Browsing by FAS Department "Religion, Committee on the Study of"
Now showing items 21-40 of 42
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Karma and Punishment: Prison Chaplaincy in Japan from the Meiji Period to the Present
(2017-05-11)This dissertation analyzes prison chaplaincy (kyōkai) in Japan from the Meiji period (1868-1912) to the present day focusing on the chaplaincy activities of Shin Buddhist sects, Christian churches, Shintō shrines, and new ... -
Literature and the Moral Life: Reading the Early Biography of the Tibetan Queen Yeshe Tsogyal
(2019-02-20)In two parts, this dissertation offers a study and readings of the Life Story of Yeshé Tsogyal, a fourteenth-century hagiography of an eighth-century woman regarded as the matron saint of Tibet. Focusing on Yeshé Tsogyal's ... -
Meaning and Appearance: The Theology of Literary Emotions in Medieval Kashmir
(2016-05-12)This dissertation examines a major debate in tenth- to twelfth-century Kashmiri literary theory between two famous theorists: Abhinavagupta and Mahimabhaṭṭa, and shows that we cannot fully understand the debate between ... -
Omani Religious Networks in Contemporary Tanzania and Beyond
(2018-09-16)This dissertation is an ethnographic and historical study of the ethnically Omani Ibadi Muslim minority community in contemporary Tanzania and Zanzibar. The focus of the dissertation is on an Ibadi Muslim charitable society ... -
Pedagogies of Transformation: Teaching and Learning Muslim Ethics in Greater Paris
(2017-05-11)This dissertation is an ethnographic study of moral education and social activism among religiously-engaged Muslims in the Paris metropolitan area. It investigates how French Muslims are working to ethically transform their ... -
Persisting in the Good: Thomas Aquinas in Conversation With Early Chinese Ethics
(2020-05-15)The study addresses the question, How do we persist in the good when the world’s contingency, fortune, and evil are not hospitable to virtue? Drawing on the legacy of Matteo Ricci, I put Thomas Aquinas in dialogue with ... -
The Poetic Path to Awakening: Reading the Buddhist Literary Text as a Form of Practice in Aśvaghoṣa’s Mahākāvya
(2016-09-16)This thesis proposes a new approach to reading and understanding a Buddhist literary work as a form of practice relying on aesthetic pleasure to engage readers on a textual path that gradually awakens understanding. Its ... -
Protestants, Politics, and Power: Race, Gender, and Religion in the Post-Emancipation Mississippi River Valley, 1863-1900
(2015-05-17)This dissertation argues that Protestant Christianity provided the language through which individuals and communities created the political, social, and cultural future of the post-emancipation South. Christian arguments ... -
Recentering the Sufi Shrine: A Metaphysics of Presence
(2019-05-21)The religious character of Indus Sufism is marked by its devotion to the living presence of Sufi saints at their tombs. In much previous scholarship on Sufism, the tomb has not figured prominently. This has inadvertently ... -
Right Feelings: On Sentimentality, Philosophy, and Religion in Harriet Beecher Stowe
(2018-05-15)Harriet Beecher Stowe provides one of antebellum American culture’s most significant lettered intellectual accounts of the development of morally persuasive literature in the cause of anti-slavery. This dissertation explores ... -
“Sharpen Your Blade and Put Your Animal at Ease”: Islamic Ethics and Rituals of Killing Non-Human Animals
(2020-05-14)This dissertation approaches the question of killing animals in Islam from the perspective of ritual as adjudicated within the sphere of Islamic jurisprudence, one of the primary repositories of ethical values in Islam. ... -
Song of Auspiciousness: Ethics, Humaneness and the Auspicious in an Eighteenth-Century Court Poem From Bengal
(2017-05-13)Maṅgalkāvya texts—belonging to a South Asian genre of Middle Bengali literature—ubiquitously, and without exception, claim that they will bestow auspiciousness, or maṅgal, on their audiences. This study investigates the ... -
“Suppers in the Times of the Kingdom”: Food, Drink and the Resurrected Body in Early Christian Thought
(2020-05-05)By the second and third centuries C.E., the resurrection had become a focal point of intra-Christian controversy. Writings from this period that insist on an eschatological resurrection of the flesh and/or body— themselves ... -
The Construction of Subversive Speech in the Latter Prophets and in Plato’s Socratic Dialogues
(2020-05-13)This dissertation compares “subversive speech”—i.e., speech that challenges and destabilizes otherwise recognized authority—in the Latter Prophets of the Hebrew Bible and the early-to-middle dialogues of Plato. The biblical ... -
The Gradual Qur'ān: Views of Early Muslim Commentators
(2019-05-18)This dissertation is the first endeavor to explore the formulation of the gradual Qur’ān in early works of commentaries on the Qur’ān (pl. tafāsīr, sing. tafsīr al-Qur’ān). It draws upon the hitherto largely neglected genre ... -
The Lotus' New Bloom: Literary Innovation in Early Modern North India
(2018-05-10)Situated at the disciplinary intersection of literature, history, and ethics, this dissertation is a comparative analysis of three Digambara Jain versions of the story of the epic prince Rāma: Raviṣeṇa’s seventh-century ... -
The Mimetic Life: Imitation and Infinity in Gregory of Nyssa
(2017-05-03)“Christianity is mimesis of the divine nature,” writes Gregory of Nyssa, the fourth-century CE author who also first makes the infinitude of God central to his theological project. How does one imitate the infinite? Or, ... -
The Second Coming of the Book: Rethinking Qur’anic Scripturology and Prophetology
(2018-04-18)This dissertation aims to reassess the character of the Prophet Muhammad’s movement by rethinking major aspects of the qur’anic worldview. Specifically, the dissertation proposes a new interpretation of the Qur’an’s ... -
To See a Mountain: Writing, Place, and Vision in Tibetan Pilgrimage Literature
(2020-05-14)Buddhist thought diagnoses human suffering as the result of a fundamental misperception of reality. As such, Buddhists have developed practices that aim to replace or improve ordinary ways of seeing the world. In Tibet, ... -
(Un)Desirable Customs: A History of Indigenous Religion and the Making of Modern Ghana, C. 1800-1966
(2015-05-18)This dissertation examines the explicit and implicit currency of indigenous religious thought on political, moral, and social formations from precolonial through colonial to postcolonial Ghana. It advances new answers to ...