Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Global Megachurch Studies: The State, Evolution, And Maturation Of A Field, Chad Bauman

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Over the past decade, the field of megachurch studies has matured and become global in its scope and orientation. The number of texts produced on megachurches since 2010 is nearly triple the number produced before that date, and many of the newest texts decenter North America. Megachurch studies today, therefore, is a properly international and cosmopolitan field. The article has four interrelated aims: (1) to provide a thorough overview of major themes and work in megachurch studies, with special emphasis on works emerging in the last decade; (2) to update two excellent state-of-the-field reviews by Stephen Ellingson (in 2008 and …

Litigating The Limits Of Religion: Minority And Majority Concerns About Institutional Religious Liberty In India, Chad Bauman

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Western religious liberty advocates tend to focus on restrictions placed on minority religious communities, particularly when advocating abroad, that is, outside of the country in which they reside. In all contemporary democracies, however, adherents of religious majorities also express concerns about religious liberty. For this reason, the article considers both minority and majority concerns about institutional religious freedom in India. This essay provides an overview of religious freedom issues, with a particular focus on institutions, though, as I acknowledge, it is not always simple to distinguish individual from institutional matters of religious freedom. After describing various minority and majority concerns …

Anti-Christian Violence In India, Chad Bauman

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

No abstract provided.

Critiques Of Christianity From Savarkar To Malhotra, Chad Bauman

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Featured in this chapter are a number of prominent Indian critics of evangelism and conversion to Christianity over roughly the last one hundred years. After briefly covering early twentieth-century figures like Savarkar, Hedgewar, and Golwalkar, the chapter focuses primarily on postcolonial leaders of the last few decades, especially Mohandas Gandhi (who survived just barely into the “postcolonial” era), Ram Swarup, Sita Ram Goel, Arun Shourie, Ashok Chowgule, Swami Dayananda Saraswati, and Radha Rajan. Finally, at the end, to demonstrate the multinational scope of these polemics, I briefly discuss the views of the Hindu American Foundation and Rajiv Malhotra. It is …

“I Want To Love Islam, I Really Do, But . . . ”: Islamophilic Classrooms In Islamophobic Times, Nermeen Mouftah

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This essay reflects on a critical incident that occurred during a seminar discussion about the age of Aishah at the time of her marriage to the prophet Muhammed. I take students’ discomfort with the material and their expression of emotions—especially their desire to love Islam—as an opening to think about the opportunities and challenges of working with students’ emotions in the classroom. I begin by problematizing love (or the want of it) as an Islamophilic response to students’ awareness of the dangers of Islamophobia. I then go on to entertain the possibility of embracing love as a ‘productive’ emotion that …

Faith, Doubt, And Reason - Conclusion And Epilogue, Brent Hege

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Courtesy of Wipf and Stock Publishers:

Faith, doubt, and reason are universal human faculties, yet they are frequently misunderstood, denigrated, and even abused. What does it mean to have faith, and what distinguishes faith from belief? Can someone have faith without religious commitments? What is doubt, and what is its relationship to faith and belief? How do we make sense of evil and suffering? What roles does reason play in our lives? What do we do when we have the sneaking suspicion that life is absurd? What do we love, and what do we fear? How do faith, doubt, and …

The Mandaean Book Of John: Text And Translation, James F. Mcgrath, Charles G. Häberl

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

No abstract provided.

Exorcising Mythicism’S Sky-Demons: A Response To Raphael Lataster’S “Questioning Jesus’ Historicity.”, James F. Mcgrath

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

No abstract provided.

Learning From Jesus’ Wife: What Does Forgery Have To Do With The Digital Humanities?, James F. Mcgrath

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

McGrath’s chapter on the so-called Gospel of Jesus’ Wife sets aside as settled the question of the papyrus’ authenticity, and explores instead what we can learn about the Digital Humanities and scholarly interaction in a digital era from the way the discussions and investigations of that work unfolded, and how issues that arose were handled. As news of purported new finds can spread around the globe instantaneously facilitated by current technology and social media, how can academics utilize similar technology to evaluate authenticity, but even more importantly, inform the broader public about the importance of provenance, and the need for …

Book Review: *Living Without The Dead: Loss And Redemption In A Jungle Cosmos,* By Piers Vitebsky, Chad Bauman

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

No abstract provided.

The Institution Of Gender-Based Asylum And Epistemic Injustice: A Structural Limit, Ezgi Sertler

Philosophy, Religion, and Classics

One of the recent attempts to explore epistemic dimensions of forced displacement focuses on the institution of gender-based asylum and hopes to detect forms of epistemic injustice within assessments of gender related asylum applications. Following this attempt, I aim in this paper to demonstrate how the institution of gender-based asylum is structured to produce epistemic injustice at least in the forms of testimonial injustice and contributory injustice. This structural limit becomes visible when we realize how the institution of asylum is formed to provide legitimacy to the institutional comfort the respective migration courts and boards enjoy. This institutional comfort afforded …

Writing A Moral Code: Algorithms For Ethical Reasoning By Humans And Machines, James F. Mcgrath, Ankur Gupta

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The moral and ethical challenges of living in community pertain not only to the intersection of human beings one with another, but also our interactions with our machine creations. This article explores the philosophical and theological framework for reasoning and decision-making through the lens of science fiction, religion, and artificial intelligence (both real and imagined). In comparing the programming of autonomous machines with human ethical deliberation, we discover that both depend on a concrete ordering of priorities derived from a clearly defined value system.

The Gospel Of John As Jewish Messianism: Formative Influences And Neglected Avenues In The History Of Scholarship, James F. Mcgrath

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Messianism is sometimes construed broadly in relation to a wide variety of savior figures, but within the context of Judaism, messianism has a more natural narrow focus on anointed figures – and within early Christianity, the Davidic king in particular. The study of the Gospel of John, however, has tended to veer away from focusing on such matters, often based on the conviction that the Gospel itself does likewise. The case can be made, however, that the exalted status of Jesus in the Gospel of John, as one who embodies the divine presence and power, is attributed to him precisely …

Review Of Telling Tales About Jesus: An Introduction To The New Testament Gospels, James F. Mcgrath

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Article reviews the book, Telling Tales about Jesus: An Introduction to the New Testament Gospels, by Warren Carter.

Words Taken For Wonders: Conversion And Religious Authority Among The Dalits Of Colonial Chhattisgarh, Chad Bauman

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

An unedited, prepublication version of the book chapter.

Book Review: *Jesus In Asia,* By R. S. Sugirtharajah, Chad Bauman

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

No abstract provided.

Faith Development Beyond Religion: The Ngo As Site Of Islamic Reform, Nermmen Mouftah

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Anthropological field studies of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in their unique cultural and political contexts. Cultures of Doing Good: Anthropologists and NGOs serves as a foundational text to advance a growing subfield of social science inquiry: the anthropology of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Thorough introductory chapters provide a short history of NGO anthropology, address how the study of NGOs contributes to anthropology more broadly, and examine ways that anthropological studies of NGOs expand research agendas spawned by other disciplines. In addition, the theoretical concepts and debates that have anchored the analysis of NGOs since they entered scholarly discourse after World War II …

Luther, The Flawed Giant, Brent A. R. Hege

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Presentation given in part of the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation at the First Lutheran Church on October 21, 2017 in Columbus, Indiana.

Europe At The Time Of The Reformation, Brent A. R. Hege

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Presentation given in part of the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation at the First Lutheran Church on October 21, 2017 in Columbus, Indiana.

Luther’S Life And Thought, Brent A. R. Hege

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Presentation given in part of the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation at the First Lutheran Church on October 21, 2017 in Columbus, Indiana.

Rudolf Bultmann On Myth, History, And The Resurrection, Brent Hege

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The Christian faith stands or falls with the confession that Jesus Christ is risen. While that assertion itself is perhaps uncontroversial, precisely what this confession means has been a subject of profound significance and immense controversy for centuries. Central to this discussion is the role of myth and history in the biblical witness and in the church’s theological engagement with the confession that Jesus Christ is risen. This book traces key trajectories of German Protestant discussions of myth, history, and the resurrection from its earliest critical analysis in the work of Hermann Samuel Reimarus and David Friedrich Strauss to contemporary …

Slow Scholarship: Do Bloggers Rush In Where Jesus’ Wife Would Fear To Tread?, James F. Mcgrath

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

No abstract provided.

Obedient Unto Death: Philippians 2:8, Gethsemane, And The Historical Jesus, James Mcgrath

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Despite the extensive attention that has been given to Philippians 2:6–11 in relation to its Christology, the possibility that v8 alludes to the story about Jesus in Gethsemane has received only cursory mention when it has been considered at all. Philippians 2:8 and the Gospel tradition converge in depicting Jesus choosing to be obedient to God even to the point of death, in the absence of an interpretation of that death as itself salvific. The historical allusion, offered in the midst of a heavily theologized Christo- logical statement, offers an excellent test case for an approach to history which accepts …

Luther Goes Viral: Mass Communication In The Lutheran Reformation, Brent A. R. Hege

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Presentation given at the Indiana Association of Historians Annual Meeting on February 18, 2017 in Lafayette, Indiana.

Christian Responses To Discrimination And Violence In India And Sri Lanka: Avoidance, Advocacy, And Interfaith Engagement, Chad Bauman

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

No abstract provided.

Pentecostals And Interreligious Conflict In India: Proselytization, Marginalization, And Anti-Christian Violence, Chad Bauman

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

No abstract provided.

Orality And Intertextuality, James F. Mcgrath

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

No abstract provided.

What Is Religious Freedom?, Brent Hege

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Last year's passage of Indiana's Religious Freedom Act set off a storm of controversy about the nature of religious freedom and the status of LGBT rights in Indiana. In this presentation, Dr. Brent Hege from the Department of Philosophy, Religion, and Classics will discuss the meaning of religious freedom, offer some historical context for understanding the RFRA, and challenge the theological assumptions supporting this new law.

What Has Coruscant To Do With Jerusalem? A Response And Reflections At The Crossroads Of Hebrew Bible And Science Fiction, James F. Mcgrath

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

No abstract provided.

Appreciation, Analysis, And Critique: The Oxford Handbook Of Religious Conversion And The Future Of Conversion Studies, Chad Bauman

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

No abstract provided.