HDS Theses and Dissertations

Through an inter-disciplinary and comparative study of the acoustic phenomenon of resonance—i.e., the synchronous vibration between two or more sounds—this dissertation thinks through a socially-engaged “sonic metaphysics” and phenomenology of sound in the field of religious studies, in three case studies of contemporary aesthetic and mystical works: Eastern Orthodox Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s (1935-present) selected works from his early tintinnabuli period of composition; Mestizo Indigenous Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña’s (1948-present) selected Précario and Quipu works; and transnational Sri Lankan Sufi Shaikh M.R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen’s (?-1986) The Resonance of Allah: Resplendent Explanations Arising from the Nūr, Allāh’s Wisdom of Grace. Critically, the study discovers how these three contemporary forms and dimensions of sonic religiosity act formally (through their content, form, and reception) to open up within and beyond established discourses of mysticism, animism, and aesthetics, to speak in new and socially-engaged ways about actual human and environmental relations and transformations.

Each case study traces clear, detailed connections between metaphysical ideas about resonance and the impact of resonance on concerns such as self-realization and healing, social and environmental justice, humanitarian aid, medical care, and inter-religious tolerance, while examining the capacity of resonance to express continuities between metaphysics and the phenomenology of lived religious experience; to convey meaning across religious, political, and aesthetic categories of belonging; and to expand our capacity for listening and ethical action. Each case study likewise contributes both theoretical and ethnographic insights into how resonance, and sound more generally, convey roles as prayer, as presence, and as mode(s) of attunement that enact the creation of the cosmos and dialogue with the divine. The dissertation also uncovers the psychoacoustics of the listener’s embodied relationship with sound and presence and the capacity of resonance to elucidate commonalities in intersubjective experience (relational ontologies). The study contributes methodologically to the study of religion by situating resonance as a vital concept of contemporary interdisciplinary and comparative inquiry and positioning the listening subject and their experience at the center of the unfurling of sound within complex multi-religious and secular global spaces. More broadly, the study addresses how developing an account of the metaphysics of resonance in religion helps us to hear differently, with and for each other.

This dissertation compares the ancient ṣaḥābī (“companion”) tree that still stands today in northeastern Jordan and the tree that became the Cross, memorialized where it once stood in Jerusalem. The former, by virtue of lowering its branches to give shade to the Prophet Muḥammad when he was a child, has been venerated as his last living terrestrial companion. The tree of the Cross has a religious history as a participant in the Crucifixion, displaying piety, agency, and voice. The presence of these trees in religions perceived largely as being “non-animist” or even “anti-animist” forms this dissertation’s central line of inquiry: what within these traditions affirms the religious agency of these two trees? What does their consciousness signify about other trees and about the rest of the cosmos within Islamic and Christian traditions? Significant strands of Islam and Christianity suggest that the agency that these two trees display is not only miraculous. After a study of trees within scripture, the dissertation branches out to a study of religious views of non-human consciousness in the natural world. Islamic and Christian scriptural portrayals of nature include the religious life of others within the cosmos. Notwithstanding intra-religious contestations, each religious tradition includes a metaphysics that accounts for and explains the consciousness of non-human beings. According to the exegetical and metaphysical expositions of the Sufi author of primarily Persian poetry Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (d. 672/1273) and the patristic theologian Origen of Alexandria (d. 253/4), non-human others are alive and also religious. The consciousness of the two trees is exceptional but also universal; both thinkers unveil the inner animateness of the natural world. In this work I also explore the ethical implications of being in relationship with living non-human others. I engage the present global ecological crisis as a problem rooted in ignorance of the spiritual integrity that is inherent in all beings in the cosmos, highlighting the urgent need to engage religious environmental views. Not only are the two trees alive and devotional, but, according to many of the sources of this study, so too is the cosmos teeming with life, consciousness, and inherent spirituality.

Abstract This dissertation examines a fundamental paradox in Christianity. How can the omnipotent, omnipresent God be said to be present within Mary, mother of Jesus Christ? I pose this question of the poetry of Ephrem the Syrian. I further argue that Ephrem’s rich theological symbolism, because it is embedded in a fourth-century Roman Syrian context, is best understood by examining contemporary literature, both within Syrian Christianity and from other contemporary religious traditions. I divide the dissertation into two parts. Part One, on Ephrem himself, begins with a chapter in which I review recent important literature on Ephrem’s symbolism, consider Ephrem as a poet, and then perform a sample reading of one of his poems to illustrate his theological method. This chapter closes by articulating principles which should guide a systematic study of Ephrem’s theology. Chapter Two then performs such a reading on Ephrem’s Mariology, tracing a range of symbols that the Syrian uses to depict the mother of God, and sketching their implications. I draw chiefly on the madrashe or Hymns on the Nativity, a rich collection of songs which are largely given in Mary’s own voice. Among the symbols I find Ephrem using for Mary include the Virgin, the Prophet, and the Temple. I argue that these three symbols make particularly useful examples for comparative study. Part Two then consists of three chapters looking beyond Ephrem to his world. In Chapter Three, I situate Ephrem within earlier Syrian Christianity. Studying these authors, I note the prominent theme of the chaste Christian becoming the Temple of God and suggest that some of Ephrem’s theological symbolism makes more sense when considered in this tradition. Chapters Four and Five turn respectively to the Greek authors of late antique Roman Syria and the early rabbinic authors. Here too, although the connections are more distant, I find that various elements of Ephrem’s symbolic theology make the most sense when considered alongside the way that other traditions use the same images.

Christianity is a place-less religion, so the story goes. This dissertation argues, on the contrary, that Christian theology, far from having put an end to spatial thinking, has found ways to take place literally over the course of its history. Theology has long engaged with concrete, material places, as well as imagining an array of fantastical topographies of its own. Much of this has been forgotten in Western Christian theological reflection, either from undue focus on time or from a misplaced desire to speak universally, from nowhere, inheriting the intellectual legacy of colonialism. Drawing on the geographical theory of Yi-Fu Tuan, Henri Lefebvre, Katherine McKittrick, and Michel Foucault, I develop an account of the relationship between theology and place that manifests both in places of theology (places of which theological reflection routinely avails itself), and in theology of places (theologies that both form and are formed by geographical situations).

Because place is specific and demands analysis of the place of the theologian, I apply this methodology to the American South, and to my own places within it, a set of theological experiments exploring how South functions as a theological category and a source of theological reflection. It proceeds though a series of geographic scales (the body in Decoration Day, the rural attraction of Dollywood, the urban neighborhood of Hayti, the imagined region of “the South”), genres of writing theology (narrative, taxonomy, oral tradition, systematics), bodily orientations (bodies I never knew and my own body, fantastical bodies, bodies that are not mine, imagined bodies politic), and theological topoi re-geographized (ritual and forgiveness, mysticism, demonology and myth, heresy).

Through these explorations, this project argues for an expansive vision of the utility of theological reflection in the consideration of the social, cultural, and political dynamics of place, particularly concerning race, gender, sexuality, and class. This broadness entails not only the necessity of engaging with place in theological terms, but also a loosening of the strictures of scope around the places of theology and a reconsideration of reductive visions of the relationship of place and Christianity in the American South.

This dissertation utilizes interviews with participants in the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s to situate the movement as an object of practical theological inquiry. Much of the scholarship on the movement focuses on the experiences of activists, while this dissertation centers the voices of recipients of sanctuary. That focus reveals the extent to which recipients’ recitation and embodiment of fear and trauma constituted the practice of sanctuary, even as white activists found their agency augmented by participation in the movement. Through the cultivation of refugee identity for recipients, the movement restricted their agency, leading to tensions between the two groups.

This dissertation makes power as a central category of analysis for the movement and practical theological inquiry. I argue that Macintyre’s practice framework fails to account for the power differential between recipients and activists, replicating the power-obliviousness of the movement. This failure to account for power necessitates a new orientation in practical theology, and I develop a practical theology that utilizes Judith Butler’s accounts of subjectivity. In adopting Butler’s theoretical frameworks, recipient struggles for agency come to the fore, leading to a generative analysis of the movement as a site for white subject formation. Building off these insights, I offer a constructive proposal for an insurgent collaborative ecclesiology that centers fugitivity.

Situated at the intersection of the study of the New Testament, the theorizing of Christian origins, and queer historiography, this dissertation examines the ways in which biblical scholarship’s pursuit of historical authenticity normalizes some epistemic desires while stigmatizing others. I focus specifically on a set of New Testament and early Christian texts whose authenticity is disputed—texts characterized by some rubrics as pseudepigraphical and by others as forged—and the arguments that arose over the course of those texts’ receptions. Rather than making a case for or against the authenticity of any of the texts read here, this project analyzes how discourses of authenticity and forgery, as two terms in a binary constructed to distinguish the normative from the deviant, inflected as both terms are by the forces of canon and orthodoxy, designate acceptable and unacceptable—perverse, even—forms of contact across texts and times. The deployment of forgery discourses in New Testament scholarship can be read, I propose, as enabling or curtailing certain kinds of readerly and writerly relations—relations that speak to a kind of historical desire and disavowed eroticism that structure biblical scholarship’s historicizing truth claims generally, especially when its traditional historiographical commitments constrain certain desires and modes of identification by marking them as intelligible and properly historical, while rendering others as historically illegible. Thus, this project also investigates how historical-critical biblical scholarship negotiates its unease regarding the relational nature of interpretation and the place of the historian’s desire. I entertain the question of whether a paradox—that biblical studies is passionately attached to and structured by its notions of objective history—is what undermines the recovery of the intimate politics and affective disavowals that discourses of authenticity perform in disputes on “falsely” authored texts. Ultimately, I suggest that biblical history poses its own forms of “queer” history, queer in the sense of disrupted, broken open, by diverse—and perverse, by many of its own dominant and regularly enforced standards—lines of desire and imagination. Engaging resources offered by queer theoretical and affective engagements with historiography that are particularly helpful for parsing relations between the erotic, relational, and theological negotiations in forgery scholarship in biblical studies specifically, I ultimately wonder if we might need to grapple with the epistemological implications of the fact that all our histories are forgeries of desire.

In the cultural landscape of the ancient Mediterranean, clothing was not only a covering for the body but also functioned as an ideological system that worked to construct and stratify categories of identity and social roles. On the one hand, garments themselves, such as the stola and the toga, materialized hierarchal categories of gender, class, and citizenship under the Roman Empire. On the other, women’s compliance with normative clothing practices—or lack thereof—served as a measure of broader social and moral decline for elite male writers. The early Christ movement emerged within this world, where clothing ideologies materialized and naturalized binaries of male and female, free and enslaved, citizen and foreigner. From the proclamation that the baptized have put on Christ to prescriptions regarding how women should dress in the household and assembly, early Christ followers took up cultural norms of dressing and adorning to fashion arguments about the social organization of the community and relations of power within it. This dissertation analyzes the rhetorics of dress and adornment—or arguments that use clothing practices to “think with”—embedded within citations of the baptismal formula and the household/domestic codes. These key examples highlight the ways in which early Christians used dress and adornment in arguments on both sides of debates about equality, piety, and social relationality within and outside of the community. Using a feminist rhetorical critical and materialist historical framework, this dissertation considers dressing and adorning at the intersection of metaphor and material practices and highlights how structures of power are variously shored up and contested through the deployment of clothing rhetorics. Rather than identifying the notion of being “clothed in Christ” as distinct from calls to cast aside luxurious garments in early Christian discourse, this dissertation understands both as embroiled in political and theological struggles for equality in early Christianity. In this way, clothing functioned as both garment and argument, and could be utilized at once to justify systems of subordination and to fuel movements for transformation.

Christianity is a place-less religion, so the story goes. This dissertation argues, on the contrary, that Christian theology, far from having put an end to spatial thinking, has found ways to take place literally over the course of its history. Theology has long engaged with concrete, material places, as well as imagining an array of fantastical topographies of its own. Much of this has been forgotten in Western Christian theological reflection, either from undue focus on time or from a misplaced desire to speak universally, from nowhere, inheriting the intellectual legacy of colonialism. Drawing on the geographical theory of Yi-Fu Tuan, Henri Lefebvre, Katherine McKittrick, and Michel Foucault, I develop an account of the relationship between theology and place that manifests both in places of theology (places of which theological reflection routinely avails itself), and in theology of places (theologies that both form and are formed by geographical situations).

Because place is specific and demands analysis of the place of the theologian, I apply this methodology to the American South, and to my own places within it, a set of theological experiments exploring how South functions as a theological category and a source of theological reflection. It proceeds though a series of geographic scales (the body in Decoration Day, the rural attraction of Dollywood, the urban neighborhood of Hayti, the imagined region of “the South”), genres of writing theology (narrative, taxonomy, oral tradition, systematics), bodily orientations (bodies I never knew and my own body, fantastical bodies, bodies that are not mine, imagined bodies politic), and theological topoi re-geographized (ritual and forgiveness, mysticism, demonology and myth, heresy).

Through these explorations, this project argues for an expansive vision of the utility of theological reflection in the consideration of the social, cultural, and political dynamics of place, particularly concerning race, gender, sexuality, and class. This broadness entails not only the necessity of engaging with place in theological terms, but also a loosening of the strictures of scope around the places of theology and a reconsideration of reductive visions of the relationship of place and Christianity in the American South.

Enslaved persons were ubiquitous in the first- and second- century CE Roman Empire, and early Christian texts, in particular, reflect this fact. Nevertheless the implications of enslaved presence in religious practices are under-examined in early Christian and Roman history. Moreover, previous scholarship often builds on the assumptions that enslaved persons who did participate in religious practices either functioned as extensions of their masters, or performed roles in subjection to elite leaders. Employing early Christian texts and archaeological materials associated with the Roman city of Ephesos as a test case, this dissertation demonstrates that enslaved persons' roles in civic and religious activities were contested precisely because they held leadership positions. I use feminist rhetorical analysis, which is sensitive to attempts at persuasion, to interpret literary texts, and I extend its methods to archaeological materials. Thus this dissertation traces the rhetorical attempt to regulate enslaved persons' presence in early Christian writings, such as Philemon, 1 Timothy, and Ignatius' letter to Polycarp, and in materials from archaeological excavations in Ephesos. This dissertation concludes that enslaved persons enacted roles that potentially upended social hierarchies privileging wealthy, slave-holding men. Enslaved persons were priests, religious specialists, and leaders in cultic groups, including early Christian groups. At the same time these roles were neither signs of Roman slavery's benign nature nor evidence that early Christians were more tolerant of enslaved participation. Rather Christian constructions of authority and communal structure participated in a larger social, political, and religious contestation around enslaved leadership in the Roman world. Thus this dissertation contributes to a conversation in Roman history and early Christian studies around the historiography of enslaved history. It analyzes the rhetorical bent of both literary texts and archaeological materials demonstrating that within the exploitative nature of Roman slavery enslaved persons had the ability to enact limited authority.

Sexual purity rhetoric produced by conservative Christian individuals and institutions shapes U.S. religious and political life in profound ways. Yet, there has not yet been a study of the scope or the results of sexual purity rhetoric. This dissertation addresses this gap in research on religious life in the U.S. The central question asked in this study includes not only, "What does sexual purity rhetoric say?" but also, "What does it do?" I use a critical feminist lens to analyze the sexual purity rhetoric deployed in the most popular purity rituals and practices - rallies, retreats, parties, pledge signings, and father-daughter purity balls - and in a significant cross-section of the printed and online literature. Sexuality rhetoric is challenging to analyze because it not only does something different than it says, but what it says often contradicts and obscures what it does. Sexual purity rhetoric says that its purpose is to help adolescents delay sexual activity prior to heterosexual marriage. The prevention of sexually transmitted infections, pregnancy, and heartbreak are the most common arguments made as to why adolescents should refrain from sexual activity prior to heterosexual marriage. Yet, the evidence is overwhelming that sexual purity teachings do not reduce pregnancy or rates of sexually transmitted infection, nor are they effective in meaningfully delaying or in preventing sexual activity prior to heterosexual marriage. If sexual purity rhetoric has virtually no impact on adolescent sexual activity, what does it do? My analysis shows that it functions as a structuring and regulating framework for personal and communal relationships, as well as a normative framework for theo-political beliefs and practices. It contributes to constructing a world where purity status determines the moral quality of relationships - with God, the church, potential partners, the nation, and, in the case of adolescents, with parents. It is used normatively to shape, and analytically to understand, a wide range of relationships, and physical, mental, and spiritual states. Sexual purity rhetoric is both sustained by and sustaining of kyriarchal structures that dramatically disadvantage and harm people of color, wo/men, girls, queer-identified people, poor people, and immigrants who do not and cannot conform to impossible-to-meet sexual purity ideals.