HDS Scholarly Articles

The purpose of this study was to explore campus leadership amidst the transition to virtual learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The study sought the advice and personal experiences of religious and spiritual life administrators, chaplains, faculty, and student leaders. Campus leaders from 11 institutions participated in the survey. Results indicate that 41% of campus leaders believed it was too soon to report whether transitioning to virtual learning in the spring was negative or positive. However, 29% believed it negatively impacted their ability to mentor students. The results also suggest that nearly all campus leaders transitioned to working remotely, and nearly 60% have pondered how the pandemic will affect their future position in higher education.

One of the central problems in Anne Conway’s metaphysical philosophy is answering the question: what is the identity and nature of the creature than endures through time? There are two basic ways of interpreting Conway’s answer to this question. One interpretation is that the identity is that of a soul, and its nature is material. This is the interpretation taken by Emily Thomas. Another interpretation is that a created spirit is the identity, and its nature is also material. This is the interpretation taken by Rozemond and Simmons. In this paper, I present an interpretation that is a version of Thomas’ thesis. It claims that the identity of Conway’s creature that endures through time is the soul. However, my interpretation goes beyond Thomas’ thesis and against Rozemond and Simmons in that the nature of the soul cannot be strictly material, thus possibly immaterial. This thesis relies on what I call “the contrary thesis,” as applied to Conway’s metaphysical philosophy.

In this paper, I propose that finding Dionysus’ counterpart in India is a futile task unless the relation focuses on Dionysus as a divine force of nature variously manifest following the meaning of the Rig Veda verse mentioned above. As Nietzsche saw the Dionysian as a force of nature inherent in the human, it becomes a much more plausible thesis to ascertain a relation of Dionysus to India through Indo-European comparative mythology and philology. This is so because many scholars have given objective status to assertions about Dionysus’ relation to India that can at best be only subjectively attested. The fields of Indo-European comparative mythology and philology, because of their very nature of dealing with a body of literature that is yet unattested, provide space for an objectively plausible, though still subjectively arguable, thesis for a relation of Dionysus to India. All this will become evident as we travel from Germany in the early twentieth century to the culture of the Indo-Europeans through Rome, Greece, Persia, Iran, and India.

The monumental Rotunda in Thessaloniki was originally part of the palace complex of the emperor Galerius, who so famously persecuted Christians in the early fourth century. It was converted to a Christian church by the late fourth or early fifth century, a conversion which included the addition of a magnificent mosaic program within the dome of the Rotunda. This article both addresses the question of what this conversion meant and seeks to articulate a method for interpreting the Rotunda’s archaeological remains within a local context, broadly construed. Texts produced in Thessaloniki or which were known to be objects of civic pride, such as 1 Thessalonians, an account of local fourth-century martyrdoms, and the triumphal Arch of Galerius, are used to interpret the Rotunda’s conversion. This article concludes that the production and early interpretations and use of the early Christian Rotunda are revolutionary in that Christians reused monumental space built by a Roman emperor who persecuted Christians. Even more, a revolution in meaning occurred because the early Christian Rotunda can be interpreted as having borrowed from an apocalyptic rhetoric that formerly subverted empire, turning this around in order to articulate a Christian Roman identity continuous with and supportive of the Roman Empire.