Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Review: 'Racial Justice And The Catholic Church', Jana Marguerite Bennett

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Concepts Of The Body In The Zhuangzi, Deborah A. Sommer (司馬黛蘭)

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

In this essay Sommer explores how the Zhuangzi, a Chinese philosophical text that dates to the third or fourth centuries BCE, uses different terms for the human body. She explores each term's different fields of meaning: the body might appear as gong 躬, a sanctimonious ritualized body; shen 身, a site of familial and social personhood; xing 形, an elemental form that experiences mutations and mutilations; or ti 體, a complex, multilayered corpus whose center can be anywhere but whose boundaries are nowhere. The Zhuangzi is one of the richest early Chinese sources for exploring conceptualizations of the visceral …

Grounding "Language" In The Senses: What The Eyes And Ears Reveal About Ming 名 (Names) In Early Chinese Texts, Jane Geaney

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Scholarship on early Chinese theories of “language” regularly treats the term ming 名 (name) as the equivalent of “word.” But there is a significant difference between a “word” and a “name.”¹ Moreover, while a “word” is often understood to mean a unit of language that is identifiable in its sameness across speech and writing, there is reason to believe that a ming was mainly used to mean a unit of meaningful sound.² Analyzing the function of ming is a prerequisite for understanding early Chinese theories of “language”—if such a term is even appropriate. Such an analysis will also …

Religious Experiences In New England, Douglas L. Winiarski

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

This chapter examines the shifting language of conversion in New England Congregationalism - the bastion of Puritan culture in North America - from the period of settlement in the 1630s to the eve of the Civil War. Evidence is drawn from a database of more than a thousand church-admission narratives from nearly three dozen communities scattered across Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. Throughout this period, most Congregational ministers remained committed to a Calvinist theology that emphasized innate human depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, and irresistible grace. Yet the importance of conversion - the sacred calculus through which God winnowed saints …

Dynamical Similarity And The Problem Of Evil, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Discussions of evil commonly fault God for not “doing something.” Defenders of God respond that God had good reasons for not “doing something.” Detractors observe that if a human being can snatch the toddler from the path of the oncoming bus, why does not God snatch the bus from the path of the oncoming toddler? The underlying assumption in such discussions is that God’s “doing something” is similar to humans’ “doing something.”

If human beings bear the image of their Creator as the Abrahamic faiths maintain, it is natural to suppose that divine action is similar to human action. But …

Singular Christianity: Marriage And Singleness As Discipleship, Jana Marguerite Bennett

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

If only Paul had not written chapter seven of his first letter to the Corinthians. Christians can fairly easily avoid questions about whether to be married or single when they stick to the Gospels, for Jesus does nothing clear-cut with respect to states of life. He is present at the wedding at Cana in John; in Matthew, he issues a prohibition against divorce; he speaks about being eunuchs for the Kingdom of God, and reconfigures family in his exhortation that the ones who are his disciples are his mother and brothers. Because Jesus does not appear to have much of …