Arts and Humanities Commons^™

“I Am A Hindu; I Am An Indian And I Am A Man” A Rhetorical Analysis Of Contemporary Hindu Nationalist Political Ideology, Julia Binder

Honors Papers

This paper explores the roots of Hindu Nationalist religiopolitical rhetoric. The argument centers around Ram Madhav’s 2021 book The Hindutva Paradigm: Integral Humanism and the Quest for a Non-Western Worldview. In addition, it examines texts from the websites of various organizations in the Sangh Parivar, a term used for a collection of groups that are aligned in their conservative, Hindu Nationalist agenda. A rhetorical analysis of Hindu Nationalists’ language reveals how the Sangh Parivar attempts to distinguish its worldview from so-called western social structures in order to establish the ancient legitimacy of Brahminical Hinduism. Further, this paper frames contemporary Hindu …

Eros As Interpretation: Isaac Ibn Sahula's Commentary On The Song Of Songs And The Invention Of A Kabbalistic Hermeneutics, Jesse Noily

Honors Papers

Isaac ibn Sahula was a marginal figure in the Castile community of medieval Spanish kabbalists, which included those mystics who would come to compose the groundbreaking book of Zohar toward the end of the thirteenth century. While Ibn Sahula is best known for his anthology of animal fables, this essay casts his more obscure Commentary on the Song of Songs (ca. 1283) as a key document in tracing the genealogy of the Song's interpretation in classical Kabbalah. Through the translation and analysis of two exemplary sections of the Commentary, this essay will discuss its uniquely kabbalistic reading of the Song …

Interpersonal Forgiveness: An Approach To The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Gianna S. Volonte

Honors Papers

Finding peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict has been a daunting and, thus far, impossible task for the past 75 years. Many countries have attempted to negotiate and mediate peace between the two conflict groups, including the United States, Norway, and most Arab nations. With each of these failed attempts, Israelis and Palestinians sank deeper into violence and destruction, believing that retributive justice was the only solution to this conflict. This paper addresses the possibility of a different, non-violent solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict – forgiveness. Forgiveness offers Israelis and Palestinians a path to peace, co-existence, and reconciliation through personal relationships …

The Rise And Fall Of Qigong, William J. Cramer

Honors Papers

This capstone engages the history qigong, a Chinese method of spiritual and bodily cultivation. Although similar Daoist practices have existed for thousands of years, the term qigong was invented by the Chinese military in the 1950s. Qigong exploded in popularity in China from the early 1980s to the late 90s. The Chinese state promoted, appropriated, regulated, and ultimately suppressed qigong. On one hand, the Chinese Communist Party wanted to measure and order qigong according to orthodox scientific and political principles, thus processing and controlling the explosion of spirituality known as “Qigong Fever.” Yet on the other hand, both within and …

1984 And Film: Trauma And The Evolution Of The Punjabi Sikh Identity, Hayley Dawn Segall

Honors Papers

This capstone analyzes Punjabi Sikh identity to expand scholarly discourse on trauma and identity formation. After providing background on Sikh roots in Punjab, this piece relates Sikh trauma from 1984 to a contemporary collective identity. In June 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi launched Operation Bluestar; troops stormed the sacred Golden Temple to capture a perceived militant, Jarnail Bhindranwale. Because hundreds of civilians died in the crossfire, Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. In retaliation, Hindu nationalists slaughtered thousands of Sikhs in the Delhi Riots. The effects of violence against Sikhs in Operation Bluestar and the Delhi riots reflect both …

The Substance Of Kinship: How Ruth The Moabite Became A Daughter In Judah, Cynthia Chapman

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Nature Of The Crescent: Humans And The Natural World In Genesis 1-11 And Mesopotamian Mythology, Bryton A. Smith

Honors Papers

This capstone thesis examines the human-nature relationship in the Genesis primeval history (Gen. 1-11) and compares it to the human-nature relationship in the Mesopotamian Enuma Elish, Atrahasis, and Epic of Gilgamesh myths. Despite common threads running in the two sources of mythology, I argue that Genesis is the only text that portrays humans in a religiously and royally authoritative position that includes responsibility for nature. To clarify, modern Jewish or Christian thought on Genesis in relation to the environment is not the focus of this study. Instead, this study examines Gen. 1-11 in the context of the ancient Near East, …

Purifying The Sacred: How Hindu Nationalism Reshapes Environmentalism In Contemporary India, Owen Dunton Ellerkamp

Honors Papers

The transposition of the cultural, religious, and sacred onto physical geographies is practiced by humans everywhere as landscapes are canvases for meaning making and integral placeholders of histories. In the Indian context, this practice is distinct for several reasons. Scholars of Hindu traditions recognize that the place-oriented disposition and centrality of land to Hindu traditions and cultures is unprecedented and integral to identity formation in modern India. As India faces increasing environmental degradation, the preservation of “sacred geographies” is especially crucial to the identity of Hindu traditions. The rise of Hindu nationalist (Hindutva) political parties (e.g., the Bharatiya Janata Party …

Fearless Foreign Women: Exploring Tamar And Ruth As Characters Within A Post-Exilic Debate On Intermarriage, Rachel Sacks

Honors Papers

This paper examines the influence of Genesis 38 on the Book of Ruth. Both texts feature women—Tamar in Genesis 38 and Ruth in the Book of Ruth—whose extraordinary actions result in the preservation of King David’s descendants. While the Book of Ruth draws on many received traditions, its use of Genesis 38 has been underappreciated and not fully understood. To explore this, I identify similarities in the stories, as well as the likely political purpose and historical context of each text. I analyze the ancient practice of retelling biblical stories, and argue that evidence points to the Book of Ruth …

A Trickster In Disguise: Reading A New Type Of Satan In 2 Corinthians, Miranda Julia Rutherford

Honors Papers

This paper examines three brief mentions of Satan in 2 Corinthians by comparing them with representations in two longer pseudepigraphal texts: the Testament of Job and the Greek Life of Adam and Eve. Although the Satan of 2 Corinthians is often read in tandem with other mentions of an apocalyptic evil figure, I argue that this Satan bears a greater resemblance to the Satan portrayed in the Testament and the Life. In these three texts, Satan's moral alignment is ambiguous: although he often acts for nefarious purposes, he does not oppose God on a cosmic scale as apocalyptic Satan figures …

Rethinking The Ill Body In Phallocentric Western Culture: A Critical Engagement With Luce Irigaray, Sarah E. Kahn

Honors Papers

This capstone critically engages with the work of prolific, contemporary continental philosopher Luce Irigaray on subjectivity and the body in order to challenge widely held notions of the ill body in phallocentric culture. Within my project, phallocentrism means the privileging of an erect, rational, individually autonomous body with defined boundaries. Using sociologist Ken Plummer's journal during his liver disease, I extend Irigaray's critique of phallocentrism to the experience of illness in Western culture. Ill bodies occupy a space analogous to that of female bodies within Irigaray's theory, because phallocentrism subordinates ill bodies to the normative phallic body that is functional, …

Ecotheology And The Parables Of Jesus: Creative Re-Readings Of Parables In Light Of The Environmental Crisis, Anita L. Peebles

Honors Papers

In this paper I demonstrate how adopting a scriptural hermeneutic based in Rosemary Radford Ruether’s prophetic principle can cultivate the ability of Christian communities to interpret Scripture based on their own community context. I will provide an interpretive framework for rethinking relationships between humans, nature, and the Divine that can serve as a correction for entrenched reading practices that reinforce Christianity’s complicity in environmental degradation. I use reader-response theory to conduct literary-critical readings of three well-known parables from the Gospel of Luke. The parabolic structure of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation informs my view of the parables as inherently subversive and …

Virtue Of Attunement: Contributions Of Yuasa Yasuo's Embodied Self-Cultivation Practices To Ted Toadvine's Ecophenomenology Of Difference, Pailyn Brown

Honors Papers

I argue that Ted Toadvine’s Ecophenomenology presents a concept of difference that is totalizing and has a concept of the body that is a-historical and universal. By using Yuasa Yasuo’s ideas that the body is culturally constructed and can be reconstituted through repeated bodily practices, I revise Toadvine’s totalizing difference, emphasizing that we can use our bodies to increasingly learn about difference. I call this a Virtue of Attunement.

Renegotiating A Beheading: Literary Opposition To Varna Hierarchy In Shambuka's Story, Thomas Ahlers Nunan

Honors Papers

The Ramayana's Shambuka story is a controversial incident that has served as a site for the renegotiation of social power structures in India for thousands of years. Because the episode is fundamentally about India's system of caste hierarchy, or varna, any retelling will by its very nature engage in a formulation of social relation between different caste identities. Close readings of these retellings reveal the ways in which the adaptations and appropriations of each version create new literary meanings that provide insight into varna hierarchy as a normative body of social control. Despite the Shambuka incident's hegemonic history, transgressive participation …

Highway Religion: Truckstop Chapels, Evangelism, And Lived Religion On The Road, David Brett Greenberg

Honors Papers

This study examines manifestations of Christian faith found along the highways of the United States, particularly in the form of truckstop chapels. Through ethnographic research and social-historical/theoretical analysis, this study seeks to explore the ways in which Evangelical Christianity, when combined with certain cultural and social particulars of the trucking profession, may be markedly re-contextualized, giving rise to distinctive approaches to ministry, worship, and religious life.

By identifying widespread and often codified specializations among trucking ministries and examining the ways in which the trucking-specific evangelism of such ministries may be applied and lived out by individual drivers of faith, this …

Review: Hokkeji And The Reemergence Of Female Monastic Orders In Premodern Japan, James C. Dobbins

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Educator And Evangelist: Charles Grandison Finney 1792-1875, Sonja Rice, Oberlin College Library

Exhibition Catalogs

Exhibition Dates: August 14 to October 24, 1992
Catalog includes sections on Finney's early life, revival work, theology and sermons, and contemporary views of Finney.

The Tragic Sense Of Life: The Philosophy Of Miguel De Unamuno, John C. Morgan

Honors Papers

The major thesis of this research work has been that Unamuno’s life and writings can best be seen in terms of a philosophy of tragedy. Tragedy, in the Unamunian sense, means an agonizing struggle between opposing forces so well matched that no final victory of one over the other is possible. Unamuno wrote about and lived within this “tragic sense of life,” which consists of this agonizing struggle; and it is the centrality of this fact which can be demonstrated in his writings. Unamuno’s own life and the life of the so-called “Generation of 1898” serves as an introduction to …

A History Of The Evangelical Alliance: Pioneer In Christian Co-Operation, Glenn E. Besco

Honors Papers

This study is an attempt to trace the history of the Evangelical Alliance. I was introduced to the Alliance by the biography of Philip Schaff. It appeared that this was an interesting and unexplored area of Church history. The Evangelical Alliance has been overlooked by most popular historians of the ecumenical movement. The only work that presents a comprehensive study is the all-embracing history of the ecumenical movement by Ruth Rouse and Stephen C. Neill. Even the renowned Church historian Kenneth S. Latourette relies upon Rouse and Neill' s work for the note he makes of the Alliance. I am …

The Voodoo Gospel And The Christian Gospel, William Dewitt Burton

Honors Papers

When on September 4, 1950 I went to the Republic of Haiti as a missionary for the Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Mission Convention, U.S.A., I found Voodoo to be far more prevalent there than I had been led to believe, and I was very ill-prepared to cope with it in the rural area where I was assigned to work. I knew also that after two years I was to go to Liberia, ' West Africa, where I would find a similar situation. I then set about to learn all that I could about Voodoo.

Two main reasons, then, led me …

The Oberlin Negro And His Church, Homer Julius Tucker

Honors Papers

This thesis is the result of a study which represents an interest in a group of ill-adjusted community churches. For a long time I have been interested in the Negro and his church life here in Oberlin. While the background out of which these churches grew and the environment in which they operate are superior in many ways to those of most communities, the churches themselves are definitely sub-model.

My ultimate objective has been to investigate the aforesaid topic with the hope of discovering problems that are preventing the churches from expanding and serving the community, as well as to …

A Study To Determine A Workable Program For The Training Of Leaders For Service In The Church Of Christ In Siam, Newton Carl Elder

Honors Papers

"New occasions -beach new duties" but do not always make clear the course one should follow in performing those duties. It is necessary to stand off and view the situation in which one finds himself in order to disentangle the various threads that at close range seem to run hopelessly together. This thesis is an effort to clarify the situation in which the author has been placed by the members of the Siam Mission, but for which he has had little preparation either in training or experience.

Early in the year 1955, the author and his family were temporarily assigned …

The Christian Minister Protagonist Of Social Justice, Ellsworth N. Escott

Honors Papers

The thesis to be elaborated in this paper is that the Christian minister has a responsibility of profound import in the great common enterprise of achieving social justice. By social justice we mean the greatest possible realization by the individual and by society of abundance of life by way of the most complete practical coordination of individual attitudes, social relationships, economic arrangements and ethical motives. In the development of this thesis we shall be under necessity of employing a number of technical terms, such as democracy, dictatorship, capitalism, profit economy, acquisitive society, economic imperialism, which are in current use. We …

The Theology And Psychology Of The Negroes' Religion Prior To 1860 As Shown Particularly In The Spirituals: A Thesis, Norman Gregg Long

Honors Papers

In this thesis the writer has endeavored to treat the distinctive religion of the American Negroes so as to make evident, as far as he is able, the circumstances of its origin, its early development, the changes which have conditioned it, the theology in which it has been formulated, and the psychological motives which have been expressed in it. This study is made with the following specific objectives in view:

1. To study the Negro Spirituals as a body of musical literature in which the Negroes' religion prior to 1861 is embodied.

2. To point out the most outstanding features …

The Ethics Of Jesus And The Plight Of The Coal Miners, James Croswell Perkins

Honors Papers

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the ethics of Jesus and to describe conditions which have resulted from a failure to apply his teachings to an important phase of economic life. No attempt will be made to offer a panacea.

Some of the limitations of this study should be noted. Attention will be confined to the bituminous coal industry. As the main interest in this thesis is ethical, it has been necessary to neglect many economic aspects of the problem. We are fully aware of the existence and importance of such questions, but they seem beyond the scope …

Thesis: Relation Between Eschatology And Jesus' Ethics, Robert L. Sutherland

Honors Papers

Speculations on the final destiny of man and of the world have busied wise man's minds of many ages. Although findings on the future life no longer captivate our thoughts as during the Middle Ages, yet they are still a by no means neglected part of almost every man's theology. The change that we label by the common term death appears to be universally imposed upon mankind. To be aware of the approaching end of life-as-it-is stimulates many of us to probe the hereafter. That search and its fruits become an integral part of our theology. Has this fact of …