Harvard Divinity School

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 zine of short essays, collages, and erasure poetry stitches together representations of Saint Francis with texts like Hospicing Modernity by decolonial scholar Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti in order to explore some of the moral dynamics of modern living. Rather than claim to describe a historical Francis, instead this “modern florilegium” attempts to reconstruct a Francis who speaks to us as a companion in troubled times; as a patron saint of moral injury and as a willfully foolish figure. This Francis, “my” Francis, is one who troubles and complicates the desire to “leave the world,” as much as he insists we find ways to know, feel, and enact new ways of living.

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 paper explores abolition as a spiritual discipline, considering the possibilities of turning a political commitment into a ritual, daily practice that becomes an ethic. Incarcerated people have always documented their experience through writing and storytelling, and in recent decades, scholars have turned to anthologizing their words. Few analyses focus on prison writing influences abolition, and even fewer highlight the spiritual dimensions that connect incarcerated individuals to a larger movement. This work uses writing from incarcerated people to demonstrate the power of spiritual discipline to combat the power of discipline by the state.

During the early years of the Great Depression, financial pressures caused the rate of abortions to at least double despite the procedure’s illegality in every state. In response to this rise in abortions, Catholic theologians published anti-abortion articles in journals like Commonweal, America, and The Linacre Quarterly that described abortion, contraception, and eugenics as murder. Although the publication of these articles coincided with the release of the first monographs arguing for abortion’s legalization, all of which were written by Jewish physicians, Catholic anti-abortion voices dominated the discourse on reproductive health. What did these Catholic perspectives reveal about how they viewed their identities as American Catholics? In the Great Depression, arguments over abortion, including Catholic theologians’ resistance to abortion, were designed around visions of a “civilized” America. In Catholic journals, theologians described Catholicism as a civilizing force that had the power to advance the nation from the darkness of “paganism.” In this way, Catholics portrayed themselves as the saviors of the nation. Ultimately, these anti-abortion arguments decentered the experiences of pregnant people by placing pressure on women to uphold the morality of American civilization.

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.

"Almost No Matter What" is a work of autotheory - according to Stacey Young, a mode of writing "personal experience within political contexts" - in the emerging discipline of post-capitalist pastoral theology. Aware that critiques of capitalism have so far failed to shake us of its spell, "Almost No Matter What" represents the author's assessment of the damage capitalism has wrought on his own relationships and inner life. If Bruce Rogers-Vaughn (who coined the term "post-capitalist pastoral theology") is correct in his view that capitalism enacts a kind of soft trauma on the human psyche, then theory and academic discourse alone do not suffice to bring about healing and transformation; we must bravely examine our own wounds, notice our patterns, face up to our coping mechanisms, and find our way toward new choices. Proceeding from our collective right to "need recognition" - to being seen as ones who need - "Almost No Matter What" takes careful stock of the author's own dwindling spiritual resources in the era of neoliberalism, an aggressive form of capitalism that came of age alongside him. It addresses the reader directly, in a sense saying, "I feel this; do you feel this too?" Insofar as the answer is "yes," the solution becomes ours to forge together.

One can learn a lot about a person based on their social media of choice. No one considered ‘young' uses Facebook anymore—but where have they moved? Despite being considered “dead” by many after its infamous adult content ban in December of 2018, the social media website Tumblr, founded in 2007, is still a viable option—it's even (re)branded itself as a friendlier (albeit less user intuitive) alternative to X, formerly Twitter. While Tumblr is not a new website, it is host to all sorts of discourse—not the strictly academic kind, but rather that which is produced by a specific group of people who most would call “chronically online.” This paper explores one aspect of this online discourse, specifically as it relates to antis, who can be seen reiterating conservative/right-wing religious rhetoric in their crusade against darker aspects of fiction.

This was written as a Capstone Project for the Certificate of Religion in Public Life and it is a project within the education track which prioritizes Religious Literacy within Education. The novel Between Two Moons presents a great opportunity for young adults to explore this text and analyze in ways that religious literacy could be promoted at a high school level. This project includes an outline unit for an AP English Literature curriculum, with the potential for pitching it to College Board.

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.