HDS Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a comparative study of the Anglican Bishop Joseph Butler's (1692-1752 AD) and the Neo-Confucianist Wang Yang-ming's (1472-1529 AD) conception of conscience (or in Wang's terminology, liang-chih.

Conscience, for Butler and Wang, is the supreme moral guide, signifying the individual person's moral autonomy. Yet human remain fallible leading Butler and Wang to warn that unless carefully nurtured, conscience may yet become weakened or even buried. Therefore Butler's and Wang's moral appeal is the recurring call to conscientiousness and to exhort their fellow humankind to diligent moral cultivation.

In comparing Butler and Wang this study shows they possess complex differences and important similarities. In the first instance there are marked variances, for example, while affirming the supernatural realm they diverge radically in their specific depiction of the transcendent. They also differed in moral cultivation with Butler's emphasis on `cool reflection' while Wang focus more on the senses. Differences notwithstanding Butler and Wang share important semblances. Their modes of deliberation reveal familiar patterns, e.g., assertions of prima facie truth, decisions guided by consequences, recognition of primary and secondary norms etc. There are also intriguing parallels in their prognosis of erroneous teachings. Butler's critique of Hobbes and Wang's repudiation of the Mohists, show their unified concern to defend a sanguine interpretation of human nature. Butler's refutation of the Deists and Wesley, and Wang's criticism of Chu Hsi and the Buddhist, underscores their common struggle over the perennial dialectical tension of reason and sense.

In addition this dissertation shows that Butler's and Wang's conception of conscience, and by extension the moral self, have critical nuances. This is evident specifically in their thicker rendition of human flourishing, i.e., their more intricate view of what constitute the Christian and Chun Tzu. However they also share crucial similarities especially in their thinner account of moral self, i.e., their expectation that humankind ought to conform to a set of basic values. In sum this thesis argues that while Butler and Wang possess critical thick differences they also affirm thin similarities that are equally vital.

This essay offers a constructive take on the theological relationship between God and history. Following in the wake of the revitalization of the doctrine of the Trinity in modern theology, this essays examines how a trinitarian understanding of God's being can be used to articulate a notion of God's living relation to history in pre-temporal, inner-historical and eschatological perspective. I explore this topic by way of a critical engagement with the trinitarian theology of Isaak A. Dorner, Karl Barth, Wolfhart Pannenberg and Robert W. Jenson. The central notion of the triune God's living relation to history derives from a modified form of Dorner's way of reconciling a notion of divine immutability with the revealed vitality of God in nineteenth century context. With the twentieth and twenty-first century theological figures of this study — Barth, Pannenberg, Jenson — the question becomes intensified so as to ask how the Trinity of God's being not only grounds God's activity ad extra, but enables the history that God lives with others; how construals of eternity and divine immutability bear on the conception of the reality of God in history; and how a historicized notion of the triune God encompasses an idea of God as transcendent being. There exists various contextual links, internal critiques and adaptations between these figures and their theological work that this essay incorporates into its constructive responses to these questions. In formulating a conception of the triune God's living relation to history, Barth's doctrine of election is gleaned for an idea of the Son's obedience that underlies the vitality of God in the relation between God's pre-temporal eternity and history; Pannenberg's concepts of the dependent monarchy of the Father and divine self-actualization are utilized to generate a view of the livingness of God in history; and Jenson's eschatological idea of the Spirit is used to support a historical notion of divine freedom. The concluding assessment identifies the constructive possibilities that the analysis of this study opens up for a trinitarian understanding of the relation between God and history, including a way forward on the question of the vitality of God in history based in the divine person of the Spirit as the possibility and guarantor of the future.

This dissertation tracks Jesuit discourse about suffering in the missions of Northern New Spain from the arrival of the first missionaries in the 16th century until their expulsion in the 18th. The project asks why tales of persecution became so prevalent in these borderland contexts and describes how missionaries sanctified their own sacrifices as well as native suffering through martyrological idioms. It argues that in both corporeal and textual forms, missionaries put their passions to use in the pacification of the norther frontier of Mexico. It also correlates colonial martyrologies to longer traditions of redemptive death in the history of Christianity. The belief that sacrifice begets growth reaches back to the biblical writers and church fathers like Jerome and Tertullian. More recently, Talal Asad has argued that "dying to give live" lies at the foundation of western civilization and its capacity for war. The work charts a transitional moment in the longer geneology of matyrological discourse that extends early Christian tales of persecution to the modern logic of redemptive sacrifice. It argues that Christian martyrdom traditions helped early modern Jesuits rationalize their participation in the Spanish colonization of the Americas and explain rebellion, disease, and death as providential.

In addition to the deaths of specific missionaries at the hands of rebellious converts, it takes up the wider motif of martyrdom that permeated their entire evangelistic enterprise in New Spain. Through histories, annual letters, personal correspondance, and maps, it describes how metaphors of agricultural growth, economic exchange, cosmic war, exile, and "prolonged martyrdom" downplayed the material causes of violence and instead elevated convert and missionary suffering as ultimately redemptive. The disseratation shows how Jesuit martyr language had a symbiotic, though conflicted, relation to native religious practices, spurring native revolt, aggressive retribution, and spatial redistribution. In distinction from early Christians who cultivated martyrdom as rhetoric of victimization under imperial persecution, early modern missionaries used their own passion stoties to justify imperial expansion and the often difficult pacification of indigenous groups. When located in Christian history, the blood of Jesuit martyrs helped place native landscapes within an imagined Christendom in the minds of European audiences who encountered their tales of sacrifice through letters, histories, maps, paintings, and reliquaries. Whether positioning themselves vis-à-vis other religious orders, petitioning superiors, preparing campaigns to extirpate native "idolatries," or protecting converts from European and indigenous enemies, Jesuits believed that their greatest victories would be resurrected from stories of victimization.

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.

This dissertation argues that the Protestant Reformation did not degrade the importance of ritual, but instead reinvested it with a new form of power. By interpreting a theological controversy over the benefits and dangers of “human ceremonies,” this project demonstrates how liturgical practices and implements made competing theologies materially present in moments of apocalyptic expectation. Following their defeat by emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire in 1547, German Protestants were supposed to assist in repairing the breakdown of the western Latin Church by accepting compromises in church ceremonies as “external things” that were immaterial to their core theological commitments. However, the mere suggestion that traditional Catholic elements could “make no difference” to Protestant worship touched off a firestorm of protest among a group of theologians and pastors passionately devoted to the memory of Luther. Far from being “indifferent things,” or adiaphora, ritual materials and gestures were instead presented by these critics as the means for infecting pious souls with the “prostitution of idolatry” and inscribing the apocalyptic “mark of the Beast” [Malzeichen des Thiers] on their bodies. I argue that the polemical rhetoric of the adiaphora controversy reflects a larger trend in early modern Protestant thought: the fusion of the concepts of pollution and idolatry. Idolatry remained associated with opinions and dispositions, however it was also transmitted through corrupted speech. Corrupted speech, in turn, polluted the material of idolatry. The objects and practices stained in this way materialized idolatry in Protestant liturgical settings. Idolatry, therefore, was not just located in false beliefs or statements, but was also embodied and transmitted through tainted practices and paraphernalia. The materialization of idolatry threatened bodies, souls, doctrines, and communities, and its dangers were brought into view through metaphors of filth, disease, and prostitution. These were employed in polemical rhetoric to mark the practices of allegedly hypocritical Protestants, making their moral and theological corruption legible to a broader Protestant public. By exploring the operations of this rhetoric, I offer an interpretation of Protestant liturgical purification that stands in contrast to dominant scholarly accounts of the Reformation as a moment of “anti-ritualism” and rationalization.

Located in the heart of Lower Manhattan, the 9/11 Tribute Center is a small memorial museum that commemorates the attacks of September 11, 2001, and their aftermath. Tribute’s five small galleries house numerous exhibits and artifacts; however, this museum is most widely recognized for its daily walking tours, which are led by individuals who hold direct connections to the attacks. These docents—who include survivors, first responders, rescue and recovery workers, local residents, and family members of the deceased—share historical information, statistics, and their own stories as they lead visitors around the new World Trade Center site.

Drawing from four years of ethnographic research and interviews at this memorial museum, my dissertation argues that Tribute has been a site of profound meaning making for many individuals struggling to gain purchase on an event that shattered their lives. I employ an existential and phenomenological approach to show how everyday acts of memorialization, storytelling, and walking have allowed individuals to cultivate a sense of agency and restore intersubjective bonds. Case studies also illuminate the complex interplay between personal memory and collective memory at this site as docents attempt to navigate the space between private and public realms.

In analyzing the continual negotiation of memory and discourse, I reveal how tensions can inhere when individual and official framings of the past diverge. Particular attention is given to the ambiguous place of religious narratives, histories, and interpretations of the past at Tribute, an institution that strives to remain religiously and politically neutral. I analyze the reasons why Tribute’s leaders have attempted to prohibit conversations about religion from their site while also pointing to some of the consequences—both individual and social—of their framing.

Ultimately, this dissertation makes two important contributions to the field of Religious Studies. First, this work moves beyond conventional frames of reference to analyze the manifold resources (whether conventionally called “religious” or not) upon which humans draw to reconstruct viable lives in the wake of a trauma. And, second, it examines how institutional ideas about religion can shape exhibits, tours, and larger public perceptions of an event.

Apophatic Measures: Toward a Theology of Irreducible Particularity is a work of constructive comparative theology examining select writings of Śaṅkara (Eighth Century, India) and Nicholas of Cusa (Fifteenth Century, Germany). It argues that, for Śaṅkara and Cusa, apophasis does not culminate in what Michael Sells calls a “semantic event,” but instead in a sensual event. For each, negation removes intellectual distractions, awakening one to a heightened state of sensual attentiveness. For Śaṅkara, this is observed in the embodied encounter wherein a teacher incarnates Vedānta scripture to reveal “This Self is Brahman” (Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad 2). For Cusa, the intimate encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well (John 4) is paradigmatic of true, attentive sensuality. Employing a heuristic device termed “apophatic measure” in its trifold meanings of method, sensuality, and particularity, this dissertation contributes to contemporary discourses on the ontology of difference, the theo-ethical valuation of diversity, and the singularity of unique bodies. Rather than reducing individuals to ethnic, gendered, or other essentializing measures, persons are regarded as unique disclosures of ultimate reality. Each person is re/cognized as an unprecedented imago Dei or particular manifestation of Ātman-Brahman. Through the pedagogy and performance of apophatic theology, one progressively removes epistemic universals and thereby cultivates a phenomenology of irreducible particularity as a vision of God. Awakened to an attentive sensuality, one re/cognizes this Self, incarnate before one’s very eyes, as an apophatic measure of the immeasurable divine.

The development of the Cistercian Order in the twelfth century came as a product of a number of eleventh-century reforms. These reforms affected all strata of society, and they impacted the way in which medieval European Christians viewed themselves, their social, political, and theological structures, the world around them, and their relationship to the Christian narrative of salvation history and eschatology. The early Cistercians built their “new monastery” (novum monasterium) upon an apostolic foundation of austerity and poverty, informed by a “return” to the Rule of Benedict as the program for their daily ritual and liturgical lives. These Cistercians centered their monastic “way of life” (conversatio) around the pursuit of ascent into God, seeking to become “citizens among the saints and members of the household of God.”

The language of twelfth-century Cistercian ascension theology drew from a number of scriptural motifs for its expression. For example, Bernard of Clairvaux described his monastery as the “heavenly Jerusalem” and his monks as “Jerusalemites”; Aelred of Rievaulx spoke of “living stones,” building up the Temple of Jerusalem and rising up as sacred incense; and Helinand of Froidmont exhorted his monks to climb the mountain with Christ and to raise up within themselves a Temple of “living stones,” becoming bearers of Christ like Mary, his holy mother. In the case of these and other Cistercian exegetes, the goal remained the same: by interpreting Christian scripture and tradition, Cistercian theologians sought to transform the monastery into a sacred space, bridging the gap between the human world and the realm of God, so that they, and their brethren, might ascend “as living stones built up, a spiritual house, a holy priesthood.”

This ethnographic study of contemporary Muslim poverty alleviation projects in India investigates the way in which Islamic social ethics are brought to bear on efforts to redress the social suffering. Drawing on field research in Hyderabad, one of many cities that experienced Hindu-Muslim riots after the destruction of the Babri Masjid, the present study demonstrates that confronting social suffering has propelled the creation of new public spaces and experimental social practices. Within such spaces, local understandings of Islamic ethics, gender formation, inter-religious relations, and religious authority are elaborated in such a way as to reshape lived social relations. The projects studied demonstrate that Muslims counter social suffering by drawing on the longstanding commitment to charity and care of the vulnerable that is the hallmark of Islamic social ethics, and simultaneously reformulate this tradition in light of contemporary concerns about communal violence and gender justice. Focusing on diverse Muslim poverty alleviation projects within the same urban area, this study demonstrates that there is no monolithic Islamic response to poverty. Rather than a single ethical code that organizes all Muslim poverty alleviation efforts, practical interventions are shown to be the result of particular interpretations of Islamic tradition, suffering, and gender that cluster together to support emergent notions of wellbeing. These emergent social projects further demonstrate that poverty localizes Islam. The effort to alleviate poverty instantiates a creative field in which ways of being Muslim are contested, embodied, and engaged through the frame of local tradition. In such local spaces, Islam is elaborated in such as a way as to support forms of sociality that counter the use of force in social reproduction. Within the on-going efforts of poverty alleviation efforts, religion is inflected in such a way as to reflect the desire that what bonds people in everyday life is something other than violence, subordination, fragmentation, deprivation, and suffering. As Muslim poverty alleviation projects shape modes of belonging to others, and work to inhibit the formation of zones of social sacrifice, they simultaneously construct nonviolent social practices and gender reforms as expressions of local Islam.

Recent scholarly work has shed light on various contributions made by community based community organizing (CBCO) to civic life in the United States. Through national organizations such as the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), local CBCO affiliates engage members in a variety of relationship- and leadership-building practices to effectively address and solve common community, regional, and statewide problems. This dissertation examines one IAF affiliate, the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO). GBIO was founded in 1996 to organize across Boston's religious, racial, ethnic, class, and neighborhood lines for the public good. Versus earlier studies, the lens is here reversed; the object of this study is to understand how congregations qua religious institutions are impacted by and interpret democratic practice. Based on participant observation, in-depth ethnographic conversations, and an examination of written documents, this study examines Jewish and Christian congregations as they engage in the campaign to bring progressive healthcare reform to Massachusetts. Its interests are interdisciplinary, drawing on disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Its grounding discipline is Religious Studies, with a focus on lived religion, understood as an approach that locates religious creativity within culture. It engages current sociological scholarship in its sub-fields of religion, culture, and social movements. Finally, it examines political science scholarship interested in civic engagement and social capital in an increasingly diverse society. This research finds that when religious practice engages CBCO democratic practice, the result can be productive of pluralism without being reductive of difference. Congregations, drawing on situated religious traditions, can foster pluralism, understood as self-conscious, active, and intentional engagement with diversity. Further, this case study demonstrates that congregations engaged in civic activity have religious resources to mediate conflict that might be intractable in the political sphere.

This dissertation explores the ways in which early Christians thought about resurrected bodies in terms of desires, sexual practices, and roles, as well as in terms of how maleness and femaleness are distinguished. The early Christian writings on the resurrection discussed in this dissertation addressed a set of interrelated and overlapping questions and goals. First, they sought to define what was meant by the resurrection, especially with respect to what degree of continuity existed between the mortal self and the resurrected self. In doing so, they specified what substances, desires, dispositions, and practices persisted in resurrected bodies and what did not. For early Christians, sexual acts, desires, and reproduction did not have any place in the resurrection. Second, they sought to underscore the importance of having a correct view concerning the resurrection so that they could better understand the mortal body. By examining the resurrected body's characteristics, early Christians sought to diagnose what was most important about the mortal body. These differences between the mortal and resurrected spheres produced a set of problems for describing not only the relationship of sexual practices, desires and reproduction to resurrected bodies, but also the place of such practices in mortality. Third, as these writers wrangled over what kinds of morphological and substantive bodies would persist in the resurrection, they confronted questions concerning the nature of male and female difference. While they suggested that sexual desires, acts, and reproduction were inessential to resurrected bodies, they argued that maleness and femaleness remained essential features of resurrected bodies. This dissertation explores the instability of the early Christian attempts to separate maleness and femaleness, located in resurrected "parts," from the gendered discourses of sexual desires, acts, and reproduction.

Although the rhetoric of home is broadly used and may seem banal, it is a notion that has been significantly contested in recent decades. This dissertation critically analyzes the politics of space within the rhetoric of home by locating "home" within socio-economic constellations of power. To underscore the linkages between the domestic family home and the political homeland, I place critiques of home in feminist Christian discourses into critical dialogue with postcolonial critiques of home.

After beginning with a contextual discussion of the rhetoric of home in U.S. history, I thematically address the rhetoric of home in feminist and postcolonial discourses. Firstly, I examine the rhetoric of violence and the home. By engaging both feminist and postcolonial texts, I show how home is not only a site of violence, but also functions as a tool of violence. Secondly, I explore the rhetoric of work and home in feminist Christian discourses. Critically analyzing differing articulations of the relationship between work and home reveals alternative spatial models of the socio-economic dynamics that construct the social and material landscape. Finally, I show how the rhetoric of home and heaven in Christian discourses express utopian visions for dwelling together. Examining these discourses raises important questions about how the rhetoric of home functions to create ethical and cultural norms.

In conclusion, the dissertation surveys the range of strategies feminist and postcolonial discourses have used to intervene in the politics of space in the rhetoric of home. To these strategies, I add an argument for engaging the alternative rhetoric of "dwelling together." The rhetoric of home and homeland has a problematic legacy of violence and exclusion that masks critical intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, marital status, and national identity. A feminist, postcolonial Christian rhetoric of dwelling together seeks to create a theo-ethical framework that more adequately addresses the ethics of spatio-socio-economic interrelations.

This dissertation describes how desiring subjects make devotional worlds in times of radical change. I argue that what is centrally at stake for people who pass through the Şumuleu Ciuc (Hungarian: Csíksomlyó) pilgrimage site in Transylvania, Romania is the question of what makes a good Catholic in relation to the Virgin Mary. Disputes about this question revolve around notions of the desiring subject: What role should forms of sexual, material, and affective self-interest – or lack thereof – play in the life of Mary’s devotees and the life of the Mother of God herself? This formulation of desire and change as intersubjective and relational processes involving divine and human beings breaks new ground among dominantly sociological and symbolic studies of religious change in contemporary Eastern Europe. Chapter One broadly outlines 20th and 21st century social transformations in the Ciuc valley. Chapter Two explores the annual Pentecost pilgrimage event as a ritual intricately caught up in everyday processes of emerging post-socialist masculine subject formation. Chapter Three tells the story of a young woman’s vision of the Virgin Mary that resulted in the installation of a new statue and shrine at the pilgrimage site. Where other scholars have treated similar events in terms of abstract political processes of resacralizing and nationalizing post-socialist space and time, I seek to re-site the “politics” of the shrine in the tension between religious experience and semiotic form. Chapter Four blends phenomenological and pragmatist theories of materiality to address recent infrastructural transformations to the pilgrimage site as efforts to “remodel Mary’s home.” One set of new structures outside at the shrine materialize and enact the ambivalent search for a post-socialist lay Catholic leading class that I introduced in Chapter One. Chapter Five takes up my previous concern with gender in order to examine women’s Marian healing practices in secular post-socialist hospitals. Chapter Six beings with a consideration of the intersubjective politics of storytelling and the new role played at Csíksomlyó by the global Catholic radio network, The World Family of Radio Maria.

This dissertation investigates how early Christ-followers used financial language to articulate and imagine their relationship to the divine. In the ancient Mediterranean, the divine was an active participant in what we call the economic sphere. Gods and goddesses were represented as owning goods, holding accounts, and producing wealth through the mediation of religious and civic officials. In this dissertation, I use a variety of epigraphic, papyrological, and literary evidence to examine the use of financial terms that are found throughout Paul’s letter to the Philippians, asking: what sorts of human-human and human-divine relationships are described? Paul describes his relationship with the Philippians using the business language of a koinonia, a shareholding venture, in the gospel. He uses language of deposit and security to represent his imprisonment as a contribution to the success of the gospel venture in which both he and the Philippians participate. In Philippians 3, he commodifies Christ and suffering. In Philippians 4, Paul refers to a divine accounting system to offer a promissory note to the Philippians for their support of him. I also explore Polycarp’s Letter to the Philippians, which exemplifies one trajectory in the afterlife of this theo-economic rhetoric. There the commodification of Christ and suffering has been turned towards polemical ends.
My study adds a new framework of analysis, theo-economics, to New Testament and early Christian texts. This new framework allows a better understanding of major theological and economic logics in early Christianity, and the imbrication of themes such as poverty, labor, social status, cosmology, and eschatology. The framework of theo-economics also makes visible an emerging “economy of suffering” in early Christianity, which is present in the Letter to the Philippians and expands in multiple directions after Paul. Thus, my study has implications for New Testament and early Christian studies as well as Roman history, economics, and the study of religion.

This dissertation explores discussions of prophecy in early Christianity focusing on Origen of Alexandria’s works. It argues that Origen engages the contested terms of prophetic activity to persuade his audience(s) toward the cultivation of a particular moral self.

The dissertation situates early Christian discourse on prophecy within a larger philosophical conversation in the Greco-Roman world from the first to fourth centuries C.E., in which cultivating a properly religious self involves discipline or askēsis. Some early Christian debates about prophecy are predicated on the idea that certain practices are necessary to be considered worthy of the indwelling of the divine/the Holy Spirit. Using Pierre Hadot’s insights, the dissertation contends that discourses on prophecy in early Christianity call for training in a particular way of living, and thus could be influential to early Christians regardless of whether they would ever attain the status of prophet or not.

By encouraging his Christian readers to participate in reading and studying the Scripture as a way to purify their souls, Origen argues that everyone needs to cultivate himself or herself to be worthy to receive spiritual gifts such as prophecy. In his Commentary on Romans, Origen turns Paul’s exhortation to “strive for spiritual gifts, and especially that you may prophesy” (1 Cor 14:1) into a more general call to cultivate virtue through scriptural study. In Contra Celsum and the Homilies on Numbers, Origen invites the readers to participate in disciplined training so that they may become worthy instruments of the divine, just as the prophets are. The dissertation also compares Origen’s arguments with those of the Shepherd of Hermas and Iamblichus’s De Mysteriis, demonstrating that the ancient discussions of prophecy deploy similar strategies to persuade the audiences to participate in particular disciplined training, even if they have different ideas about what the best form of prophecy may be.

This study's principal goal is to engage Eberhard Jüngel's views on freedom and, with the help of this engagement, to think through the intimate connection of the doctrine of God and anthropology. This larger goal contains within itself two objectives. The first is investigative and has to do with critically analyzing the divine-human togetherness in Jüngel's theology through the lens of freedom. The second, constructive objective is to ask critically whether Jüngel's doctrine of God is able to support the anthropological effects that Jüngell ascribes to God's being; and, in light of this study's findings, to put forth a way of intertwining even more closely and seamlessly trinitarian and anthropological conceptualities.

The argument unfolds in four major moves. First, I examine Jüngel's critique of the modern notion of freedom as rooted in the self-securing and self-possession of an allegedly autonomous subject. Second, I analyze Jüngel's account of divine freedom. This analysis shows Jüngel's construal to be ultimately dissonant in its two central emphases: the inalienable spontaneity and creativity of God's being, and the inter-subjective character of God's self-determination as a trinitarian event of love. God's subjectivity is shown to border, as a result, on predominant self-relatedness, which Jüngel rejects as unfreedom in anthropological terms. In its third move, the argument then turns to the being of the person as elementally interrupted and so not only freed but brought into correspondence with God. My focus here is chiefly on the person's two acts of existence. Finally, I develop the ontological implications of the two existential acts of the free person. With their help I offer a way of resolving the ambiguity present in Jüngel's account of God's self-determination. This study's central, constructive claim is that in God there also are two acts of existence, grounded in two distinct manners of trinitarian relationality. Next to what I call the logic of love, there is the logic of freedom. Without sacrificing God's originary creativity, it enables God to enter into a successful togetherness with the humanity God liberates and thus to determine God's self in an inter-subjective manner as an event of love.

This dissertation explores the function of ekklēsia rhetoric in the Book of Revelation, and demonstrates its role in addressing various issues within the seven ekklēsiai and their inscribed rhetorical situation, including: the participation of eidōlothyta, the blasphemy of the so-called synagogue of Satan, and the pursuit of wealth. Contemporary reconstructions of the rhetorical situation of Revelation cast the assemblies as consolidated Christian churches and view the aforementioned issues as indicative of tensions between heretics and orthodox Christians, between church and synagogue, and/or between church and Greco-Roman society. Yet, such interpretations often reinscribe normative frameworks, the so-called parting of the ways, and obfuscate the role of imperial power. In contrast, I reconstruct the inscribed assemblies Revelation as Jewish groups from the Diaspora in Asia Minor that used ekklēsia rhetoric as well as its topoi of civic reciprocity, civic participation, and the common good to negotiate the socio-economic and political situation of Asia Minor under Rome. In order to map the ways in which the assemblies could have interacted with imperial power, I use epigraphic materials from ancient voluntary associations. Drawing from postcolonial theory, I also read the rhetorical situation of Revelation as a colonial situation and the aforementioned issues as negotiations of power, ethnic identity, and wealth.

"Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these." Based on the gospel accounts of Jesus's welcoming of little children, scholars have often presumed that early Christianity offered a new, uniform, and positive understanding of children against the backdrop of the ancient world. This dissertation challenges this exceptionalist approach to history by exploring imagery of the child used in the Gospel of Matthew, 1 Corinthians, and the Gospel of Thomas. In particular, it situates the selected texts within discourses and practices related to children in the Roman Empire and explores the cultural context in which childlikeness in each text should be understood. For Matthew, the little child in Jesus's sayings represents the lowliest of the low in the Roman Empire, functioning to urge the readers to abandon their political and economic privileges. For Paul, "infant" is a term of invective against the Corinthians, whose infantile lack of proper speech and logos marks their unpreparedness for God's kingdom. For the Gospel of Thomas, the child functions as an exemplar of the primordial being in Gen 1:27 who exists without shame, for this gospel idealizes the child's sexually undeveloped body and liminal status in society. This research demonstrates that there is no one understanding of children among these texts. The authors diversely deploy the child's marginalized status, intellectual incapability, and non-gendered state in these three focal texts while inviting the adult audience to envision an ideal believer entering the kingdom of God. These images of children concretize spiritual, moral, and social transformations to which believers must aspire-or which they should avoid, presenting the diversity of religious ideals among those who first used these texts. Their references to children cannot be used as evidence to support claims that early Christ followers were kind in their treatment of children. Exploring the developmental characteristics and social situations of children reveals that early Christ followers cast young children as theological imaginaries for expressing various conceptions of an ideal self who is worthy to enter God's kingdom.

The mystical theology of Thomas Gallus, “the last great Victorine,” was inseparable from his theology of sacred literature. This dissertation analyzes Gallus’s major works: his commentaries on the Song of Songs and the Corpus Dionysiacum (CD). I argue that Gallus’s mystical theology emerges from his analysis of constitutive theological tensions in the CD about God, language, and mystical perfection. That is, in navigating the CD’s conceptual apertures, Gallus is even more thoroughly Dionysian than has been previously estimated. At the same time, Gallus’s mystical theology is an original creation—distinctively Augustinian and Victorine, and informed by his complementary interpretation of the Song as depicting the union between the soul and the Word. Thus, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of both the inherent interpretive possibilities and the varieties of medieval reception of the CD.

This dissertation makes a second contribution to the field by articulating how Gallus’s role as a commentator is key to understanding his mystical theology. The practice of commentary writing played a significant role in Gallus’s affective Dionysianism, which saw the contemplative soul in an unending pursuit of loving, experiential knowledge of the Word of God. In Gallus’s commentaries, we find a coherently performed, if incompletely realized theory and practice of Christian wisdom. I argue that to understand Gallus’s practice of commentary writing (beyond as a pedgagogical practicality), we should look to the account of Christian perfection articulated in the commentaries themselves.

Finally, Gallus’s commentaries were attempts to experience (experientia) and explain (explanatio) the eternal Word of God, and this dissertation also calls attention to the rhetoric of experience within Gallus’s commentaries. In conversation with debates about religious experience within the study of mysticism, this dissertation argues that, not only is Gallus’s use of experientia central to his theological and mystical program, but understanding its use in his context can help to reconsider what conceptual reservoirs contemporary scholars of medieval mysticism are to draw from. Gallus’s rhetoric of experience is rich enough to contain a number of tensions within Christian mysticism that remain salient today (such as immanence and transcendence, talkativeness and ineffability, intellect and affect).

A Firestone of Divine Love serves as capstone of two years Jesuit ministry and fifteen of academic study. It extends nine articles into a book project to be published by Gorgias Press. Its original thesis appeared as: In the last decades of the sixteenth century the Society of Jesus prohibited its members the reading of several mystical texts. A theme that cuts across these texts is the use of erotic language to describe the relationship between the soul and God. I argue that behind the prohibition lies the fear that erotic desire would be a threat to a Jesuit masculine identity.

“Heterosexual Melancholia and Mysticism in the Early Society of Jesus” Theology & Sexuality 13/2, 1/2007

Working across the disciplines of History of Christianity and Women, Gender and Sexuality studies, I integrate these articles and deepen the original thesis within its 16th century Hispanic context. Chapter One introduces as historical setting the late medieval spirituality that inspired the first Jesuits to compose their order’s earliest spiritual texts, exemplifying it with the mystical doctrines of annihilation and deification. Chapter Two develops the first half of the deepened thesis: late medieval mysticism offered Jesuits of the first generation an erotic discourse that served as a space for grieving loss, even when within the confines of a gestating Jesuit masculine ideal. Chapter Three develops the second half. Jesuits of the second generation succumbed to the popular views dominating in a late 16th c. Spanish atmosphere permeated by the Inquisition's association of heterodox spirituality with women, racial minorities, and sodomites. It links the 1573 edict against mysticism with the 1599 decree against the admission of racial minorities, the de-emphasis on the importance of women's ministry, and the condemnation of erotic interpretations of Christian bridal language as potentially moving Jesuits too close to feminized racial undesirables. Finally, Chapter Four explores the aftermath of 1599 and its impact on the ministry of Jesuits who, living in the margins and borderlands of the Hispanic empire, were able to preserve in their writings the tradition of Jesuit mysticism and ministry.