The Graduate Journal of Harvard Divinity School

This paper considers how “counter-mapping,” or the production of maps by a community seeking to challenge those produced and used by hegemonic power structures, can serve as a legitimate expression of diasporic Jewish identity and spirituality. Using frameworks from human geography, Jewish studies, and sociology, I contextualize the Ashkenazi and Jewish diaspora in a framework of critical geography in order to propose a distinctly Jewish countermapping paradigm. I also explore the meaning of “spirituality,” drawing on several existing spiritual practices that illustrate the lay-led, visually creative, and political possibilities of Jewish spirituality. Merging these concepts, I propose the spiritual significance of a Jewish counter-mapping practice. Finally, I explore concrete examples of what maps might be produced through this novel spiritual practice, and to what political ends.

This paper argues that Wake Forest University’s 1986 separation from the North Carolina Baptist State Convention did not end the influence of white evangelical political culture on campus. Using a qualitative case study of disaffiliation debates, presidential speeches, student newspaper coverage, race and DEI reports, and conflicts over speakers and sexuality, the paper demonstrates how that political culture continued to shape institutional authority, racial memory, and public moral messaging. Compared with openly partisan campuses such as Liberty University, Wake Forest University presents itself as more moderate and more pluralistic. Yet the university’s responses to controversy, management of racial memory, and public signaling on culture war issues still protect long-standing white Christian constituencies. The paper, therefore, argues that Wake Forest University is best understood as a post-evangelical Institution.

This paper explores how the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine expressed his Jewish allegiances throughout his theoretical writings. Heine challenged the intelligentsia of nineteenthcentury Germany for disparaging the Jews under the influence of Hegelian philosophy. In On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, Heine contested notions of Jewish obsolescence by elucidating the importance of Moses Mendelssohn and Benedict Spinoza to German thought. In Shylock (Jessica), Heine conceptualized the Jews as bearers of freedom, who had been undeservedly hated for their wealth. In Confessions, Heine interpreted the Jews as the people responsible for monotheism, morality, and Scripture, and hoped that a nondogmatic form of Judaism would become the religion of the future. This paper contends that despite his marginal status in the academic study of religion, Heine should be taken seriously as a thinker who vocalized a much-needed diatribe against the Christian West for mistreating the Jews over innumerable centuries.

How does a religious tradition make contact with what it cannot see? Despite appearing hundreds of times in Archaic and Classical Greek literature, daimones left no trace in the material record: no statues, no temple friezes, no red-figure silhouettes. Walter Burkert concluded that there was simply no image and no cult. This paper takes that absence as its starting point. Using Sophocles’ Oedipus Cycle as a case study, I argue that the tragic stage functioned as an alternative medium of religious materiality, making perceptible what visual and cultic media could not. Where pottery and statuary failed to render daimones approachable, performance succeeded. Through an analysis of sense perception and deprivation in Oedipus Tyrannus and the hero cult apotheosis of Oedipus at Colonus, I argue that Sophocles explores daimonic indeterminacy. In this, he enables divine affectivity to become a collective and embodied theatrical experience, transforming the invisible into the ritually present.

To this day, the Ku Klux Klan remains one of the most recognizable and infamous organizations in American history. That enduring image can be credited to the mobilization of ritual by the Klan’s second incarnation, with cross burnings being the central element of all Klan activity. Utilizing theoretical conceptions of ritual activity, I illustrate the dimensions of Klan ritual within their communities, such as their valorization of the past and the encouragement of “klannish” behavior. However, I argue that traditional theories have neglected the impact rituals have on outsiders, since Klan rituals were also designed to intimidate and threaten groups they despised. Ultimately, I demonstrate that rituals like cross burnings operate as “hostile rituals, where they elevate and reinforce the insider community while simultaneously attacking outsider groups. In my conclusion, I urge scholars of religion to understand the hostile dimensions of rituals and their presence across American history.

The typika of aristocratic women in late Byzantine Constantinople encode the motivations guiding their patronage. Although these women employ gendered language of humility and piety, they also grant themselves, their children, and members of their social strata significant privilege within their monastic orders. Consequently, the typika reveal a tension in which women’s attempts to secure personal power are shaped by the cenobitic, male-dominated religious framework. Through a textual analysis of the typika in translation, I argue that these documents demonstrate a negotiation between self-preservation and an obligation to fulfill traditional gender expectations by appealing to established male authorities. I conclude with a biographical discussion indicating that concessions to male administration were a strategy for these women to insulate their privilege after the deaths of their husbands.

Muhyī al-Dīn Ibn al-‘Arabī was born in Murcia in 1165 C.E./560 A.H. and died in Damascus in 1240 C.E./638 A.H. He became arguably the most renowned Sufi metaphysician, and his wellknown honorary title al-Shaykh al-Akbar (“The Greatest Master”) reflects this position. While much is captivating about the life and thought of Ibn ‘Arabī, his perspectives on gender in particular are distinctively striking as they express highly metaphysical, esoteric, and often unconventional interpretations of canonical Muslim writings. This paper examines Ibn ʿArabī’s metaphysics of gender through his depiction of the Adam-Eve creation myth and the Virgin Birth.While Ibn ʿArabī draws a remarkable comparison between the characters of Jesus and Eve, and Mary and Adam, he also delves into a discussion of cosmological principles that centers upon the infinitude of Divine knowledge and power.