Zosimus of Panopolis: Alchemy, nature, and religion in late antiquity
Grimes, Shannon L.
2006-05-01T07:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Patricia Cox Miller
Zosimus of Panopolis
Alchemy
Nature
Religion
Antiquity
Greece
History of Religions of Western Origin
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion
Late antiquity has been characterized as an era when science and rational thought were in decline, eclipsed by irrational magico-religious philosophies and pseudo-sciences such as theurgy, astrology, and alchemy. I argue that new paradigms are needed in the study of religion that go beyond these stereotypes and more accurately reflect the perspectives of the practitioners, using as a case study Zosimus of Panopolis, who incorporates Hermetic and "gnostic" ideas into his alchemical theory and practice and is considered the founder of religious alchemy. I examine the nexus of science, religion, and magic in his work and in the broader context of Greco-Roman culture, and analyze how these epistemologies are configured in light of ancient views of "nature" and what is "natural."
My theoretical approach builds upon the work of Bruno Latour, Stanley Tambiah and others who have exposed the ways in which scholarly analyses of science, magic, and religion often privilege modern notions of rationality and construe the viewpoints and practices of the "other" as its opposite. I argue that modern views of nature and science are frequently defined in contradistinction to "primitive" or "pre-modern" notions of cosmic sympathy---a theory of nature upon which alchemy is based---and that modern tendencies to conceptually separate nature and culture have led to several misunderstandings of Greco-Egyptian alchemy. My thesis is that conceptualizations of nature are crucial for understanding both ancient and modern delineations of science, magic, and religion; this type of analysis is also useful for interrogating modern biases and arriving at more nuanced interpretations of ancient perspectives.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/20
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1020
2010-10-05T19:03:06Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
The power of sacrifice: Roman and Christian discourses in conflict
Heyman, George P.
2004-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
James W. Watts
Sacrifice
Christian
Roman Empire
Comparative rhetoric
Arts and Humanities
History of Religions of Western Origin
Religion
This dissertation argues that the conflicts between Rome and the early Christian Church were the logical outcome of divergent discursive formulations of the idea of sacrifice. This project examines "discourse" within the conceptual framework offered by Foucault, Barthes, Lincoln, and Todorov. Discourse is more than a collection of words or an extended soliloquy, it is a means that generates and constitutes social identity through the exercise of power. A society's religious or political discourse manifests itself in many and varied rhetorical forms. I will argue that "sacrifice" functions as a mode of social discourse. Both imperial Rome and early Christianity capitalized on the idea and the rhetoric of sacrifice as a discursive means to craft their location and identity within the cosmos. The sacrificial practices associated with the Roman imperial cult allowed the Emperor, as a divine-like figure, to be present throughout the Empire. These rituals accomplished more than extending honor to a monarch, they effected social cohesion and religio-political control. The early Christian Church emerged from this sacrificial and social milieu to formulate its own discourse through rhetorical and ritual practices. Because of their sacrificial discourse Christians were perceived as a threat to the fragile balance of power that existed between the gods and the state. In an attempt to check Christianity's growth, Rome made sacrifice the litmus test of political and religious loyalty. Borrowing an imperial political model for Church order, as well as exalting the spectacle of the martyr in imitation of the biblical Christ, Christianity was able to create its own social order through a novel discourse of sacrifice.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/24
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1022
2010-10-05T19:40:26Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
"Tumultuous meetings" and the fury of freedom: Rethinking African American religion
Green, William H.
2004-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Charles H. Long
Black religion
African American religion
Freedom
Religion
Slaves
Cultural stylistics
African American Studies
Arts and Humanities
Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies
Religion
This dissertation argues that African American slaves resisted the dehumanizing effects of the slave system and claimed for themselves a fully human identity through the creation of a cultural stylistics centered around bodily enjoyments, music, drinking, socializing, joking, play, and festivity--a cultural stylistics which I refer to as "the party mode,"--and interprets this party mode not simply as a cultural activity, but as a religious activity.
The primary historical locus for the generation of this argument is the 17 th century Chesapeake where we find a historical coincidence between the passage of racist laws which relegated all black persons to a subhuman class and the emergence of large, "tumultuous" parties among the Afro-Chesapeakan slaves. The persistence of the "party mode" among the slaves is briefly traced, with special attention to the Pinkster festivals in New York and the festive modalities in Nat Turner's rebellion, illustrating how the "partying" functioned as a vehicle for resistance and identity creation in these contexts.
To make the argument for the "party mode" as a religious activity, the dissertation critiques reigning definitions of religion which exclude or subordinate the kinesthetic and sensorial modalities of human experience and activity, and develops an alternative definition of religion that foregrounds kinesthetic and sensorial experience as primary in the formation of religious consciousness. Key resources for the articulation of this alternative definition of religion are Charles H. Long's theory of the materiality of religion and Herbert Guenther's discussion of the religious consciousness as emerging within pre-linguistic, bodily-based experiences of "ecstatic spontaneity."
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/22
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1021
2010-10-05T19:38:31Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Translators and converts: Religion, exchange, and orientation in colonial New France, 1608--1680
Poirier, Lisa J. M.
2004-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
http://libezproxy.syr.edu/login?url=http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=766270801&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=3739&RQT=309&VName=PQD
Arts and Humanities
Religion
This dissertation argues that new religious orientations emerged as products of the material exchanges of human beings constitutive of French and Native encounters in seventeenth-century New France. The various discourses operating within the context of colonialism created disjunctive valuations and geographical displacements of the persons involved in these exchanges. Most visibly, translators and converts served as sites of religious contestation in that their newly constructed orientations highlighted differences between French and Native conceptions of the sacred. The persons being transformed into translators and converts articulated their values. The emergence of these new religious orientations contributed in a constitutive and essential fashion to the construction of modern subjectivities and collectivities.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/23
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1023
2010-10-07T20:24:13Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Ethics 2.0: Post-biological-posthuman subjectivity and the challenge to ethics
Benko, Steven A.
2003-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
James B. Wiggins
Subjectivity
Ethics
Postbiological
Posthuman
Emmanuel Levinas
Arts and Humanities
Philosophy
Religion
We live in a time when technology threatens to make ethics obsolete by allowing for the development of embodiments and subjectivities that are either only partially organic or are altogether immaterial. Cyborgs, the melding of the organic and machinic, and online personae, the attempt to realize subjectivity in cyberspace sans an organic body, challenge ethical discourses by revealing their last normative, humanist standard: the organic body. Establishing an ethic for cyborgs and online personae will answer the charge that these are narcissistic subjectivities who inhabit chaotic, if not anarchic, communities, demonstrating instead that they are committed to others and communities that allow otherness to flourish.
This dissertation argues that previous attempts to establish or extend ethics to cyborgs or online personae have failed because they fail to take into account the alterity of the technologies that makes these subjectivities possible. Humanist and posthumanist understandings of cyborgs and online personae reduce the alterity of technology in favor of establishing and perpetuating a knowable and controllable subjectivity, and this in turn has led to the failure of establishing a cyborg ethics based on the irony of cyborg subjectivity, and a narrative ethics for online personae based on the narrative structure of the communities they inhabit.
A viable ethics for cyborgs and online personae emerges with an emphasis on the alterity of technology that forces cyborgs and online personae to become other than they are.Cyborgs and online personae remain posthuman in their critique of normative, humanist claims, but become post-biological in their recognition that the alterity introduced by the technologies forces them to become other than human and other than who they understood themselves to be. Using the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, I argue that becoming other motivates cyborgs and online personae to support the otherness of others so that they can continue to become other to themselves, experiencing the infinite that Levinas says occurs in the encounter with the Other. As a result, becoming other and becoming responsible for the Other's otherness requires cyborgs and online personae to establish and maintain communities where otherness flourishes.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/21
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1024
2010-10-11T18:28:36Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Religion and sexual violence in late Greco-Roman antiquity
Caldwell, John Matthew
2003-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Patricia Cox Miller
Religion
Sexual violence
Greco-Roman
Antiquity
Arts and Humanities
Religion
Rape is a motif found in numerous religious texts of late Greco-Roman antiquity, often explicitly. At other times, a rape motif is present in the form of eroticized violence, a figural use of rape.
Feminist film critics have analyzed the gaze as a form of sexual violence at a distance. The gaze plays a prominent role in late antique accounts of the martyrdom of Christian women. The gaze also appeared to be a powerful tool for the social control of women in Christian congregations.
In addition to these forms of sexual violence, there are other categories of behavior that should be numbered among the forms of sexual violence in religious texts of late antiquity: castration and rhetorical emasculation. The self-castrated Galli, the priests of Cybele, for example, were objects of scorn and fascinated horror. Emasculating rhetoric was used by bishops for exerting control over their congregations.
The power dynamics at work within these texts are far from simple. Sexual violence appears in these texts as an attempt to assert power over another. There is evidence in the texts that this deployment is resisted. Further, the resistance is often recuperated into the strategic deployment. Sometimes power seems to predominate on the side of deployment or resistance, but the dynamics are never simple.
Sexual violence is not incidental to these religious texts, an anomalous intrusion that is peripheral to their religious concerns. Sexual violence in all its forms appears to be a way of figuring and negotiating the divine-human relationship in late antiquity. Even when sexual violence is used in religious contexts primarily for social control, as in the use of the gaze and emasculating rhetoric, there is a religious agenda at work.
The religious texts of late antiquity that allude to sexual violence replicate the dynamics of that violence. Neither the deployment of the various strategies of sexual violence nor the resistance to them is completely successful. Sexual violence is a field within which the relationship between God (or the gods) and human beings is figured and negotiated.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/26
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1025
2010-10-11T19:21:37Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
The aesthetics of nostalgia: The return of the real in postmodern Christian discourse
Pasulka, Diana Walsh
2003-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
James Watts
Return of the real
Postmodern
Christian
Paul Griffiths
Wesley Kort
Catherine Pickstock
Arts and Humanities
Philosophy
Religion
This is an examination of the works of three scholars who advocate an academic and cultural return to Christian scripture. Paul Griffiths, Wesley Kort and Catherine Pickstock all claim that the category of scripture is the answer to philosophy's epistemological crisis, exemplified by the tension between realist and anti-realist claims regarding the status of the object of representation. With recourse to the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, I will make two claims in this dissertation. First I will demonstrate that their works owe a debt to Martin Heidegger's late philosophy, specifically his essay "Origin of the Work of Art," in which he answers the philosophical issue of truth and representation via aesthetics. Second, I will show that the nostalgic narratives of these works suggest that they are symptomatic and work better as aesthetic productions than as academic scholarship, as they seek to make truth claims regarding the ontological status of the referent of scripture.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/25
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1026
2010-10-12T18:55:09Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Christian anarchism and the Catholic Worker movement: Roman Catholic authority and identity in the United States
Boehrer, Frederick George, III
2001-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
James G. Williams
Christian
Anarchism
Catholic Worker
Authority
Identity
Personalist
Arts and Humanities
Political Science
Religion
Social and Behavioral Sciences
"Anarchism" is a term frequently misunderstood within U.S. society. By examining the Catholic Worker movement, founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in 1933, I clarify four distinct expressions of Christian anarchism: (1) an alternative to state definitions of social life, (2) the practice of personalist community, (3) the practice of a personalist social movement, and (4) prophetic discipleship as an alternative to church definitions of Christian living. Thanks to Day, Maurin and Ammon Hennacy, the movement can be located within the larger anarchist tradition through their embrace of the needs-based political economy espoused by Peter Kropotkin, Leo Tolstoy, and the Industrial Workers of the World. The Catholic Worker movement distinguishes its anarchism from most anarchist groups through its radical interpretations of Roman Catholicism and Christianity, specifically, the primacy of conscience, the principle of subsidiarity, the New Testament, Christian nonviolence and Christian personalism.
Since Day's death in 1980, with neither co-founder to offer charismatic leadership for the entire movement, today's Catholic Workers raise questions of identity and authority. What makes a person (or a community) a Catholic Worker? What makes a Catholic Worker Catholic ? As more Catholic Workers publicly criticize the Roman Catholic church, as both institution and as people of God, I observe a para-institutional model of church. Such a model fosters a deconstruction of the institutional church while offering an alternative model to the human community in terms of meeting the needs of all through unconditional love. Since 1980, the movement continues without a leader, a set of policies, or a mechanism for decision-making. I conclude that the Catholic Worker movement continues to thrive because of anarchism. It continues not in spite of but because of the back-and-forth movement of conversation over questions of identity and authority. Such questions never lead to a definitive set of conclusions for all within the movement. However, it is in the community of conversants where the discussion of such questions provides experiences of great satisfaction, embracing the hope of meeting the needs of all, one person at a time.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/27
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1027
2010-10-15T15:21:17Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Ancient Greek drama, postmodern psychoanalysis and fundamental ambiguity: Euripides and Lacan
Boliaki, Eleni
2000-05-01T07:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
David L. Miller
Jacques Lacan
Ancient
Greek
Drama
Postmodern
Psychoanalysis
Fundamental ambiguity
Euripides
Ancient History, Greek and Roman through Late Antiquity
Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory
Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion
It is the thesis of this dissertation that many of the theoretical arguments made by Jacques Lacan are articulated in advance by Euripides who conceived, acknowledged, explored and justified the unconscious dimension of the soul, the other within. The dissertation will argue that Euripides 'performed' dramatically the nature, causes and symptoms of ambivalence, conflict, self-deception and otherness that Lacan 'talked' about and theorized.
Resemblances between the ideas of these two persons are extensive. They both had similar modes of perceiving the tragic human position in the world, the complexity of reality, and the consequent difficulty of determining moral judgments.
For both, pathology is inherent in the world and a permanent dimension of human psyche. Euripides and Lacan subverted the conventional boundaries between normality and pathology, and they doubted that sanity and insanity are incompatible. Therapy is not cure but the awareness and recognition of self-delusion. Both agree on the fact that to be human is to fail to make the ideal compromise. This is what makes them both tragic.
This dissertation will also discuss matters of ultimacy and the ethics that shape the religious implications of Lacan's psychoanalysis. Lacan's insistence on the priority of difference over sameness reflects an ethical potential and a religious aspect of psychoanalysis. Euripides also enacted a multiple interpretation of many voices and provided the frame for an intended diversity.
Both thinkers lost their positions as experts: Lacan as an authoritative therapist and Euripides as an authoritative teacher. Yet, each saw an imperative to protect personal dignity and advocated human thought (Euripides) and style (Lacan).
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/28
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1028
2010-10-18T17:45:35Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
For the sake of sorrow: Christian Holocaust theology and the interpretation of the Resurrection
Greene, David Patrick
2001-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
David L. Miller
Christian
Holocaust
Theology
Resurrection
Arts and Humanities
Religion
Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion
This dissertation challenges René Girard's reading of the resurrection of Jesus, insisting that any substantive re-evaluation and re-interpretation of the crucifixion must necessarily involve a re-interpretation of the resurrection as well. The context in which this challenge takes place is that of Christian Holocaust theology, following the work of Alice and A. Roy Eckardt's Long Night's Journey into Day . The Eckardts openly and without hesitation criticize those elements of Christian theology which allow complacency (and in some instance, complicity) in the face of mass murder. In the course of their work, however, they designate the resurrection as a primary theological link to the death camps. This dissertation examines their understanding of the resurrection and demonstrates that their reading of the resurrection is dependent upon what Girard calls the "sacrificial" reading of the crucifixion. Given the anthropology of the victimization mechanism and the subsequent interpretation of the crucifixion which Girard offers utilizing his theory (the "non-sacrificial" reading of the crucifixion) the path is open toward a non-sacrificial reading of the resurrection which need not lead inevitably to the death camps, but which works to deconstruct Christian violence toward Jews by demanding that Christianity accept accountability for the violence done in the name of the one crucified.
Chapter One surveys Jewish and Christian responses to the Holocaust. Chapter Two surveys scholarship regarding the interpretation of the crucifixion and resurrection and presents Girard's non-sacrificial reading of the crucifixion. Chapter Three examines the work of Alice and A. Roy Eckardt and demonstrates the dependency of their reading of the resurrection on Jürgen Moltmann's theology, which is shown to have several elements in common with the sacrificial reading of the crucifixion and resurrection, as well as certain theologies of atonement. Chapter Four contrasts the historical and literary concerns of René Girard with the work of John Dominic Crossan and establishes Girard's oversight with respect to his treatment of the resurrection--he has not followed through on the movement of thought which begins with a non-sacrificial reading of the crucifixion. Chapter Five weaves two avenues of thought together (the question of the interpretation of the figure of Judas and the impact of the non-sacrificial reading of the crucifixion on the interpretation of the resurrection) and offers a new reading of the resurrection.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/32
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1029
2010-10-18T17:55:58Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Gift and commodity: Sociocultural economies, indigenous religions, and academic exchange practices
Lokensgard, Kenneth Hayes
2001-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Philip Arnold
Gift
Commodity
Sociocultural economies
Indigenous religions
Academic exchange
Blackfoot
Anthropology
Arts and Humanities
Religion
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Social and Cultural Anthropology
In this dissertation, I conduct a thorough investigation and reapplication of the interpretive terms "gift" and "commodity." The critical investigation of these terms reveals that their use can contribute greatly to scholars' appreciation of differences in social organization. More important, however, this dissertation provides a case study and example--focusing upon the Blackfoot peoples of North America and their medicine bundles--of how the careful use of these concepts can also reveal overlooked ontological dimensions to material exchange between cultures. As cultural contact, the objectivization of others, and the commoditization of culture continues, the recognition of these dimensions to exchange is of great importance. A more thorough recognition of the wide-ranging implications of cultural exchange will contribute to a more ethical, accurate, and meaningful approach to the study of religion for all parties. Because this approach can be simplified by understanding religion as an orienting phenomenon that is potentially tied to all social exchanges, this dissertation also illustrates the contribution that religious studies can make to related disciplines and fields concerned with understanding otherwise discrete dimensions of human life.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/31
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1030
2010-10-18T19:53:15Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Service and performance: 'Leitourgia' and the study of early Christian ritual
Tuzlak, Sibel Ayse
2001-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Patricia Cox Miller
Service
Christian
Ritual
Leitourgia
Arts and Humanities
Religion
This dissertation traces the history of the Greek word leitourgia ("service") in order to illuminate the development of public worship in early Christianity. Rather than focusing on sacramental theology, I consider Christian worship in light of social exchange and physical labour: two elements that made up an important part of the cluster of meanings surrounding the word leitourgia in its classical context. This approach allows me to focus on underappreciated aspects of worship in early Christian societies in the West, including the roles played by the body, by physical artifacts, and by participants' perceptions of space and time in ritual.
The way that the word leitourgia was used by speechwriters and philosophers in classical Greece almost always included connotations of hard work and military defense. Furthermore, there was a well-developed vocabulary--first among Greek rhetoricians, and later among Roman government officials--to describe the reluctance that characterized the people upon whom liturgies were imposed.
These connotations influenced the ways in which Paul, Clement, and other early Christian writers imagined the religious "services" that they performed for their communities. For Paul, leitourgia was intimately connected with the sacrifices, financial and otherwise, that members of young Christian communities made for one another. The way that he makes his case depends entirely on the classical connotations of the word: for him, liturgies are burdens, fraught with difficulties, dangers, and expenses.
The purpose of this dissertation is to enrich modern scholarly perceptions of liturgy by emphasizing aspects of leitourgia that have often been neglected in the scholarship of the past two hundred years. I also consider some of the reasons why earlier connotations of the word fell out of favour during the European Renaissance, why the word was revived (through the Latin neologism liturgia ) after the In its final chapter, the dissertation provides what I call a "leitourgiac" reading of a mediaeval Christian ritual manual, contrasting that hermeneutical method with the "liturgical" hermeneutics that have been dominant in the scholarship of the past two hundred years.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/30
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1031
2010-10-18T20:49:05Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
The problem of philosophical theology
Robbins, Jeffrey Walter
2001-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Charles E. Winquist
Philosophical theology
Ontotheology
Levinas
Emmanuel
Emmanuel Levinas
Arts and Humanities
Philosophy
Religion
Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion
Redefining ontotheology is the main objective of this dissertation. This objective is accomplished by examining twentieth century philosophical and theological thought, specifically with regard to the problem of philosophical theology. What this problem reveals is that both contemporary philosophy and contemporary theology have been driven by a desire to overcome ontotheology, when, in fact, as the contemporary history of the problem of philosophical theology consistently demonstrates, ontotheology is the constitutive origin and legacy of Western thought. From this respect, ontotheology is not a problem to be overcome, but rather the inevitable, if not necessary, condition of thought.
This understanding poses yet another problem, however, which is simultaneously the central irony and chief responsibility of this work as a whole--namely, if the strategy of overcoming is a problem where ontotheology is concerned, then how is it possible to overcome overcoming without falling into the same preestablished patterns of thought which themselves were fundamentally problematic? The answer, as suggested by the work of the Emmanuel Levinas and as explored in the final chapter of this dissertation, is the development of a strategy of thought that is "otherwise than overcoming," one that might recognize in the ontotheological condition the necessary site of the ethical relation. This recognition is an affirmation of responsibility. But not only a responsibility for those actions and thoughts of which one is conscious, but even more, an infinite responsibility that exceeds intentionality altogether, a realization that one is responsible for the other, and by extension, that one path of thought, whether philosophical or theological in nature, is complicit in, and stands in a necessary relationship to, the other. Thus, the recognition of the ontotheological condition of thought points beyond the problem of philosophical theology to the very conditions of its possibility. As a result, philosophical theology might redirect its attention away from questions of its own nature and possibility and towards its more urgent task of a meaningful engagement with, and critical analysis of, the world.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/29
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1032
2010-10-25T18:50:12Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Cross purposes: The violent grammar of Christian atonement
Bartlett, Anthony William
1999-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
James G. Williams
Saint Anselm of Canterbury
Violent
Christian
Atonement
New Testament
Arts and Humanities
Religion
Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion
Key Western theories of Christ's death on the cross have been worked out in terms of exchange brought about by violence. The most influential example is that of Anselm, of Canterbury (1033-1109), that Christ's death made satisfaction to/for God's offended honor. Mimetic anthropology, based in the work of René Girard, provides a powerful deconstructive tool in regard to such doctrine. It demonstrates the inherent quotient of violence in the logic used, producing a divine hypostasis of violence. Application of this analysis to concrete episodes of the medieval period further locates the Anselmian text in a frame where violence is constitutive of cultural practice, meaning and symbols.
An alternative tradition exists--that compassion of the crucified is the most persuasive account of the cross of Christ. Radicalized mimetic anthropology--understanding the "self" as already a version or repetition of the "other"--enables; us to describe this compassion as solidarity in suffering and at an abyssal level. This means that non-retaliation and forgiveness provide an "alternative" (self) to and for the violence profoundly shaping relationality, that they do so at a level beneath all phenomenality of violence, and that such explanation in and of itself lacks metaphysical necessity: it is the qualitative uncertainty of com-passion that is its only warrant to "alter" violence. This account is, therefore, intrinsically rhetorical, illustrated consistently both by the philosophical aporia of "repetition," and by particular exempla drawn from world literature. And yet it is also historical, rooted in the particular and contingent. A hermeneutic of the New Testament rejects exchangist notions of Christ's death, highlighting rather the apocalyptic content which fits the interruptive nature of the cross, and gives credibility to a contingent intentionality in the historical Jesus. In this light the conclusion detects in Christ's abyssal com-passion the re-creative quality of "new time," both for God and humanity, obviating need for systematic accounts incorporating both violence and non-violence in the one God.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/33
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1033
2010-10-26T13:25:07Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
The Skeptic way as a religious way: A meditation on religion and Pyrrhonian spirituality
DiBernardo, Sabatino
2000-05-01T07:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
James B. Wiggins
Skeptic
Religion
Pyrrhonian
Spirituality
Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion
Skepticism, throughout much of the history of Western religio-philosophical thought, has been portrayed by its detractors as an irreligious or antireligious philosophy that doubts/denies all belief, truth and knowledge. Consequently, it has been diagnosed as the etiology of a spiritual disease that leads to an aporetic abyss of indeterminacy and undecidability incompatible with or detrimental to religion and spirituality.
In contradistinction to this historically perpetuated misrepresentation, this dissertation suggests that the Skeptic way of Pyrrhonism may be read as religion (interpreted as a spiritually therapeutic 'way' of life and thought ) by virtue of a formal, functional and analogical isomorphism between Pyrrhonism and religion. Unlike the spiritually denuded, unmitigated 'skepticism' with which it is conventionally confused and conflated, Pyrrhonian 'Skepticism' is not the cause of, but rather, the spiritually therapeutic remedy for the spiritual disease of anxiety brought on by dogmatic desire. Indeed, it proffers a nondogmatic, ataraxic antidote with(in) and by means of the very aporetic abyss of indeterminacy and undecidability diagnosed as the contagion by traditional religion and philosophy. This dissertation is a story of Skeptic religiosity and a Pyrrhonian hermeneutic of appearance engendered by a suspension of judgment regarding essentialist, realist truth in the absence of an experience of a metacriterion of judgment.
The first chapter explores historical diagnoses vis-à-vis Skepticism, religion and the spiritual dilemma; the second chapter provides a hermeneutic of religion and spirituality based on formal, functional and analogical formulations of religion as 'story,' 'existential hermeneutic' and 'way'; the third chapter surveys various traditional religious and philosophical instantiations of the way to which it conjoins the Skeptic way of Pyrrhonism; the fourth and fifth chapters focus on similar remedial functions within religion and philosophy as 'therapy' for the soul (e.g., sage, philosopher, priest as 'physician of the soul'); the fifth chapter closes with the religious implications of this reading of Pyrrhonism for contemporary religious thought in terms of a 'profane' religiosity.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/39
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1034
2010-10-26T18:11:59Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Interpreting the agency of possessed women in a postcolonial comparative study: Toward a concept of instrumental agency
Keller, Mary Louise
1998-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Patricia C. Miller
Women possessed
Feminist
Spirit possession
Agency
Postcolonial
Instrumental agency
Religion
Women's Studies
This dissertation is a historian of religion's approach to the repeated appearance of possessed women across time and cultures, informed by post-colonial and feminist perspectives on the study of the religious other. Beginning with a critique of the major comparative studies of possession written by Oesterreich, Bourguignon and Lewis, I argue against their interpretive frameworks on the basis that they each employ a reductive model of religious subjectivity which undergirds their analysis and perpetuates biased representations of possessed women. Specifically, I examine how agency is constructed by these authors and argue that, given the post-colonial and feminist criticisms of the inherent biases of thought/action or belief/power dichotomies as argued by Talal Asad and Catherine Bell, it is an opportune time to revisit the problem of interpreting the agency of possessed women.
I propose a concept for interpreting the agency of possessed women, "instrumental agency." The concept shifts the discussion of agency away from a model of subjects (agents) toward the analysis of practices which constitute a receptive subject who is far from passive, but instead functions as the instrumental agency through which ancestors, deities or spirits remind communities of their historical obligations, and do work in the world toward the production of a moral order. "Knowledge" of the possessing ancestors, deities or spirits is an epistemological impossibility, but the concept allows a discursive space for the theological terms by which a people identifies possession phenomena. Rather than imposing modern, psychological interpretations which elide or erase indigenous explanations, the concept of instrumental agency indicates that the woman's subjectivity is instrumental for forces external to human consciousness.
The chapters of the dissertatian are organized around the themes of Work, War and Play(s), examining possession phenomena in Malaysia, Zimbabwe, and in the theaters of Greek antiquity and Yiddish theater in the twentieth century. These case studies exemplify the relationship of women's religious lives to systems of power and highlight the specific agency of possessed women.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/38
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1035
2010-10-26T18:41:59Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Re-covering fideism: An a-modern model of language and thought
Lorentzen, Osborne
1999-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Charles Winquist
Fideism
Language
Thought
Johann Georg Hamann
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
Louis Bautain
Arts and Humanities
Philosophy
Religion
Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion
I begin with an introduction of the perceived problem (the skepticism that modernism, or rationality, leads to) and the main fideist thinkers (Hamann, Jacobi, and Bautain) under consideration. The presence of skepticism (primarily "post-modernism") points to a state of epistemological crisis which requires a paradigm shift. This study is a "re-covery" of a fideist epistemological paradigm. The argument advanced is ostensibly one which Hamann, et al. would have made or did make. It begins with an analysis of experience as the beginning of knowledge (chapter 2)--which, among other considerations, functions to situate the argument in the context of Hume and Kant's critical philosophy. This analysis indicates that in order for experience to be an intelligible concept, and in order for experience to lead to knowledge, one must presuppose an element of faith which is prior to reason. Faith, further, leads to a knowledge of the realities of the subject-object and the self-other relations. Chapter 3 is an examination of the epistemological structure of faith. The conclusion of this chapter is that faith is a formal authority, or provides an essential epistemological confidence that requires a "translation" into particulars in order to be meaningfully engaged. This translation, however, is less certain than the original conviction and is dependent upon reason and language for its deployment. This leads to an analysis of reason (chapter 4) and language (chapter 5) within the fideist paradigm. Language and reason are dependent upon the "revelations" which come from tradition and the senses--the two sources of human knowledge. To be effective one's approach to language and reason requires both faith and a correct understanding of how they function: reason primarily as an organizer of data and a limit to human pretensions; and language as the vehicle of the Real. In chapter 6 the implications of language as the vessel or occasion of the Real are developed. The term "sacrament of language" is used to capsulize this understanding of language. This leads to a discussion of grace and the mediatory function of language with the conclusion being that humans are best related to language use by an attitude of (wise) trust.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/37
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1036
2010-10-27T17:38:09Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Saving the phainomena: Religion and the Aristotelian moral philosophy of Martha Nussbaum and Alasdair MacIntyre
Nelson, Janet R.
1998-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Ernest Wallwork
Aristotelian
Phainomena
Religion
Nussbaum
Martha
Macintyre
Alasdair
Moral philosophy
Philosophy
Religion
This thesis takes as its starting-point G. E. M. Anscombe's argument in her 1958 essay entitled "Modern Moral Philosophy" that contemporary ethics is largely incoherent due to the continuing use of moral concepts of obligation dependent upon a Christian framework which no longer exists. The origin of the current renaissance of Aristotelian ethics is oftentimes traced to Anscombe's recommendation that preChristian Greek ethics might offer resources for the project of revisioning postChristian moral philosophy. This dissertation investigates the contemporary turn to Aristotle, focusing on the Aristotelian-informed moral theory of Martha Nussbaum and Alasdair MacIntyre. It does so in light of the continuous, rather than discontinuous legacy of Christian thought, not just in terms of content and function, but also with respect to the forms, structures, themes, images, narratives, ethical presuppositions, and literary genres employed in each theorist's work. These are the phainomena referred to in the title of this work.
The central argument is that both Nussbaum's and MacIntyre's appropriation and interpretation of Aristotle, are mediated, and to a large extent, shaped by their post Christian location. Moreover, despite the many overlapping areas of concern in their work, e.g. the ethical significance of narrative, practical reasoning, and moral particularism, I argue that the substantial differences in their respective framing of these issues can be explicated by exploring each in relation to religion and religious ethics. This perspective serves to problematize both Nussbaum's project of rehabilitating a preChristian Aristotle and MacIntyre's advocacy of a Christianized-Aristotelian tradition.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/36
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1037
2010-10-27T19:33:34Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
The perpetual millennium: Narrative closure and the end of days
Gutierrez, Cathy Nora
1999-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Patricia Cox Miller
Millennium
Narrative
End of days
Nineteenth century
Arts and Humanities
Religion
This dissertation argues that millennialism is a religious phenomenon in which the participants seek to make sense of the events in the world by positing an end of time which will, retrospectively, imbue the past and present with meaning. This process of projecting a future end is analogous to the creation of plot in narrative: in each, the end will justify the difficulties of the present to culminate in a meaningful whole. Millennialism is a sense-making system in which epistemology is derived from the "plot" of history. However, by foregrounding imminent cosmic closure, millennialists must continually defer the closure which is their defining characteristic. This dissertation argues that the act of deferring closure is intrinsically an act of temporalization, and thus millennialists create alternative constructions of time to the norm. Narrative theory, focusing on closure and anti-closure, is brought to bear on nineteenth-century American millennialist movements as exempla of temporalization and the deferral of closure. The Mormons, the Spiritualists, and the Oneida Community are examined with a view to elucidating strategies for the deferral of closure. The first chapter examines the rise of the novel and the cultural imagination of the end in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The second chapter examines the Mormon's construction of time and argues that it is mimetic of an earlier state of purity. Mimesis as a literary phenomenon is then explored with a view to arguing that it is simultaneously creative and closural. The third chapter looks at sexuality and desire in all three representative millennialist movements, and argues that their constructions of time are inscribed on their bodies in erotic praxis. The fourth chapter turns to Mormon and Spiritualist heavens, and argues that an individual's life is a microcosm of the millennialist project whereby epistemology is found in the relation to the end of a single life. The conclusion offers a theory of why some millennialist groups are able to move to institutionalization and the relation of this event to narrative. It also offers some future directions for the use of the model created herein.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/35
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1038
2010-10-27T20:04:39Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Towards a theology of language: A philosophical analysis of the theological desire to give expression in the secular world
Vahanian, Noelle Dominique Isabelle
1999-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Charles E. Winquist
Philosophical
Secular
Theology of language
Arts and Humanities
Philosophy
Religion
Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion
I . This dissertation is a comprehensive and critical study of the other in and of language that the history of Western thought manifests.
II . The hypothesis that stands under the analysis of the other in and of language in the history of Western thought is the following: (1) The value placed on existence depends on the adequacy of modes of representation to integrate affects into concepts. (2) The value placed on existence depends, therefore, on the adequacy of our interpretations, our readings, our critiques, our evaluations of the work of scholarship--of an insufferable quest for knowledge.
III . The schematism of the work is that of a genealogy in that: (1) It is a tracing back of the other in and of language through the ideas of it that have prevailed in and motivated the history of Western thought. (2) It is a comprehensive evaluation of this history. (a) it shows how this history is often synonymous with a devaluation of existence. (b) it suggests how a theological understanding of the desire to know as a desire to give expression in a secular world can overcome the devaluation of existence triggered by thinking. (c) the overcoming in question is not an overcoming by faith alone, or the product of a whimsical imagination. Rather, it is a promise: the promise that to speak a theological desire is better than not to speak this desire.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/34
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1039
2010-10-28T14:43:57Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
The appearance of shame in Holocaust witness
Boone, Susan Livingston
1998-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Alan L. Berger
Elie Wiesel
Primo Levi
Holocaust
Shame
Witness
Religion
The dissertation maintains the need for a more extended consideration of shame in Western "self" understandings and models of subjectivity. It joins its voice with other critics challenging the totalized individuality, the certainty and unambiguous righteousness of the Western moral self of modernity, along with its attendant conception of personal moral responsibility.
The argument is made that testimonial literature provides a compelling point of view from which to consider models of the Western self. Testimony provides a perspective which brings to light what is lacking in contemporary theories of the self. What is missing is a sense of shame, and "shame" appears in testimony as admitting a risky habit of self-deflating attentions through exposures to the "other." The value of such texts for consideration of ethical concerns is in large part their ability to promote self-inquiry and "other" regard.
Attention to shame, therefore, offers the possibility of a more complex, nuanced regard for self as it alters the sense of proportion between self and other. Shame's cogency lies in the validity and elevation of the "other" perspective. This "other" point of view of shame is advanced as an essential corrective to the potential hybris and narcissism occasioned by some theories of moral agency, and supports a criterion of self-restraint in the face of the other.
The dissertation offers for consideration of its thesis the specific Holocaust testimonies of Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi. Attention to shame dominates in the texts of both authors as in the experience of radical diminishment of self at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators, on the one hand, and on the other, the agony which surrounds personal memories of refusal to help the weaker, needier prisoners. Adherence to the mandatory rule of the camps, to take care of oneself first and foremost, lingers as self-accusing torment, as unpardonable and ineradicable offense to the human. The show of self in witness serves to pierce the veil of invulnerable hearing/seeing; knowledge implicates and involves; witness gives voice to a summons to become answerable, to become responsible.
The dissertation turns, in conclusion, to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and his radical notion of moral obligation. The demand for response which is inherent to witness is what Levinas describes as the occurrence of ethics. Witness may then be offered as exemplary of the ethical in Levinasian terms.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/41
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1040
2010-10-28T16:50:56Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
The theological sublime: Subjectivity, temporality and imagination in the Kantian critique
Crockett, Clayton Scott
1998-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Charles E. Winquist
Imagination
Subjectivity
Sublime
Temporality
Theological
Religion
This dissertation develops a theological reading of Kant, by reading the Critique of Judgment back into the Critique of Pure Reason, in the context of contemporary continental philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Specifically, the Kantian understanding of the First Critique breaks down in the Schematism of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding, but this does not become explicit until the Analytic of the Sublime of the Third Critique. The interpretations of Kant by Heidegger and Lyotard are explicated in order to provide a context for an original reading of the core of the Kantian critical project. Kant's notions of subjectivity, temporality, and imagination are interwoven in the analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason, and their confluence points to a negative power of imagination which disrupts the determinate working of the understanding. In the Critique of Judgment, the power of imagination to apprehend to infinity outstrips the ability of understanding to comprehend the sublime, creating an abyss which reason must step in to control and contain.
The insights into the Kantian sublime are then related to the schematism, or the transcendental imagination, which is an act or process of knowing which cannot be fully represented by the conceptual understanding. This Kantian wounding of understanding is an epistemological wound, which fissures objective knowledge even of the realm of phenomena. Furthermore, using the theology of Paul Tillich, the force of Kant's philosophical insights are interpreted theologically, that is, in terms of formal conditions of human "ultimate concern." These insights are then used in contributing towards a theology of the sublime, which consists of a formal interrogation and unsettling disorientation of concepts, rather than a determinate understanding of the contents of given theological frameworks.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/40
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1041
2010-10-29T14:06:00Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Beliefs, grounds, and the basing relation
Radcliffe, Dana Montford
1996-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
William P. Alston
epistemology
Religion
A number of epistemologists have held that a person who has a particular a posteriori belief is justified in that belief only if it is based on adequate grounds. Generally, these philosophers have focused on trying to determine exactly what is required for the grounds to be adequate. Surprisingly few epistemologists, however, have attempted to analyze just what it is for a belief to be based on grounds at all. In Chapter 1, after introducing the general concept of basing, I propose a set of desiderata which, I argue, any analysis of the basing relation should meet. In Chapters 2-4, I expound and critically evaluate the best-known treatments of basing by contemporary epistemologists--namely, those of Marshall Swain, Robert Audi, and Paul Moser--bringing out their strengths and weaknesses in light of the desiderata advanced in Chapter 1. The final chapter is a defense of my own analysis, which reconciles the epistemic and causal aspects of the basing relation by construing it as resulting from the operation of what William Alston calls "doxastic practices." Such practices are activations of settled cognitive habits through whose exercise we process occurrent experiences and belief states, thereby forming new beliefs and reinforcing existing ones. As I show in Chapter 5, my analysis of the concept of basing--together with plausible analyses of certain ancillary notions--satisfies the Chapter 1 desiderata.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/46
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1042
2010-10-29T18:29:48Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Pandaemonia: A study of Eusebius' recasting of Plutarch's story of the "Death of Great Pan"
Coggan, Sharon Lynn
1992-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
David L. Miller
Eusebius of Caesarea
Plutarch
Pan
Religious meaning
Religion
This study is based on a comment by Eusebius of Caesarea on a story transmitted by the first-century philosopher Plutarch, the story of the "Death of Great Pan." In his commentary, Eusebius calls attention to the time when Plutarch says the death occurred, during the reign of Tiberius, the same era as that which saw the advent of Christ on earth. Eusebius claims that the death of Pan, imaged as the death of "all" the pagan gods, based on an ancient pun which equated the name of the shepherd god Pan with its Greek homonym pan ("all,") was not a natural or chance occurrence. Rather, it resulted from a purposive act of exorcism by Christ to chase away all the pagan gods which were imagined to be "demons." In this proclamation, Eusebius turns Plutarch's story into a polemical weapon to use against the pagans. By pursuing this tactic, Eusebius subtly changes the meaning of the terms "Pan" and "daemon" to make them stand for dimensions of evil, whereas in Greek religious and literary history, both terms had stood for dimensions of the sacred.
This transformation in religious meaning and value is the subject of the present study. The method employed involves a comparative linguistic analysis of the terms "Pan" and "daemon" in Greek and Christian literature, covering the period from Homer to Eusebius. Since the transformation of these words results from their utilization in a polemical, apologetic context, the place and role of Eusebius as apologist, in contrast to his more familiar identification as "the father of church history" will also be carefully examined.
The thesis argues that Eusebius has taken two terms which stood for highly ambiguous, multivalent meanings, and has, in the course of his polemical treatment, transformed them into flat, univocal meanings which were exclusively negative. Eusebius does this precisely by denying the terms their native ambiguity and reducing them to simple, unambiguous meanings. This is a classical representation of the movement which distorted the highly complex deity "Pan," transforming him into the Christian devil, and the complicated, ambiguous entities, the "daemons" into "demons," the evil spirits of Christian lore.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/45
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1043
2010-10-29T19:44:36Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Violence as grace: A Theopoietic reading of mimetic violence in Rene Girard and Flannery O'Connor
Johnson, William Lawrence
1992-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
David L. Miller
Rene Girard
Flannery O'Connor
France
Religion
Flannery O'Connor's fiction assaults the reader by juxtaposing realistic and grotesque imagery, evoking a violence which strikes the reader not only as appropriate to her narratives, but as a necessary correlative to human experience as well. To read Flannery O'Connor, one must reckon with the necessity of violence.
The critical work of Rene Girard serves the study of O'Connor admirably. Girard identifies violence as chief among the forces which elude human mastery--a force so elusive that he imagines it as "the heart and secret soul of the sacred." For Girard, violence is not the primordial reality, but is itself the product of a mimetic rivalry whose reciprocity can only be terminated by a community's turn against a surrogate victim.
Girard thus opens mimesis toward a richly technical meaning which far exceeds its traditional understanding as a basic mechanism of plot development. From a vast array of textual traditions, Girard develops an understanding of mimesis as a universal mechanism of social formation which erases its underlying violence by concealing itself within the play of those structures which it engenders.
The importance of this understanding for the interpretation of narrative is that it discourages superficial readings, compelling the reader to delve deeply into the text to discover the "unsaid" which "ghosts" the play of images within the text. Through O'Connor's fiction, I identify a realism of a different order which preserves the mystery and integrity of the text and its textuality.
Girard's and O'Connor's call to re-examine mimesis leads me to recover a history of the term. I trace its development recursively: beginning with Plato's fateful distinction between "good (representation) and bad (fantasy) mimesis" and following its course through Aristotle, Horace, and the literary critics of the Italian Renaissance, I return once again to Aristotle.
A revisionary reading of Aristotle, in turn, deflects me toward Heraclitus, through whom I again engage Girard. I argue that fantasy and mimesis belong together and that one might regard the violence resident in O'Connor's fiction as an inscription of their conjunction.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/44
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1044
2010-10-29T20:16:24Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Immanence and otherness as perceived by Plotinus, Marsilio Ficino, John Cage, and Victor Zuckerkandl
Mauler, Joyce J.
1995-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
David L. Miller
Marsilio Ficino
John Cage
Victor Zuckerkandl
Italy
Philosophy
Music
Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion
Problem. Although many challenges have been levied against the dualistic perspectives which frequently characterize occidental worldviews, literalistic applications of hierarchical schemata continue to alienate phenomenological disciplines. This dissertation explores the anti-philosophical bent of many empiricists in terms of Neoplatonic insights into the dynamic relationships which distinguish different dimensions of being. Specifically theories about musica mundana, musica humana, and musica instrumentalis that have been developed by Plotinus and Marsilio Ficino are placed in conversation with the radically empiricist stance advanced by composer John Cage and the moderating position offered by music theorist Victor Zuckerkandl.
Procedure. After summarizing music theories put forth by Pythagoras and Plato (chapter 1), the positive influence which those theories have had on the thinking of Plotinus and Ficino is articulated (chapter 2). Then passages from these writers which seem to judge the phenomenal realm in negative terms are identified (chapter 3). The critique against such judgments which arises from John Cage's convictions regarding music's autonomy is presented (chapter 4) and evaluated in terms of the diverse components that constitute musica practica's "self" (chapter 5). Cage's immanentist focus is thus examined in terms of Neoplatonism's extra-sensory tendencies and revisioned in terms of music's self-transcendence.
With the tension between empiricist and metaphysical perspectives established, the prospect that musica practica may lead its participants beyond dualistic assumptions is considered in terms of the musical perspective advanced by Victor Zuckerkandl (chapter 6). The remainder of the dissertation explores the possibility that encounters which Cage and Zuckerkandl have with the musical result in insights into the interconnectedness of being which are similar to the understandings that distinguish the music theories of Plotinus and Ficino.
Conclusions. Throughout the dissertation, a "rhythmic" approach to the issues under consideration is employed. This approach anticipates and reveals the manner in which music's paradoxical nature enables dualistic perspectives to be relinquished. Absolute affirmations of otherness and/or immanence repeatedly are shattered in the writings of Plotinus, Cage, Ficino, Zuckerkandl, and myself because confrontations with the musicality of life replace apparent absolutes with the dynamism of paradox. New configurations of immanence and otherness enabled by this dynamism overcome false dichotomies that continue to be drawn between empirical realities and extra-sensory phenomena.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/43
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1045
2010-10-29T20:20:26Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Woman, community and conflict: Rethinking the metaphor of female adultery in Hosea 1-2
Keefe, Alice Ann
1995-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
James G. Williams
Bible
Religious history
Womens studies
Cultural anthropology
Biblical Studies
This dissertation will argue that the dominant reading of female adultery in Hosea 1-2 as a metaphor for religious apostasy in a syncretistic fertility cult proceeds from an interpretative framework that spiritualizes the meaning of religion, uncritically imports Western assumptions about gender meanings, and presupposes the individual as the basic unit of human meaning. Reading within this interpretive frame, commentators generally agree that the great point of Hosea's female sexual imagery is the articulation of a theological position in which spirit is raised above matter. This dissertation will show that this conclusion is a product of hermeneutical premises which already presuppose the matter/spirit dichotomy, and will offer a very different reading of the metaphor by setting it within the context of an alternative interpretative framework that presupposes no such dichotomy.
Rather than reading Hosea's figure of the ' eset zenuni m ("woman of fornications") through the lens of stereotypical Western associations of woman with nature, sexual temptation and sin, this dissertation will read female sexual transgression in Hosea in light of the repeated association of sexual transgression and social violence which is found in the biblical narratives. Thus female adultery in Hosea will be read as a commentary upon the structural violence in Israelite society which accompanied the eighth century boom in agribusiness and attendant processes of land consolidation. Further, rather than reading Hosea's religious allusions against the background of scholarly fantasies concerning a popular fertility or sex cult, the religious issues relevant to Hosea 1-2 will be identified as relating to the disruption of the socio-sacral order of traditional highland life that accompanied the progressive transformation of Israel's subsistence economy into a commercial economy driven by interregional trade. From this perspective, Hosea's marriage metaphor will be reread as a family metaphor which draws upon the centrality of the family in traditional Israelite life as a way of speaking to the disintegration of that way of life brought about by the avaricious economic practices of Israel's elite establishment. Finally, the symbolism of woman in Hosea will be reconsidered in light of this rereading.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/42
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1046
2010-11-01T19:43:05Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Prophetic discourse and postmodernism: Towards a critical theory of religion
Karafin, Brian Scott
1991-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Charles Winguist
Religion
Critical theory
Postmodern
Religion
The dissertation presents a "critical theory of religion" which demonstrates that there has been an alteration of relations between "critique" and "religion" in the "postmodern" cultural situation. Chapter I delineates the notion of the postmodern as a cultural context for contemporary theoretical writing. The Marxism of Fredric Jameson provides a test-case for the question as to how critical theory engages the postmodern. Chapter II elaborates Jameson's theory of religion in the context of an argument that Marxist critique and religion display a new configuration in postmodernity. Chapter III probes the differences between Jameson and classical Marxism on the questions of science and utopia, which have been understood as central to the question of religion in the Marxist context. In Chapter IV Jameson's notion of "prophetic discourse" emerges as exemplary of the sense of a co-implication between Marxism and religion. Chapter V confronts Jameson with alternative views of postmodernism and religion which call into question the central terms of his project. The concluding chapter returns to the issues of religion, Marxism, and utopia, developing the ethico-political consequences of the positions held by Jameson and alternative theorists. The progression of themes thus develops a critical theory of religion with ethico-political interest.
The inquiry proceeds through a reading of Jameson's texts in juxtaposition with alternative approaches to Marxism, postmodernism, and religion. A "thickly described" nexus of textual positions is thus elaborated as an enactment of the view that "culture" consists of a conversational polyphony of voices.
The conversation on Marxism and religion demonstrates the substantive result that the discursive status of these cultural texts (Marxism and religion) should be approached as neither mutually exclusive nor identical, but complexly intertwined in a fashion that calls into question any attempt to eliminate religion from Marxism and Marxism from religion. The substantive question of relations between Marxism and religion is also seen as an occasion for a characterization of the formal modality of postmodern cultural criticism. The "mixing" of Marxism and religion in the reading of Jameson and his conversational partners is construed as a critical perspective which revisions the modern sense of a necessary opposition between critical theory and religion. The undermining of this opposition in turn demonstrates a defamiliarizing vocation for postmodern cultural criticism.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/47
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1047
2010-11-03T13:42:27Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Radical theology in preparation: From Altizer to Edwards
Feero, Richard Lee
1993-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Charles Winquist
Altizer
Thomas J. J.
Edwards
Jonathan
death of God
Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion
This dissertation explores the relationship between Thomas J. J. Altizer's Christian atheism and Jonathan Edwards's Christian theism. It is organized around the idea of conversion as a response to a prior act of divine grace. When Altizer interprets Nietzsche's "death of God" as such an act, he expands the problematic of conversion to the level of theological discourse and thus brings it to bear on the distinctions of God (transfiguration), self (conversion), and world (apocalypse). The thesis argues that this linking of the death of God to that of man situates atheism at the end of a discursive sequence whose prior terms are theism and humanism.
According to Altizer, Christian theology faces the choice of maintaining the traditional language of God's transcendence at the price of becoming blind to contemporary experience, or falling silent by seeing that experience. In response, Altizer turns his theology away from God's being towards God's speech. By reading this turn through Gilles Deleuze's analysis of the visible and the speakable, the dissertation recasts atheism's relation to the tradition in terms of systematically different forms of discourse. Altizer's tracing of the possibility of a Christian atheism that is both visible and speakable to divinity's self-negation, suggests an analogy with the theistic conception of grace. I argue that Edwards's theism produces the otherness of God through a continual veiling of its essence that is repeated in his understanding of the affections, the trinity, and the creation. However, such a discursive otherness can be differentiated from post-structuralism's absent transcendent signifier only indirectly: Altizer's analysis of speech for signs of God's death is best understood as an atheistic version of Edwards's analysis of the affections for signs of God's transcendent grace. Although atheism has theism for its historical and discursive other, Altizer's "total presence" does not simply eliminate the other: instead, it marks the irreducible proximity of otherness as the becoming idiomatic of faith--at once the passing of theism's discourse and the recurrence of otherness as an alterity inherent in speech.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/53
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1048
2010-11-03T13:58:30Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Star-god: Enki/Ea and the biblical god as expressions of a common ancient Near Eastern astral-theological symbol system
Nugent, Tony Ormond
1993-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Amanda Porterfield
Canopus
History of Religions of Eastern Origins
Although some late 19th and early 20th Century scholars proposed that the Israelite god Yahweh is a form of the Sumero-Akkadian god Enki/Ea, this theory was quietly abandoned in the scholarly reaction against "Pan-Babylonism," and has not been revived since that time. In light of new knowledge gained over the past century, this theory deserves a fresh, comprehensive argumentation on its behalf.
The primary basis for the idea that the biblical god (considering both Yahweh and his incarnation in Jesus) is a form of Enki/Ea lies in the considerable congruency between the theological traditions of these gods, which encompasses divine names, functions, values, and character traits; literary themes; mythic images; ideologies; cultic forms; and socio-historical circumstances.
The theological symbol system encompassing Enki/Ea and the biblical god has an underlying "astral" character, with this god-form being a personification of the star Canopus. The astral symbology of this symbol system is indicated by the identification of deities with stars in late Babylonian astronomical and astrological texts, including Ea = Canopus; the use of a star-sign in cuneiform for the word "deity"; coherence between behaviors and characteristics of gods and the heavenly bodies which are their visible manifestations; and social and cultic institutions which mirror the heavens, following the principle of "as above, so below."
Arriving at this conclusion requires knowledge of the principles of positional astronomy, including data generated by computer calculations of star positions in antiquity, taking the phenomenon of precession into consideration.
Among the challenges the argument faces is that of bridging the gap between polytheism and monotheism, a task aided by evidence of significant residues of polytheism in the biblical tradition, as well as of the monolatrous character of the Enki/Ea tradition. The principal other Sumero-Akkadian god who appears to be implicated in biblical religion is Dumuzi/Tammuz, a son of Enki/Ea and a personification of the planet Mercury.
Part one discusses Enki/Ea; part two discusses the biblical god as a development of Enki/Ea; and part three discusses the astral character of the symbol system encompassing Enki/Ea and the biblical god.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/52
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1049
2010-11-03T15:21:43Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
The Korean War and messianic groups: Two cases in contrast
hoe, Joong-Hyun
1993-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Michael Barkun
Unification church Olive tree movement
History of Religions of Eastern Origins
The Unification Church poses a question related to the disaster causation model, because it did not grow to any significant degree during the first decade following the start of the Korean War that was undoubtedly the most disastrous event to Koreans in the 20th century.
The present dissertation examines the Unification Church, using the above-mentioned causation model in conjunction with a distinction between coterie and movement; and this examination proceeds mainly in a diachronic and contextual description.
Out of this examination, emerges a reason why the Korean War did not significantly help the Unification Church but the Olive Tree Movement, in terms of their membership growth: that is, that the founder of the Unification Church could not secure sufficient means for reaching his potential audience during the post-War period in the face of the existing Christian communities that were fast regrouping themselves with the help from the Western relief networks. The Unification Church's failure to reach its potential audience came from its delayed "sanitizing" of a deviant ceremony. If this ceremony had been "sanitized" on time, then the group might have had a better chance to become a mass movement during the 1950s. This point becomes clear especially when we compare the Unification Church with the Olive Tree Movement.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/51
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1050
2010-11-03T15:54:48Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
The politics of heterodoxy and the Kina Rami ascetics of Banaras
Gupta, Roxanne Poormon
1993-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Charles Long
heterodoxy India
hinduism
Social and Cultural Anthropology
The Kina Rami, a sect of aghori ascetics, take their name from Kina Ram, a Rajput Sant of the seventeenth century. This thesis examines the history and reform of the Kina Ram sect while placing it within the larger framework of heterodox Shaivism. Using an anthropology of religion approach, the author uses fieldwork data and observations to discuss the sociopolitical issues related to extreme religious behavior within Indian religion and to mount a critique of scholarship that would seek to locate such behavior solely within the framework of Brahmanical Hinduism. Finally an overview is presented of the reform of the Kina Ram sect under the influence of the modern-day saint Avadhut Bhagwan Ram. The author demonstrates the contemporary use of traditional Kina Rami heterodox symbolism within the context of Avadhut Bhagwan Ram's reformist organization, Sri Sarveshwari Samooh. While these reforms are demonstrated to be continuous with the traditional goals of the Kina Sect, they nonetheless represent a new compromise position in relation to the larger Brahmanical Hindu tradition.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/50
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1051
2010-11-03T16:45:22Z
publication:rel
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
True colors: A critical assessment of Victor Turner's study of Ndembu religion
Kwenda, Chirevo Victor
1993-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation/Thesis
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Charles E. Winquist
Turner
Victor
Zambia
History of Religions of Eastern Origins
This dissertation argues that Victor Turner's reduction of religion to an expression of beliefs prejudices the study of religion generally, and Ndembu religion in particular. It submits that this definition of religion allows Turner to abstract Ndembu religion from its historical context and situation in colonial rule, to operate without a coherent theory of the sacred, and to pay no attention to the question of the meaning of world and of the human in the colonial situation. The purpose of this dissertation is to advance a critique of the work of Turner which does the following: (1) grounds Ndembu religion in its colonial context; (2) develops a perspective on Ndembu religion as a contact phenomenon; (3) articulates a coherent theory of the sacred and of religious practice as they relate to Ndembu religion and its historical and socio-cultural context; (4) explores the meaning of world and of human in the political context of colonial Zambia.
The significance of my thesis consists in the possibility it suggests of relocating and redefining the problem of religion, of sensing in the religion of contact some rudiments of a colonial discourse. The studies of Turner as well as those of his critics are characteristically cast in the Enlightenment mode of the Human Sciences which, as Charles Long (handout to a graduate seminar, Syracuse University, 1989) points out, hides and obscures, in the name of scientific objectivity, the experience and response of colonized cultures, "a mode whose adequacy has been undermined by five hundred years of Western domination of other parts of the world." My thesis is a conscious effort to transcend this foundational disability in the Human Sciences.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/49
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1052
2010-11-04T13:52:08Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Empiricism and repetition: A philosophical examination of alterity, colonial discourse, and ethnography in the study of religion
Fogleman, Ronald Ray
1997-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Charles E. Winquist
Deleuze
Gilles
Philosophy
Religion
Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion
This dissertation contributes to a critique of representation and empirical method in the study of religion by analyzing post-structuralist theories of repetition and alterity. Specifically, the dissertation advances a post-structural analysis of the epistemological status of empirical representations. The dissertation examines the concept of alterity advanced by Gilles Deleuze. Drawing from Deleuze's philosophy, the dissertation interprets alterity as an a priori condition and structure of possibility determinative of perception. The dissertation evaluates the implications of Deleuze's work for analyses of ethnographic and colonial discourses. Chapter One surveys dominant themes in contemporary challenges to ethnography and the relevance of such for New World colonial discourses. Chapter Two evaluates the relationship of experience to representation in proto-ethnographic accounts of the alterity of the New World. Chapter Three advances a post-structuralist analysis of the epistemological status of representation. Chapter Four evaluates empirical representations in colonial and ethnographic discourses. Chapter Five analyzes representation in relation to Deleuze's theory of Otherness. Chapter Six evaluates alterity as an epistemological condition of Bernal Diaz's depiction of Aztec culture and religion. Chapter Seven evaluates the phenomenological role of alterity in the production of empirical positivities. The conclusion outlines the importance of theories of alterity for religious studies.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/48
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1053
2010-11-08T15:42:35Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Resistance and memory - rupture and mending: The vision and challenge of Jewish feminist theology
Nowak, Susan Elizabeth
1996-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Alan L. Berger
Tikkun Olam
Religion
Theology
Womens studies
Religion
The critical force of Jewish feminist theologies is rooted in a compelling vision of Tikkun Olam (repair or restoration of the world). In the face of divisive and oppressive androcentric-patriarchal worldviews, this vision challenges individuals and communities to create modes of relationship, communal structures, and moral practices shaped by a passion for equality, justice, and the full humanity of women. No longer willing to remain the Other's Other within their own religious tradition, the larger feminist movement, and institutional interfaith dialogue, Jewish feminist thinkers argue that their transformative-reconstructive efforts are key to revitalizing these communities and fostering a credible religio-ethical identity in the post-modern era.
Attention to theoretical foundations and reconstructive attempts, e.g., theological context, critical principles, methodological options, and hermeneutical theories, is a distinctive characteristic of this scholarship. First, these concerns expose the multiplicity of positions which mark this project, even though the common goal is full participation for women and other Jewish minority groups (e.g., gay, lesbian, and Sephardic) in the interpretation, development, and preservation of Judaism. The divergent views and commonalities marking feminist reinterpretations of God, Torah, (Jewish Teaching) and Klal Yisrael (Community of Israel) are analyzed. Second, these concerns uncover the creative dialectic influencing Jewish feminist thought and practice. Jewish feminism consciously employs traditional biblical imagery and theological concepts, as well as contemporary methodologies, critical principles, and hermeneutics, to reconstruct the tradition in a manner supportive of women. Furthermore, these concerns undergird the shared conviction that a theology's theoretical foundations are intrinsically connected to its ethical system. These thinkers scrutinize the ways in which theoretical foundations further traditional and feminist theological systems' collusion with oppressive worldviews.
The interpretation of attitudes and behaviors according to feminist understandings of Tikkun Olam has direct implications for traditional Judaism, the larger feminist movement, and institutional interfaith dialogue. It also challenges Jewish feminist thinkers to transform inadequate and/or oppressive elements within their own projects. This comprehensive process of critique, reinterpretation, and reconstruction reveals the significance of Jewish feminist theology for the future viability and credibility of Judaism, feminism, and interfaith dialogue in North America.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/72
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1054
2010-11-08T18:17:51Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
The politics and theology of prophetic pragmatism: A contribution to the critique of radical political philosophy
Wood, Mark David
1994-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Charles Winquist
prophetic pragmatism
radical political philosophy
American Studies
Philosophy
Political Science
Religion
Social and Behavioral Sciences
This dissertation makes a contribution to the critique of radical political philosophy and theology by analyzing the theory and practice articulated and advanced by Cornel West. This analysis examines and evaluates the theological and political significance of the discourse of prophetic pragmatism, the practice of prophetic pragmatists, and Cornel West as a prominent and powerful representative of a new class strata of cultural workers laboring within the first world academy. This critique interprets prophetic pragmatism, prophetic pragmatists, and these new cultural workers as symptomatic of and as contributing to the ongoing reformation of the academy, a reformation which is theorized in this dissertation as part of the larger project of reforming cultural institutions and discourses in a manner which supports the existence and continuous expansion of an essentially transnational mode of capital accumulation. Chapter One situates prophetic pragmatism, prophetic pragmatists, and Cornel West in relationship to the structural development of the capital-labor relation from the New Deal to the present, and in relationship to the development of the post-segregationist, post-colonial, multicultural academy. Chapter Two assesses the practical consequences of West's theoretical eclecticism through an examination of his amalgamation of Christian and Marxist concepts and his Foucauldian-based genealogy of modern racism, and concludes with an historical materialist explanation of contemporary racism. Chapter Three explicates the internal contradictions of West's anti-realism and anti-foundationalism, and initiates a critique of his cultural materialist theory of society and social transformation. Chapter Four evaluates the interests represented by West's recent theoretical discourses and his interpretation of the April 1992 Los Angeles riots. Chapter Five summarizes the social significance of prophetic pragmatism, prophetic pragmatists and new class strata of cultural workers, critiques the politics of identity and multiculturalism, and concludes by making several proposals regarding what may and must be done to support the collective global struggle for human emancipation.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/71
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1055
2010-11-09T15:57:00Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Millennialism and Antichrist in New England, 1630-1760
Mooney, Michael Eugene
1982-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Ralph Ketcham
Christian thought
Stuart England
American millennialism
American eschatology
Secularized millennialism
Religion
This dissertation examines changing interpretations of the term "Antichrist" within millennialist thought, with particular reference to New England in the period 1630-1760. The text consists of ten chapters. The first chapter presents an overview of the influence of millennialism on Christian thought and practice, concentrating on interpretations of "Antichrist." Within this overview, Stuart England receives particular attention, as early American millennialism traced its roots most directly to that time and place. The subsequent eight chapters consist of five close studies of major American religious figures and three shorter transitional chapters to link the figures and their respective time periods together. The five major figures are John Cotton, Roger Williams, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and Charles Chauncy. The tenth and final chapter summarizes the dissertation's conclusions and suggests additional connections between these conclusions and later historical developments.
This examination of these major figures suggests that American eschatology moved its focus away from church-state cooperation in a holy war--the "organicism" of John Cotton--and toward an emphasis on the individual in the realization of the millennial hope. Though originally the Roman Catholic Church was identified as the Beast, the primary obstacle to Christ's Second Advent, eighteenth-century commentators began to focus more on the personal sinfulness of individual Protestants as the great barrier to the institution of the New Jerusalem. By focusing on personal evil, conservative Calvinism intersected in its goals with more liberal religion as well as with secular reform movements. Such intersections laid the groundwork for a "secularized" millennialism, the collapsing together of the ultimate goals of religion and politics. This dissertation traces the movement in millennialist thought away from organicism and toward voluntarism and individualism as the keystones in the building of the millennial kingdom.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/70
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1056
2010-11-09T16:08:41Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Orpheus Remembered: Images of Death in Life
Schwartz, Susan Lynn
1982-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
David L. Miller
Rainer Maria Rilke
Orphic
Nikos Kazantzakis
Orfeu Negro
Orphee
Kleinzeit
Arts and Humanities
This dissertation is a study of the mythologem of Orpheus as it appeared in Ancient Greece and as it has appeared in the modern imagination. The approach may be described as imaginative, in that the stories of Orpheus are presented in such a way as to remember this magical poet through the arts and from a poetic perspective.
Chapter One reviews the Greek materials which form the basis of the mythologem as we know it. The episode of Orpheus' descent to the underworld is discussed at length to expose its underlying sensibility. That is to say, that Orpheus is less understandable as a "heroic lover" than as a shamanic figure whose vocation becomes dismembering to him under the influence of Eurydice and under the aegis of Hades. Orpheus knows no real triumph, and only his song remains.
Chapter Two explores the appearance of Orpheus in the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke and in the work of those literary critics who are called "Orphic." Reference is made to the characterization of Orpheus in the Odyssey by Nikos Kazantzakis and to Narcissus, who has much in common with the underworld experience of Orpheus.
Chapter Three contains a discussion of two films, Orfeu Negro by Marcel Camus and Orphee by Jean Cocteau. Both films offer unique approaches to Orpheus, and add much to an understanding of Orpheus as a magical poet who is overcome by the underworld, the source and the theme of his song.
Chapter Four presents two ballets, Orpheus as choreographed by George Balanchine and Orpheus as choreographed by William Forsythe. The imagery of these ballets adds much to an orphic perspective upon Orpheus himself.
Chapter Five offers a review of motifs and thematic elements essential to the first four chapters. These include dream and nightmare, trickery and buffoonery, purity and pregnancy, death and illness.
An Epilogue is offered which highlights Kleinzeit, a novel by Russell Hoban. The presence of Orpheus in the experience of Hoban's main character brings into sharp relief the theme of Orpheus as a poet for whom healing and death and the underworld are intimately related.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/69
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1059
2010-11-09T17:23:52Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
The Wit of Error: The Early Tarot as Imaginal Text, the Fool and the Feminine as Boundary Metaphors
Sexson, Lynda
1982-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
James B. Wiggings
Symbol-systems
Christian culture
Religion
Metaphor
Religion
Among many symbol-systems of the Christian culture, perhaps one of the least likely survivors is the Tarot. Yet it has endured for five centuries without a protective cult or literary framework. Speculation upon the sources and functions are largely fruitless and based upon preconceived notions, except that the Tarot pack appeared in fifteenth-century Italy, as a game of playing cards.
The excessive claims that have been made for its pictures generate a cluster of issues concerning the nature of religion and culture. These issues are: first and fundamentally, if as Huizinga and others have suggested, play is the primary element in the formation of culture, those arts and artifacts designated as playful may reveal deep and pervasive (religious) aspects of their cultural tradition; second and following, those playthings are the texts of the culture, revealing how what is real is what is read, and particularly the ways in which sacred text is created and carried; third and ultimately, both play and sacred text are aspects of metaphor. This study is not an attempt to create a theory of play, text, or metaphor; rather it is to use the Tarot as an example which is paradigmatic of these.
The Tarot serves, in this study, to illuminate the issues of play, text, and metaphor in our on-going search into the complex of religion and culture.
Game--or play--discloses metaphor by means of metaphor. The Introduction establishes some metaphorical qualities of game and text, and characterized by the "foolish" interplay between iconoclasm and re-mythologizing, by the "wit of error." In designating the correspondence between game and the sacred, and by playing the most commonly applied game of Tarot (that of seeking its false origins), the common metaphorical base or dynamic is established.
The figure of the Fool in the Tarot pack, the paradoxical figure of sacred and secular literature, illuminates that metaphorical perspective which includes the primary concerns of the study. Moreover, the Fool and the feminine, exemplify the boundary figures which do the work of iconoclastic imagination. Utilizing the Tarot as a paradigm of sacred text and defining some of the elements of text, it is argued as that which hides and reveals, remembers and invents, divines and interprets, all through story, and all through charting the necessity of deviance--of error. ...
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/66
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1058
2013-01-31T20:00:24Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Empty willing: contemplative being-in-the-world in St. John of the Cross and Dogen
Novak, Philip
1981-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Huston Smith
Religion
Philosophy
Philosophy of Mind
<p>This dissertation is an attempt to formulate a transcultural understanding of contemplative being-in-the-world based on the dynamics of human willing disclosed therein. Our 'test cases' are St. John of the Cross and Zen Master Dogen. Over half the dissertation is devoted to a gathering of data, that is, to a close textual study in support of our contention that John and Dogen (and, by the broadest kind of implication, all contemplatives) exhibit very similar psychotransformative strategies. We argue that the fundamental aspects of these strategies are variations of the interrelated will-dynamics of attention and intention. Upon this foundation, we proceed to build a theoretical superstructure. Its central question becomes: in what ways are these will-dynamics psychotransformatively potent? How do they achieve the apotheosis of meaning and fulfillment contemplative lives often display? Our first answer is an explanation of how the methodological practice of non-discursive attention (the core of the contemplative gesture) gradually liberates the psyche from bondage to the innumerable habit-reflexes, automatisms, fixations, and projections which haunt ordinary being-in-the-world. This answer also involves a defense of contemplative strategies in the face of the prevailing paradigms of depth psychology. We argue that gaining insight into the contents of the unconscious, a process quite foreign to religious contemplatives, is not a necessary condition for a 'depth' psychology. By the same token, we argue that the contemplative's chief tool, the will, is much more than a superficial and impotent reflex of the ego. Our second answer is that contemplative being-in-the-world offers a singularly profound harmonization of man's dual ontological motives: the self-assertive motive and the self-transcending motive. In independent works, Koestler (1978), working from the outposts of biology and physics, and Becker (1973), revisioning psychoanalysis through Rank and Kierkegaard, have mounted compelling arguments that these polar forces pulse not only at the heart of organismic life but through the whole energic continuum of the universe. Becker, especially, suggests that man cannot be whole, nor free, unless he finds a way of balancing these two fundamental motives or urges and that, indeed, one's authenticity depends upon the level at which this balance is struck. He suggests that the most profound level at which resolution can be achieved is that of non-idolatrous religious faith. We take Becker's argument a step further, proposing that contemplative being-in-the-world is the epitome of such faith, for the psychological discipline it demands is expressly directed to purifying faith of all 'idolatry', even unto the most inner altars of the mind. If there are indeed such dual ontological motives pulsing in man (as in mice and the Milky Way), then the contemplative mode of being-in-the-world provides the most salvific and profound response to those motives that a human being can achieve. We suggest that this balance is part of what it means to live in the Way--that life John calls union of the divine and human wills, and Dogen, the realization of Suchness.</p>
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/67
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1057
2010-11-09T17:14:37Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
The Procession of the Time-Bearing Gods: Soul-History in Autobiography
Stewart, Mary Zeiss
1982-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
James B. Wiggins
Autobiographical discourse
Religious meaning
Phenomenology of self
Image-amplification
Augustine's Confessions
Religion
The thesis this dissertation works from, and through, is as follows. Autobiographical discourse, when it moves through questions of religious meaning, is soul-history. And, in so far as autobiography is visioned as soul-history, it is the discovery of religious meaning both for the writer and for the reader who meet, co-creatively, in the world of the text.
Taking as its starting point the intimation that interpretation must be congruent to the genre it addresses, the method developed herein is a melding of the hermeneutical techniques of phenomenological and depth-psychological text interpretation. The focus throughout is on the role of the image in autobiographical discourse, and in discourse about autobiography. Because images are the language of the soul, the logos of psyche, questions of religious meaning (largely as they appear in "secular" autobiography) are considered in so far as they can be seen as arising from movements of the soul through life-time. This entails revisioning certain conceptual oppositions which the autobiographical genre tends to call into play (among them, I/other, inside/outside, fiction/history, now/then, real/imagined, ego/psyche). Because the imaginal perspective is a seeing-through otherness, the image/concept opposition is itself called into question, as a literalism which stands in the way of depth-level autobiographical interpretation.
Since written discourse necessarily involves the co-creative interplay of the possible worlds of author and reader, it becomes apparent that as autobiography is a phenomenology of self, so its interpretation is at base autobiographical. The key to this way of seeing it lies in what imaginal psychology calls the process of image-amplification. Augustine's Confessions provide an archetypal model of this process of "dreaming the myth onward." In addition to an extended meditation on the Confessions, considering the soul-histories of several other autobiographers (W. B. Yeats, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henry Adams, Sigmund Freud, C. G. Jung, Maxine Hong Kingston, Malcolm X, C. S. Lewis, Loren Eiseley) suggests that we are all fellow pilgrims, along the imaginal way we commonly refer to as life-time.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/68
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1060
2010-11-10T16:33:04Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Theology, reflexivity, and desire in Aristotle's "Metaphysics" and "Nichomachean Ethics"
Richard, Alan Jay
1996-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Charles E. Winquist
Philosophy
Theology
Religion
Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion
This dissertation argues that "theology" became an intellectual discipline with its own field of inquiry, distinct from those of other fields such as physics, biology, rhetoric, or politics, because it was viewed as resolving a conflict within desire between identification with the object of desire, and enjoyment of that object. An alternative formulation of this thesis is that theology, at the moment of its philosophical conception, was a necessary strategy for reformulating the concept of desire so that philosophy could escape the conceptual conflict between the beauty it ascribed to the reciprocal desire of equal interlocutors, and the ugliness it ascribed to the acts toward which that desire aimed.
Using a genealogical method, the dissertation traces the path Aristotle takes from the founding of the science of being qua being, to his discovery that it is a theological science, to his discussion of the nature of the being that is the object of theology. Focusing on the centrality of the concept of desire in Aristotle's Metaphysics, the author argues that the antinomies of "friendship" discussed in the Nichomachean Ethics poses the problem of desire in particularly graphic terms, and that Aristotle there resorts to a theological mechanism for resolving this problem. Aristotle believes he can resolve the antinomies of friendship he inherited from Plato by detaching friendship, divine contemplation, and God's self-enjoyment from its homosexual Platonic context. Thus, this dissertation takes the position that the problem of desire in Aristotle is posed by Platonic aporias concerning friendship, and that Aristotle's solution is to remove desire from eros, and attach it to divine theoria.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/65
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1061
2010-11-11T21:51:55Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Interdependence: Mutual Causality In Early Buddhist Teachings And General Systems Theory
Macy, Joanna Rogers
1978-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Ronald R. Cavanaugh
Religion
Philosophy
Interdependence
Causation
Metaphysics
Metaphysics
Notions about the nature and operation of causality are integral to interpretations of reality, be these interpretations scientific or religious. Articulated or not, they are part of every world view, implicit in every enterprise. Whether once's purpose is explanation, prediction, control, revolution, therapy or libration, such notions of causality inhere in perceptions of the orderliness of life, of how things come to be the way they are, how they change and can be changed. ...
The Buddha's teaching of causality presents a radical contrast with other views of his time in India. Indeed, it departed from previous causal notions as much as general systems view of causality does from the traditional Western thought. ...
Our project in this dissertation is to examine mutual causality and its implications using the perspectives of general systems theory and early Buddhist teachings.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/64
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1062
2010-11-10T18:52:02Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
The Polarization of the Feminine in Arthurian and Troubadour Literature
Maccurdy, Marian Mesrobian
1980-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
David L. Miller
Human suffering
Anti-feminist
Conflict
Gawain and the Green Knight
Le Morte D'Arthur
Troilus and Criseyde
Religion
In the literature of the troubadours and the Arthurian legend recurring feminine images appear to have great power over the male characters. Yet these portrayals of the feminine are not "realistic" in any modern conceptions of the word. Indeed they are either extremely negative images or highly positive ones with no median evident. When the images are positive the function of the feminine is to lead man upward to the spiritual realms, but when the images are negative the feminine becomes a figure of danger who can trap man into the material, the world of base matter, thereby endangering his immortal soul.
This study is based on a much-debated issue in Christian and Gnostic theology: is the physical universe to be loved as a product of God, as a part of His creation, or is it to be denied as evil at worst or a hindrance at best. The thesis of this study is that the image of woman is the focal point for this controversy regarding the good or evil nature of the physical world, for she is the immediate vehicle for further incarnations of souls in matter, as the early Gnostics and Christians believed. If the physical world is seen as a place of suffering, then women can be held at least partly responsible for human suffering. Most of the images of the feminine that are linked to the physical are negative in this literature under study and most that help man to raise himself out of the physical are positive.
Twelfth-century courtly literature was an attempt to control the more negative forces in man. Woman, then, acted as a mediator between man and his higher forces both within and without him. Her role was to help man get in touch with his own inner, better self which then had an external referrent: through a relationship with an idealized Lady a man could become ennobled and seen as such not only by himself but by his peers. However, as the courtly ethic dissolves the feminine images suffer. The writings become either anti-feminist or strictly religious, and woman is no longer a symbol of something positive in man, but is often a separate entity, the Virgin Mary, or later a more negative image, a demon, witch, or even a shape-shifter such as Morgan le Fay in Gawain and the Green Knight.
The literature of the troubadours and Arthurian myth from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries--especially the Grail legend as seen in French sources including Chretien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, and Middle English sources including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur-- is an attempt to come to terms with this problem: How to be of the world without becoming a prisoner of it; how to join the flesh and the spirit. Where the twelfth century author and Wolfram in his Parzival attempted to bridge the gap between spirit and matter, later literature indicates the split widened. The "noble experiment" of the civilization of the Round Table in Malory, for example, deteriorates when the actual and the ideal came into conflict. This conflict became projected onto the image of woman: she was the temptress, the seductress, the destroyer of the flowering of chivalry as well as, in Malory, the source of the power of the fellowship of the Round Table.
Early Christian and Gnostic writings, selected troubadour lyrics, Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur, and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde are studied to demonstrate the polarization of images of the feminine: she is either a spiritual guide, the source of all worth, or the demonic temptress who can cause the ruin of an entire civilization.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/63
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1063
2010-11-10T21:41:48Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
'Normal' Mysticism and the Social World: A Comparative Study of Quaker and Hasidic Communal Mysticism
Berger, Alan Lewis
1976-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Ephraim H. Mizruchi
Inner-worldly mysticism
Community
Ordinary activity
Religion
This dissertation hopes to establish the fact of essential linkages between inner-worldly mysticism, community, and "ordinary" activity. In order to accomplish this task, it is necessary to demonstrate first of all, that elite or other-worldly mysticism ... is but one among several types of mysticism. Secondly, the distinction between mysticism and religion -- valid and important for analytic purposes, may not be rigidly maintained in practice. This distinction in the works of prominent phenomenologists of religion such as Mircea Eliade and Rudolf Otto, for example, constantly breaks down. While ostensibly discussing religion, the paradigms they employ appear to be mystical. Finally, notice must be taken of an essential shift in orientation from objectivity to subjectivity, which occurred in both Western Christian and Jewish mysticism. This shift is reflected in a strong emphasis upon personal experience, the demand for a 'new' perception of one's environment, and a tendency towards transformation, i.e. ritualization, of routine or "profane" actions. All of these manifestations occur within a communal context.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/62
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1064
2010-11-11T21:46:20Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Man's ransom, God's purchase: Character-making in C. S. Lewis' planetary romances
Stewart, Jefferson Allen
1978-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
James B. Wiggins
Religion
Philosophy
Out of the Silent Planet
Perelandra
That Hideous Strength
Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion
This study discusses the planetary romances of C. S. Lewis.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/61
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1066
2010-11-11T21:37:13Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Remembering Mysteries: The Nineteenth-Century Detective Story As A Modern Art Of Memory
Brill, Amy Susan
1978-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
James B. Wiggins
Literature
theology
psychology
religion and culture
Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion
This study discusses Yates' understanding of the art of memory. The study also gives a brief interpretive history of the appearance of the detective story in the works of Poe, Doyle, and Collins. Finally, the study articulates the correspondences between Yates' idea and detective fiction and argues for the ability of the rational to accommodate the imaginal, and the unique position shared by the art of memory and the detective story with respect to both.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/59
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1065
2010-11-11T14:33:30Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
C. S. Lewis: Christopoesis and the Recovery of the Panegyric Imagination
Zogby, Edward Gabriel
1975-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Stanley R. Hopper
Spiritual discovery
The Inklings
Christianity
England
Religion
This dissertation concerns itself with the autobiography and authorship of C. S. Lewis as a paradigm of spiritual discovery.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/60
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1067
2010-11-11T14:49:25Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
When therapy becomes theology: A critical view of empathy
Whitcher, Douglas Eames
1996-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
David L. Miller
Religion
Philosophy
Psychotherapy
Religion
The dissertation proposes that a critical definition of empathy can provide one explanation for why psychotherapy is at times suspected of being a "pseudo-religion." Therapy becomes theology when consumers are provided with understandings of themselves that transcend their own understandings of themselves, and when two parties enter into a collusive rhetoric of pathos.
The dissertation arrives at this proposal by evaluating the claim of Heinz Kohut's critics to the effect that his theory of empathy is "really theology." This claim is investigated by researching the literature on empathy in theology and religious studies and by comparing views presented in this literature with what Kohut wrote about empathy. The dissertation finds that the claim is often warranted and seeks to arrive at an explanation for why empathy as a concept tends to blur the boundaries between psychotherapy and religion. The thesis is proposed that a narrative convention that is tied to a metaphysical habit of mind has survived the translation of the word from its original context into the English language and into the field of psychotherapy. Arguing that the concept is not necessarily bound to this history, the dissertation proposes a conceptual "treatment" and redefinition of empathy as a reading strategy that is alert to this "theologistic" tendency to overcome differences between "I" and "You." Applying Freud's concept of collusion and Brecht's notion of Verfremdungseffekt to psychotherapeutic case histories that were intended to illustrate empathy, the dissertation arrives at the description of a theologistic "script" to which therapist and patient adhere to varying degrees when they engage in "empathy." When critical, ironic distance is gained from this script, the seductive, collusive spell of the metaphor is broken and therapy remains therapy.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/58
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1068
2010-11-11T17:37:23Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
The Tempering Goddess: A Phenomenological and Structural Analysis of the Britomartis - Diktynna - Aphaia Mythologem
Harrod, James Benton
1975-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Kretan Nature Goddess
Kallimachos
Myth
Nature
Goddess
This dissertation will analyze and interpret the mythologem of Britomartis-Diktynna-Aphaia, the ancient Kretan Nature Goddess, found in the myth variants of Kallimachos and others.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/57
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1069
2010-11-11T20:51:06Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Gaston Bachelard And The Transformation Of Consciousness: Some Implications For Criticism And Interpretation
Campbell, Worthington, Jr.
1973-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Stanley Romaine Hopper
Religion
philosophy
symbolic language
imagination
criticism
Philosophy of Mind
Out of an inner awareness of movement oscillating between rational thought and poetic image, we find a new man. Transformation of consciousness characterizes the movement discernible in Bachelard's writings betwen a scientific way of knowing and a poetic way of imagining. Bachelard speaks two different languages. Both languages are symbolic in that they distort the immediate reality of the senses.--Preface.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/56
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1070
2010-11-12T15:45:20Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
The problem of "other" and "difference" in the study of Native American religion
Burgdoff, Craig Alan
1997-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
David Miller
other@
difference@
History of Religion
Religion
This dissertation argues for a re-examination of the category "otherness" after some have argued for "difference" as the best way of addressing the problem of cultural diversity. Through an historical examination of European representations of alterity during the early modern era I argue that the term "difference" is problematic because it suggests an implicit hierarchy and situates a particular western epistemology as universal whereas the term "other" reflects the incongruity between different cultures.
After reviewing and critiquing Jonathan Z. Smith's influential and representative typology of "other" and "difference" I take up Page duBois' analysis of alterity in the Hellenistic era to demonstrate that the logical justification of a hierarchical scale of human difference creates conceptual instability by associating "otherness" with irrationality.
The second chapter examines Roger Bartra's argument that European wild man mythology provided one of the principal frames for depicting Natives Americans as "natural" and "wild" thus lacking the rational control that characterized European ideals.
In the third chapter Captain John Gregory Bourke's account of a Zuni Clown performance provides an example of the conflation of native socio-religious practice with pre-existing European concerns about the conflict between bodily existence and spiritual life. A survey of the Pueblo Clown tradition demonstrates its important moral and religious function as the underlying principle of Pueblo worldview. Bakhtin's analysis of the European carnival tradition demonstrates the conceptual connection between that tradition and the condemnation of the Zuni.
The fourth chapter employs Julia Kristeva's theory of "abjection" to understand the way in which "otherness" is inherently linked to self-identity. The abject, like the "other," represents the ambiguous boundary between "me" and "not-me." The "other" appears as a means of differentiating between the familiar and the strange, however, the strange is always conceived through the familiar. The category of "otherness" helps to remind us that our perception of "others" is always based on pre-existing categories. By realizing that the categories through which we perceive "other" people are not universal but culturally specific we can begin to appreciate the uniqueness of "other" worldviews.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/55
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1071
2010-11-15T15:42:27Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Culture and Conversion: An Analytical Study of the Interaction between Western Theology and Eastern Culture through the Christian Missions in the Indian Sub-Continent
Wilson, Kothapalli
1972-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Gabriel Vahanian
Indian Christianity
Missions
Religion
The following discussion on culture and conversion is intended to be a practical contribution to the theological predicament of Indian Christianity. With few exceptions, the Indian theological circle has never been free to develop an authentic theology that is relevant to the Indian Cultural context. Whatever it is, theology as it has emerged in India so far has largely been determined not so much by the Indian predicament as by the supporting foreign missions. Generally speaking, the Christian Church in India never consciously acknowledged the work of God in non-Christian, religio-cultural structures and therefore treated everything non-Christian as anathema. ...
It is hoped that the present work awakens the Indian theological circle to the fact that it is only by formulating its own problematic, and not by being dictated to by denominational accessories in the West, that Christianity in India will be able to develop an authentic Christian theology of Indian culture relevant to the Indian predicament.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/54
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1072
2010-11-16T15:58:27Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Reactions to the Theatre: Virginia, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, 1665-1793
Little, Paul Judson
1969-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
A. Leland Jamison
American colonies
New World
Theater history
Religious reaction
Religion
Theatre and Performance Studies
This dissertation surveys what occurred when men who wanted the cultural and economic experiences of the theatre in America were opposed in their attempts to establish it by conscientious institutions, groups and individual men who felt that theatre should be prohibited in the New World. This dissertations deals with the reaction to the possibility of the establishment of theatre in the colonies, as well as the plays performed in Virginia, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. It does not aim to include the plays, persons, and theatres which have played an important part in our national theatre history. The section dealing with Virginia, however, has more material of this sort as the reaction in the cavalier colony was more uniformly positive. Its primary aim is to synthesize the different reactions on both sides as I have found it expressed in their contemporary accounts. In support of this contemporary material related sources in the history of the theater as well as American Colonial history have also been utilized.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/74
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1074
2010-12-03T13:58:49Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Political theory after the "return of religion:" Radical democracy as religious affirmation
Miller, Daniel D.
2010-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Frederick Beizer
Derrida
Jacques
Laclau
Ernesto
Ward
Graham
Democracy
Secularism
Philosophy of religion
Philosophy
The dissertation presents a constructive proposal for re-envisioning the relationship between the religious and the political in light of the conceptual displacement of normative secularism. The first chapter briefly outlines the way what I call "normative secularism" has provided the legitimation of modern western political theory and how it has been conceptually called into question by the global politicization of religious identity (i.e., the "return of religion)." This conceptual displacement requires that the relation of the political and the religious be reconceptualized, which is the aim of the rest of the dissertation.
The second chapter presents the alternative conceptualization outlined by theologian Graham Ward, who advances a metaphysical and theological model in which the social analogically participates in the Being of God. The chapter argues that Ward's metaphysical proposal is flawed, leading either to violent identitarian conflict or theocracy. Chapters three and four present the political theorist Ernesto Laclau's conception of "radical democracy" as an alternative, arguing that he develops a concept of universality which provides the basis for reconceiving the structuring of the social without falling into the dangers which appear in Ward's proposal. Significant emphasis is given to Laclau's theory as a form of political ontology. Chapters five and six demonstrate the continuity of Laclau's thought with that of philosopher Jacques Derrida, arguing that Derrida outlines a conception of democracy (the "democracy to come") which may itself be described as a form of religious affirmation. The chapters identify the religious aspect of Derrida's work with an affirmation of an experience of phenomenological disruption.
The dissertation concludes by arguing that Laclau's own theory of radical democracy, given its structural similarities with Derrida's theory of democracy, may itself be understood as a form of religious affirmation. What emerges from these considerations is a vision of the social in which the religious and the political emerge as co-implicated and irreducibly intertwined, rather than as discreet, separable segments of the social.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/75
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1075
2010-12-03T14:19:55Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
The body of love: Conceiving perfection in the Oneida Community
Shusko, Christa Marie
2010-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Philip P. Arnold
Perfection
Oneida Community
Noyes
John Humphrey
American religion
New York
Religion
This dissertation considers the tension between the spiritual and the material in the Oneida Community. Rather than reading this tension as a matter of theological inconsistency on the part of Noyes or failings on the part of Community members, I instead interrogate why such a tension was meaningful and indispensable within the Community. I argue that a complex understanding of the relationship between spirit and matter grounded the Community's religious beliefs and practices and even unified belief and practice. By analyzing long-standing Community practices of love, labor, and mutual criticism with an understanding of foundational theological considerations of time, the Community's later radical practice of stirpiculture, or scientific human propagation, can be more effectively conceptualized. Making use of Daniel Boyarin's perspective on rabbinic Judaism as "dialectical" rather than "dualistic" in its attitude toward the human being, I argue that the Oneida Community maintained a similarly "dialectical" attitude, one that was remained theologically consistent throughout its history. In viewing the human as essentially both physical and spiritual, the bodies of Community members became sites of spiritual significance, as those bodies were reformed, reorganized, and even newly (pro)created in order to realize their complete and perfect potentials. In seeking to overcome the problems of life on earth by imagining and emulating the future kingdom of heaven, the Community thus did not seek to supersede or erase matter, but to transform and perfect it.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/76
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel-1001
2011-02-02T21:19:06Z
publication:rel
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
Biblical Psalms Outside the Psalter
Watts, James W.
Article
2005-01-01T08:00:00Z
psalms
inset hymns
Hebrew Bible
Psalter
psalmody
King David
Song of Songs
Exodus
Second Temple
Biblical Studies
Comparative Methodologies and Theories
Religion
Psalms appear irregularly in the narrative and prophetic literature of the Hebrew Bible, at Exod 15:1-21, Deut 32:1-43, Jdg 5, 1 Sam 2:1-20, 2 Samuel 22, Isa 38:9-20, Jon 2:3-10, Habakkuk 3, Dan 2:20-23, 1 Chron 16:8-36; in the Apocrypha/Deuterocanon at Daniel 3, Jdg 16:1-17, Tobit 13; and in the New Testament at Lk 1:46-5,67-79. More often, fragments of hymns and other poems are quoted as natural parts of story-lines (e.g. 2 Sam 1:17-27; 3:33-34) or are employed as elements in prophetic compositions (e.g. Am 4:13; 5:8; 9:5-6). Complete poetic compositions appear less frequently but more prominently. Many of these inset poems are, in form and content, "psalms" since they would fit perfectly well within the Book of Psalms. But instead of being placed in the Psalter, these compositions have been inserted into narrative and prophetic books for literary and religious purposes. The comparative study of these psalms inserted whole into non-hymnic contexts is the subject of this review of research.
Part of the Vetus Testamentum Supplement Series.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel/4
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel-1002
2011-02-03T20:00:20Z
publication:rel
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
Desecrating Scriptures
Watts, James W.
Article
2009-01-01T08:00:00Z
scriptures
religion
ritual
media
icons
Qur'an
Torah
Sikh
Bible
Guantanamo
Comparative Methodologies and Theories
Religion
Sociology of Culture
Desecrations of books of scripture appear regularly in media coverage of religious and political conflicts. Twenty-first century news media have reported scripture desecrations in various Western, Middle Eastern, African, and South Asian countries. Though political tensions also arise from the desecration of sacred sites, objects, and persons, books of scripture have emerged as particularly potent objects of contestation. That is because, as a (very) old form of media themselves, scriptures encapsulate the religious experiences of many people who are used to handling the physical book with veneration. News of such a book’s desecration thus inverts a common religious experience and can arouse strong and widespread reactions.
This case study describes the effects of ritualizing books of scripture and compares their ritualization in four religious traditions in order to contextualize the phenomenon of desecrating scriptures cross-culturally and explain the political furors aroused by media coverage of particular incidents.
A case study within a joint initiative between Syracuse University and the Henry Luce Foundation (http://sites.maxwell.syr.edu/luce/index.html).
https://surface.syr.edu/rel/3
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1076
2011-02-03T18:53:52Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Auguring life: Interpretation and guidance in Lukumi cowry shell consultation
Gonzalez, Alexander (Alejandro) Valentin
2010-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
Philip P. Arnold
Lukumi
Santeria
Cowry shells
Divination
Cuba
Yoruba
Religion
Lukumi is referred to by various names including Santeria, Ayoba, and La Religion , or "the Religion." This dissertation examines the role of el Diloggun , or cowry shell reading in Lukumi . Cowry shell reading is a structured practice that examines the unique spiritual frame of the Lukumi practitioner. The process whereby an individual's unique spiritual frame is examined in terms of spiritual, emotional, physical and financial requirements for well being is captured. El Diloggun prescribes ritual action to rectify any spiritual imbalance found and offers guidance to the individual practitioner regarding how to live in terms of their unique spiritual requirements. How cowry shell reading informs a Lukumi practitioner's sense of self and generates other rituals within the tradition is explained. Some of the types of rituals generated by el Diloggun that are situated include further readings of the cowry shells, kariocha , or ordination into the Lukumi priesthood, various types of ebbo , or offering, animal sacrifice, despojo , or purging, the casting of idembe , or spells, and the appeasement of egun , or the dead. The interrelatedness of key concepts within Lukumi is explained. Key concepts include: Ashe (divine force, or essence), Eleda (the "soul," individual destiny), Ile (non blood spiritual lineage) ancestor worship, blood ancestor worship, Orisha (semi-divinities), Olorisha ( Lukumi priest/priestess), Italero/Oriate (priest expert in reading the cowry shells and master of Lukumi ceremonies), spirit guides, attached spirits, ebbo (offering, sacrifice), Spiritism (practice Lukumi borrows from that believes in reincarnation, spirit mediumship and spiritual evolution), animal sacrifice, Ileke (charged necklaces), Patakies (cosmogonic myths), and spirit and Orisha possession. Lukumi history including its Yoruba roots in West Africa, its development on Cuban soil, and relevant issues of Cuban cultural identity are situated. The dismissal of Lukumi practices in Cuba and the United States is accounted for. The concept of a "nondismissal-dismissal" is introduced to explain the dismissal of Lukumi practices. The dissertation is written in the first person tense and the anthropological participant observer model is utilized. The problematical operation of the Cartesian "I" in the participant observer model is situated and challenged. An alternative model drawn from Lukumi concepts is advanced.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/77
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel-1003
2011-02-03T20:30:28Z
publication:rel
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
Ten Commandments Monuments and the Rivalry of Iconic Texts
Watts, James W.
Article
2004-01-01T08:00:00Z
Ten Commandments
American Constitution
icons
symbolism
monuments
Iconic Book Project
Alabama
Religion
Sociology of Culture
The legal and political controversy over Ten Commandments monuments in the United States involves iconic texts holding a discrete symbolic value compared to texts whose function primarily is to be read. The nation's founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, have also increasingly been turned into monumental icons over the last half-century. The Ten Commandments controversy can therefore be understood in terms of competition among iconic texts for symbolic supremacy. Like the placement of divine images in ancient Near Eastern temples, struggles over the public display of iconic national and religious texts involve claims for their relative prestige in contemporary America.
These claims will be defended by describing the nature of iconic texts and the trend to enshrine American national texts as icons.
The Journal of Religion and Society is an electronic journal sponsored by the Kripke Center.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel/2
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel-1004
2011-02-04T19:50:19Z
publication:rel
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
"This Song" Conspicuous Poetry in Hebrew Prose
Watts, James W.
Book Chapter
1993-01-01T08:00:00Z
Hebrew
prose
Bible
inset poetry
Judaism
Biblical Studies
Religion
The Hebrew Bible contains many passages in which prose narrative surrounds conspicuous
poetry. The various theoretical and practical difficulties in distinguishing Hebrew prose from verse in other texts do not negate this observation. Explicit genre labels often appear in both the prose frameworks and the beginnings of poems, telling readers that the genre and mode have changed. The interpretive problem then becomes, not whether this is verse, but why poetry appears precisely here. What does poetic
expression accomplish that Hebrew prose narrative cannot or will not do?
Comparative study of conspicuous inset poetry suggests that Hebrew narratives use it to achieve certain distinguishable effects. The placement of poetry within prose became an established convention of Hebrew narrative, and the broad lines of this convention's development can be discerned in the history of First and Second Temple Jewish literature. Beginning with the explicit markers of poetic genres, I will survey
the voicing, narrative roles, and history of Hebrew inset poetry.
From the book "Verse in Ancient Near Eastern Prose."
https://surface.syr.edu/rel/5
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel-1005
2011-02-04T20:10:25Z
publication:rel
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
The Rhetoric of Ritual Instruction in Leviticus 1-7
Watts, James W.
Article
2003-01-01T08:00:00Z
Leviticus
Bible
ritual
Pentateuch
rhetoric
Biblical Studies
Religion
Formal and structural features of Leviticus 1-7 distinguish these chapters as some of the most systematic texts in the Hebrew Bible. In a collection of literature otherwise noted for its sweeping narratives and urgent sermons, these methodical instructions for the performance of five kinds of offerings, presented twice in different arrangements, have suggested to many interpreters that they preserve examples of an ancient genre of ritual instruction. However, the identification of a ritual genre in these chapters (and elsewhere in the Pentateuch) has failed to account for all the features of this material. The present form of Leviticus 1-7 can be better understood as a product of the same process of generic mixture and allusion apparent in many other biblical texts.
Part of the Vetus Testamentum Supplement Series.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel/6
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel-1007
2011-02-04T20:37:10Z
publication:rel
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
The Legal Characterization of Moses in the Rhetoric of the Pentateuch
Watts, James W.
Article
1998-01-01T08:00:00Z
Moses
rhetoric
Pentateuch
divine law
Judaism
Bible
Biblical Studies
Religion
Rhetoric and Composition
The force of law depends on the authority of its promulgator. Self-characterizations by lawgivers play a vital role in persuading hearers and readers to accept law and in motivating them to obey it. Pentateuchal laws therefore join narratives in characterizing law-speakers as part of a rhetoric of persuasion. They present, however, two speakers of law, one divine (YHWH) and the other human (Moses). I will show that this dual voicing of pentateuchal law has two effects: it restricts Deuteronomy's prophetic characterization of Moses to the narrower definition of prophecy presented in the previous books, while it uses Moses' scribal role to present a unifying rhetoric of divine law.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel/8
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel-1006
2011-02-04T20:29:20Z
publication:rel
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
The Unreliable Narrator of Job
Watts, James W.
Book Chapter
2001-01-01T08:00:00Z
Job
Bible
Wayne Booth
unreliable narrator
Biblical Studies
Comparative Literature
Religion
This essay by James W. Watts provides analysis on the book of Job, questioning previous interpretations of its narrative. Watts also compares the book of Job's narrative style to that of modern and historical authors. Watts argues that the author of the book of Job employed an unreliable narrator in the form of an omniscient charatcer, which attacked literative conventions of the time, but ultimately proved difficult for readers to understand.
Part of the JSOT Supplement Series (336).
https://surface.syr.edu/rel/7
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel-1008
2011-07-22T17:46:40Z
publication:rel
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
Psalmody in Prophecy: Habakkuk 3 in Context
Watts, James W.
Article
1996-01-01T08:00:00Z
Psalmody
pslams
prophecy
Habakkuk
Bible
Judaism
victory hymns
Biblical Studies
Religion
Rhetoric and Composition
<p>The psalm in Habakkuk 3 resembles songs in Exodus 15, Deuteronomy 32 and 33, Judges 5 and 2 Samuel 22 in its archaic linguistic formations and vocabulary stock, victory hymn form, and appearance outside of the Psalter. Unlike these hymns set within prose narratives, however, Habakkuk 3 appears within a book of prophetic poetry structured in a liturgical and dramatic fashion. Habakkuk, therefore, offers an ideal case for the comparative study of prophetic and narrative composition through the use of the same literary device. The results of such a comparison reveal a sophisticated text which mixes inherited generic conventions to create novel effects. I am delighted to dedicate this essay to my father, John D.W. Watts, whose early work included the form-critical description of inset hymnody in Amos.</p>
<p>Part of JSOT Supplements (235).</p>
https://surface.syr.edu/rel/9
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel-1011
2011-02-04T21:15:30Z
publication:rel
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
The Legal Characterization of God in the Pentateuch
Watts, James W.
Article
1997-01-01T08:00:00Z
Pentateuch
Hebrew Bible
Hebrew law
rhetoric
authority
covenant
Biblical Studies
Religion
Rhetoric and Composition
The Pentateuch develops God's character in stories of divine creation and destruction, promise and fulfillment, battle and redemption. The laws of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers supplement such direct characterization by the impressions provided by YHWH's speech. Speeches always indirectly characterize their speaker by providing the basis for inferring the kind of person who talks this way. So the law codes voiced directly by God provide a powerful impression of the divine character.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel/12
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel-1010
2011-02-04T21:01:18Z
publication:rel
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
Rhetorical Strategy in the Composition of the Pentateuch
Watts, James W.
Article
1995-01-01T08:00:00Z
Pentateuch
rhetoric
Hebrew Bible
Hebrew law
public reading
Biblical Studies
Religion
Rhetoric and Composition
The Hebrew Bible rarely depicts the reading of books or documents, but when it does, it usually portrays public readings of entire law codes.
Whether by Moses, Joshua, Josiah or Ezra, law readings to public assemblies play prominent roles in various biblical books. It is not my intention in this essay to discuss Israel's tradition of law readings in depth, but rather to explore its implications for the form of Israel's extant laws as found in the Pentateuch. The tradition of public law readings points out the rhetorical function of law in ancient Israel. The accounts of readings depict these texts as influencing the audience's
thoughts and persuading them to alter their behavior.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel/11
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel-1009
2011-02-04T20:55:03Z
publication:rel
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
Public Readings and Pentateuchal Law
Watts, James W.
Article
1995-01-01T08:00:00Z
Pentateuch
Hebrew Bible
Hebrew law
rhetoric
public reading
Religion
Rhetoric and Composition
References to reading are remarkably sparse in the Hebrew Bible. Though the variety of forms and styles in the biblical books attests an ancient literary culture in Israel, there is little explicit
mention of reading prophecy and virtually no references to reading hymns or history. Most references to reading portray the reading
of law.
Such references provide valuable insights into how the Pentateuch's writers expected their work to be read. Reading expectations make up the components of genre and shape the conventions
used by writers to compose their works. Thus accounts of law readings also illulllinate the ancient literary conventions for writing law. After surveying references to reading law in the Hebrew Bible, I will argue that the literary and rhetorical form of Pentateuchal law was shaped by Israel's tradition of public law readings.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel/10
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel-1012
2011-02-08T18:07:30Z
publication:rel
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
Reader Identification and Alienation in the Legal Rhetoric of the Pentateuch
Watts, James W.
Article
1999-01-01T08:00:00Z
Pentateuch
Moses
Exodus
rhetoric
divine inspiration
Hebrew law
Biblical Studies
Religion
Three voices dominate Pentateuchal discourse in turn: the omniscient narrator relates the stories of Genesis and Exodus, YHWH delivers the laws of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, and Moses combines narrative and law in the rhetoric of Deuteronomy. These three dominant voices of the Pentateuch are interdependent and almost interchangeable: the anonymous narrator, like Moses the scribe, requires both divine inspiration and reader acceptance for authorization of the story; the divine lawgiver requires reader acceptance of human mediation of the commandments; the prophetic scribe depends on authority delegated by both God and readers to interpret the stories, the laws, and the sanctions. The Pentateuch leaves the unification of speaking voices incomplete, however, and as a result divides the audience in two. God and Moses (or, at least, God through Moses) address the people in the wilderness and also the readers who overhear their speeches. Their audience comprises Israel throughout time, from Sinai to the present, as Deuteronomy makes explicitly clear. The narrator, by contrast, addresses only the readers through a discourse lying outside the story being narrated. Thus the Pentateuch's use of a third-person omniscient and impersonal narrator resists the unifying rhetoric of the divine and human speeches which it contains. By providing knowledge unavailable to the Israelites in the story, the narrator persuades readers to both identify with and to alienate themselves from
aspects of wilderness Israel.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel/13
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1077
2011-08-15T14:44:10Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Beauty and/as theology: The theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar
Liptay, David S.
2010-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
John D. Caputo
Aesthetics
Balthasar
Hans Urs von
Catholicism
Theology
Beauty
Religion
<p>In this dissertation I explore the idea of a 'theology of beauty' in the work of the Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, and highlight how Balthasar has tried to recover an aesthetic dimension in theology which he maintains has been eclipsed--particularly in the (post-)modern era. Balthasar elaborates this through a discussion of several figures, and I look at his treatment of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in an effort to show how Hopkins' poetry (on Balthasar's reading) can be considered at once aesthetical and theological: i.e., a 'theological aesthetic'. In light of this, I provide a critical evaluation of Balthasar's project, and consider its implications for, and potential contributions to, theological discourse.</p>
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/78
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel_etd-1078
2011-08-15T15:40:27Z
publication:rel
publication:etd
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
publication:rel_etd
Webs of connectivity: Foundations of the Neopagan Internet community
Beall, Alyssa J.
2010-01-01T08:00:00Z
Dissertation
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Religion
M. Gail Hamner
Neopagan
Internet
Witchcraft
Wicca
Online
Religion
<p>This dissertation explores the current growth of Neopaganism in the United States. I contend that a key factor in this growth is the willingness of the Neopagan community to use the Internet for religious communication and practice. I explore two primary issues in this dissertation: First, how a religion defined as "nature-based" finds such expression through technology; second, why the Internet has contributed so much to the growth of this religious tradition. I argue that Internet use has become so widespread in this religion because that use is a natural outcome of Neopagan religious ideas; the Internet is not simply a means for communication in this religion, but an expression of the worldview Neopagans hold.</p>
https://surface.syr.edu/rel_etd/79
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel-1013
2017-05-24T14:36:12Z
publication:rel
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
Aaron and the Golden Calf in the Rhetoric of the Pentateuch
Watts, James W
Article
2011-10-01T07:00:00Z
Bible
Exodus 32
Pentateuch
Torah
Aaron
priests
golden calf
rhetoric
Biblical Studies
Religion
Rhetoric
<p>In the Pentateuch, the contrast between law and narrative, or more precisely, ritual instructions and ritual narrative, is nowhere more stark than in the relationship between the Golden Calf story (Exod 32-34) and the instructions for building the Tabernacle (Exod 25-31, 35-40). The former vilifies Aaron by placing him at the center of the idolatrous event while the latter celebrates Aaron and his sons as divinely consecrated priests. Though source criticism has long since distinguished the authors of these accounts, it does not explain the intentions behind a literary juxtaposition that is too stark to be anything but intentional. Nor can it explain why the Aaronide dynasties who controlled both the Torah and the Second Temple allowed this negative depiction of Aaron to stand. Rhetorical analysis of the function of Exodus 32-34 in the Second Temple period provides a basis for seeking answers to these questions.</p>
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
https://surface.syr.edu/rel/14
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel-1014
2011-10-01T23:22:19Z
publication:rel
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
Story-List-Sanction: A Cross-Cultural Strategy of Ancient Persuasion
Watts, James W.
Article
2004-01-01T08:00:00Z
comparative rhetoric; ancient Near Eastern; Egypt; Mesopotamia; Israel; Hittites
Near Eastern Languages and Societies
Religion
Rhetoric
<p>Persuasion motivated the creation of many ancient Near Eastern texts. Persuasion was not limited to particular genres of discourse and literature but was frequently a stimulus leading authors to combine gemes to create more persuasive forms. In this process, the rhetorical capacities of many different kinds of liiterature were harnessed for overtly persuasive purposes. One such rhetorical strategy combined three kinds of materials-stories, lists and sanctions-to influence its audience's ideas and behaviors. It shaped the form and content of texts from a wide variety of periods and cultures in the ancient Near East and eastern Mediterranean, including the foundational scriptures of Judaism and Christianity. Through them it has influenced the subsequent course of western religious, legal, and academic rhetoric.</p>
<p>From <em>Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks </em>, ed. Carol S. Lipson and Roberta A. Binckley. Albany: SUNY Press, 2004. Pp. 197-212.</p>
https://surface.syr.edu/rel/15
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel-1015
2011-10-04T22:09:47Z
publication:rel
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
Using Ezra's Time as a Methodological Pivot for Understanding the Rhetoric and Functions of the Pentateuch
Watts, James W.
Book Chapter
2011-01-01T08:00:00Z
Pentateuch
Ezra
Hebrew Bible
scripturalization
canonization
iconic books
rhetoric
History of Religion
Religion
Rhetoric
<p>The Persian period saw the transformation of pentateuchal materials into a scripture, the Torah. The story of Ezra exemplifies that transformation by its description of his manipulation of the physical scroll, his oral reading of it before the people of Jerusalem, and his arrangement for its professional translation/interpretation by Levites. These rituals have characterized the function of the Torah (and other scriptures) from that time forward. The Persian period, however, also marks a major change in the nature of our evidence for the form, contents and meaning of pentateuchal materials. The only historical evidence from before the time of Ezra for the Pentateuch’s composition, meaning and use must be derived inductively from literary analyses of biblical texts. From the time of the Ezra story on, our data comes increasingly from explicit references to Torah scrolls in other literature (including the books of Ezra and Nehemiah), translations of the Pentateuch’s text (e.g. the Septuagint) and material evidence such as manuscripts (e.g. Qumran) and ancient synagogue architecture. The transformation of the Pentateuch into scripture around the time of Ezra thus marks a watershed not only in Jewish religious history but also in the methods and data available to modern historians. Pentateuchal studies should develop the capacity to correlate the divergent methods used to study the Pentateuch on both sides of this scriptural divide in order to give a comprehensive account of the Torah’s history and significance. I suggest that rhetorical analysis can provide an overarching methodological umbrella under which to arrange the results of other methods of interpretation coherently.</p>
<p>Proceedings of the Pentateuch conference in in Zürich, Switzerland, in January, 2010; published as<em> The Pentateuch: International Perspectives on Current Research, </em>ed. Thomas B. Dozeman, Konrad Schmid and Baruch J. Schwarz. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011.</p>
https://surface.syr.edu/rel/16
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel-1016
2012-11-28T15:36:52Z
publication:rel
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
Jewish Heritage Sites of Bosnia-Herzegovina
Gruber, Samuel D
Report
2011-01-01T08:00:00Z
jewish
history
preservation
bosnia
Religion
<p>2011 report from the United States Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad on historic Jewish sites in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Includes information on the history and current conditions of synagogues, cemeteries, and holocaust memorials.</p>
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
https://surface.syr.edu/rel/28
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel-1021
2013-01-18T20:16:18Z
publication:rel
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
Roma Historical and Cultural Heritage Sites in Poland
Gruber, Samuel D.
Report
2009-01-01T08:00:00Z
history
roma
poland
preservation
Religion
<p>2009 report from the United States Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad on Roma historical and cultural heritage sites in Poland. Includes information on the history and current conditions of various sites, includes places of martyrdom, places of pilgrimage, settlements, cemeteries, museums, and commemorative sites.</p>
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
https://surface.syr.edu/rel/23
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel-1020
2013-01-18T20:13:27Z
publication:rel
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
Selected Muslim Historic Monuments and Sites in Bulgaria
Gruber, Samuel D.
Report
2010-01-01T08:00:00Z
muslim
preservation
history
bulgaria
Religion
<p>2010 report from the United States Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad on historic Muslim monuments and sites in Bulgaria. Includes information on the history of Bulgaria's muslims, as well as history and current conditions of important sites and monuments.</p>
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
https://surface.syr.edu/rel/24
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel-1018
2013-01-18T20:06:22Z
publication:rel
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
Historic Jewish Sites in Romania, Picture Appendix
Gruber, Samuel D.
Image
2010-01-01T08:00:00Z
jewish
romania
preservation
history
Religion
<p>Supporting images for the 2010 report from the United States Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad on historic Jewish sites in Romania.</p>
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
https://surface.syr.edu/rel/26
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel-1017
2012-11-28T15:38:57Z
publication:rel
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
Historic Jewish Sites in Romania
Gruber, Samuel D.
Report
2010-01-01T08:00:00Z
jewish
romania
preservation
history
Religion
<p>2010 report from the United States Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad on historic Jewish sites in Romania. Includes information on the history and current conditions of synagogues, cemeteries, and holocaust memorials.</p>
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
https://surface.syr.edu/rel/27
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel-1019
2013-01-18T20:10:08Z
publication:rel
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
Jewish Heritage Sites and Monuments in Moldova
Gruber, Samuel D.
Report
2010-01-01T08:00:00Z
jewish
history
preservation
moldova
Religion
<p>2010 report from the United States Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad on historic Jewish sites in Romania. Includes information on the history and current conditions of synagogues, cemeteries, and holocaust memorials.</p>
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
https://surface.syr.edu/rel/25
oai:surface.syr.edu:rel-1022
2012-11-28T15:42:31Z
publication:rel
publication:coscde
publication:drel
publication:cas
Jewish Cemetries, Synagogues, and Mass Grave Sites in Ukraine
Gruber, Samuel D.
Report
2005-01-01T08:00:00Z
jewish
ukraine
history
preservation
cemetery
synagogue
mass grave
Religion
<p>2005 report from the United States Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad on Jewish cemeteries, synagogues, and mass graves in Ukraine. Includes information on the history, current conditions, and preservation efforts of Jewish heritage sites.</p>
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
https://surface.syr.edu/rel/22
1460121/qualified-dublin-core/100//