History of Religion Commons^™

Menorah Review (No. 76, Winter/Spring, 2012)

Menorah Review

A Neo-Zionist Vison -- An Idiosyncratic Journey to God -- An Open Letter to Tarek Fatah -- Books in Brief: New and Notable -- Changing the Course of a River -- Leaves without Trees -- Moreshet: From the Classics - The Ethical Will of Eleazar of Mayence -- Zachor: John Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration

Ecclesiastical Economics: Some Financial Considerations Of Mormon Settlement In Illinois, R Philip Reynolds

Librarian and Staff Publications

This article discusses financial aspects of Mormon settlements in Illinois between 1839 and 1846. Almost all discussion concerning Mormons during this time is limited to the city of Nauvoo itself although, Mormon contact in Illinois extended far beyond the city. Research about Mormon settlements outside the city often fails to relate the importance of these settlements to the success of Nauvoo. Nauvoo was plagued by shortages of hard currency and food. The need for lumber and grain mills to accommodate its explosive growth was constant. These economic realities drove many of the decisions concerning Mormon settlement and overshadowed the religious …

Menorah Review (No. 77, Summer/Fall, 2012)

Menorah Review

A Golden Poet of Spain's Golden Age -- Beyond the Second Coming -- Books in Brief: New and Notable -- Cantorial Challenges -- Jewishness in the World: A Chabad Definition -- Moreshet - From the Classics: A 1797 Wedding -- Painful Presence: Jews in Russian Music -- Zachor: Sicut Judaeis ("And Thus to the Jews")

Faith And Practice: A Book Of Christian Discipline 2012, George Fox University Archives

Faith and Practice

Faith and Practice: A Book of Christian Discipline, Northwest Yearly Meeting of Friends Church 2012. Publication of the Northwest Yearly Meeting of Friends.

Historiography As Devotion, Suzanne Abrams Rebillard

School of Information Studies - Post-doc and Student Scholarship

This article locates Gregory of Nazianzus's Poemata de seipso in the Classical historiographical tradition by comparing their historical meta-narrative to Herodotus' and Thucydides'. It then embarks on a case study of Poem 34, On Silence During Lent, closely analyzing the poem in light of recent narratological work on Herodotus' project. Like the Herodotean text, Gregory's piece reveals a variety of hermeneutical possibilities while simultaneously making the audience aware of the histor's compositional processes. The histor who emerges is a salvific and cosmological presence that focalizes the divine, thereby serving as an example of proper human/ divine relations. The poem would …

From Priest's Whore To Pastor's Wife: Clerical Marriage And The Process Of Reform In The Early German Reformation, Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer

History Faculty Book Gallery

On 13 June 1525, Martin Luther married Katharina von Bora, a former nun, in a private ceremony officiated by city preacher Johann Bugenhagen. Whilst Luther was not the first former monk or Reformer to marry, his marriage immediately became one of the iconic episodes of the Protestant Reformation. From that point on, the marital status of clergy would be a pivotal dividing line between the Catholic and Protestant churches. Tackling the early stages of this divide, this book provides a fresh assessment of clerical marriage in the first half of the sixteenth century, when the debates were undecided and the …

Coptic Prayer Book Leaves: Warrior Saint Images, Denise Loncar

Gift of the Word

PSU student Denise Loncar presents her research on a selection of illustrated pages from an 18^th-century Coptic prayer book. The hand-painted images of Christian saints on horseback (St. George, St. Theodore the Eastern, and St. Mercurius) are similar to equestrian representations seen in Eastern Orthodox, Armenian, and Ethiopian iconography, indicating a complex interplay of cultural influences that is also shown by the Coptic, Arabic, and Greek text.

Dimensions: 19.5 x 13.7 cm Origin: Egypt

Portland State University Library, Special Collections, Mss. 40

Abbasid Qur’An Leaf In Kufic Script Description, Jeffrey Brown

Gift of the Word

PSU student Jeff Brown presents his research on a leaf from a Qur’an manuscript in Kufic script. This vellum leaf dates to approximately the turn of the tenth century (early 4^th century AH), the height of the Abbasid dynasty, and may have been produced in one of the great centers of Islamic culture such as Cairo, Damascus, or Kairouan. Kufic script is common to Qur’ans from this era. This page is from Surah 87 (Al-A’la), verses 11-15 [verso], 16-19 [recto], which warns against the perils of a worldly existence that ignores the path to salvation put forth by scripture. …

Authoring Authority: The Apostle Paul And The Prophet Joseph Smith--A Critical Comparison Of Texts And Power In The Generation Of Religious Community, Alonzo Huntsman

CGU Theses & Dissertations

. . . believe in God, believe also in me . . . --John 14.1

"Authoring Authority" analyzes the ways texts function to generate social cohesion while at the same time advancing the power interests of their authors. The study is a comparative, critical, and interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary excavation of the religion-making efforts of the first-century Christian Apostle Paul and the nineteenth-century Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith.

This comparison defamiliarizes and recharacterizes the heroes and origin-stories of the dominant (and my own) tradition to force important questions about scholarly perspectives, interests and deferences (protection, exceptionalization), self-reflexivity, and politics. The project's critical orientation deploys …

Awakening Between Science, Art & Ethics: Variations On Japanese Buddhist Modernism, 1890–1945, James Mark Shields

Faculty Contributions to Books

The half-century between the publication of the Imperial Rescript on Education (kyōiku chokugo 教育勅語, 1890) and the bombing of Pearl Harbor (1941) was one of tremendous institutional and intellectual tumult in the world of Japanese Buddhism. Buddhist sects and scholars were not immune to the changing political and cultural winds. While it is true that by the late 1930s, the majority of Buddhist leaders and institutions had capitulated to the status quo, preaching, in the words of Joseph Kitagawa “the virtues of peace, harmony, and loyalty to the throne,” the previous decades show anything but a continuous progression towards …

She Shall Be Saved In Childbearing: Submission, Contemplation Of Conception, And Annunciation Imagery In The Books Of Hours Of Two Late Medieval Noblewomen, Dallas A. Grubbs

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

The role of the Book of Hours in female lay devotional life during the late Middle Ages has been investigated and analyzed by many scholars and art historians over the course of the past century. The general consensus has been that semi-literate medieval women valued these books greatly as instructional manuals on how to attain salvation, using the images contained within as spiritual aids meant to encourage individual contemplation and pious recitation. Prayers for mediation, protection, and guidance featured prominently within these books and many historians of both genders have come to the conclusion that Books of Hours were a …

Gender Concerns: Monks, Nuns, And Patronage Of The Cistercian Order In Thirteenth-Century Flanders And Hainaut, Erin L. Jordan

History Faculty Publications

The Cistercian order, which had its origins in the late eleventh century, transformed the spiritual landscape of western Europe. The order's insistence on a return to the austerity and simplicity that had originally informed Benedictine life reenergized monasticism, spawning hundreds of new abbeys within decades. By the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Cistercians dominated monastic life, surpassing their black-robed predecessors in terms of popularity and replacing them among patrons as favored recipients of donations. Yet, while a sizable body of historiography exists concerning the ability of men's houses to translate this appeal into spiritual and material success, questions remain …

Local Reception Of Religious Change Under Henry Viii And Edward Vi: Evidence From Four Suffolk Parishes, William Keene Thompson

Dissertations and Theses

From the second half of Henry VIII's reign through that of his son Edward VI, roughly 1530 through 1553, England was in turmoil. Traditional (Catholic) religion was methodically undermined, and sometimes violently swept away, in favor of a biblically based evangelical faith imported and adapted from European dissenters/reformers (Protestants). This thesis elucidates the process of parish-level religious change in England during the tumultuous mid sixteenth century. It does so through examining the unique dynamics and complexities of its local reception in a previously unstudied corner of the realm, the Suffolk parishes of Boxford, Cratfield, Long Melford, and Mildenhall. This thesis …

Religious Culture: Faith In Soviet And Post-Soviet Russia, Jerry Pankhurst

Russian Culture

The former Soviet Union is undergoing a religious revival. People inside and outside the Russian Orthodox church are reexamining its ancient ways, rediscovering its long-forgotten saints, searching its institutional memory for answers to urgent questions facing the nation. The Western reaction to this remarkable resurgence of religion in Russia has been mixed. All observers welcome the fact that free inquiry about religion and free religious worship have been restored in the Russian Federation. At the same time, many are concerned about the xenophobic tendencies that have accompanied the religious revival in Russia and that became especially evident after the liberal …

The Newbury Prayer Bill Hoax: Devotion And Deception In New England's Era Of Great Awakenings, Douglas L. Winiarski

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

[...] [T]he “Tappin manuscript,” as I refer to it in the essay that follows, presents an intriguing puzzle. If Christopher Toppan did not compose the unusual prayer request, then who did? When? Why? Solving the riddle of the Tappin manuscript leads us into the troubled final years of one of New England’s most pugnacious ministers and the evangelical underworld of the Great Awakening that he had come to despise.

Covenant Nation: The Politics Of Grace In Early American Literature, Justin M. Scott-Coe

CGU Theses & Dissertations

The argument of this dissertation is that a critical reading of the concept of "covenant" in early American writings is instrumental to understanding the paradoxes in the American political concepts of freedom and equality. Following Slavoj Zizek's theoretical approach to theology, I trace the covenant concept in early American literature from the theological expressions and disputes in Puritan Massachusetts through Jonathan Edwards's Freedom of Will and the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, showing how the covenant theology of colonial New England dispersed into more "secular" forms of what may be called an American political theology. The first chapter provides an …

The Relationship Between Liturgical Practice And Spirituality In The Church Of The Nazarene With Special Reference To John Wesley's Doctrine Of Christian Perfection, Dirk Ray Ellis

Dissertations

The Church of the Nazarene, following the pattern of the American holiness movement that gave it birth, adopted a modified version of Wesley's doctrine of Christian perfection. During the early years of the denomination Christian perfection was promoted feverishly through revivalism and worship structured after the camp meeting model; however, over time the promotion and propagation of holiness began to wane. Currently, the belief in and pursuit of inward holiness among both clergy and laity are rapidly vanishing. For more than a decade scholars and denominational leaders have recognized that this loss of spiritual vitality has placed the Church of …

Creating Heaven On Earth: Jim Bakker And The Birth Of A Sunbelt Pentecostalism, Eric G. Weinberg

Theses and Dissertations--History

This dissertation traces the rise of Jim and Tammy Bakker and analyzes the birth and growth of prosperity theology in the United States of America. It highlights how Jim and Tammy created a form of Pentecostalism that grew alongside and because of the growth of the Sunbelt. It blossomed in the new suburban enclaves of this region. Jim Bakker's religious ideas had their roots in an increasingly powerful anti-New Deal coalition that was led by the conservative business community. Positive thinking and the prosperity gospel reinforced their beliefs in unfettered markets and their opposition to activist government. Bakker combined these …

Vincentian Footprints In China: The Lives, Deaths, And Legacies Of Francis Clet, Cm, And John Gabriel Perboyre, Cm, Anthony E. Clark

History Faculty Scholarship

The American poet and essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), once wrote that, “The mass of men worry themselves into nameless graves while here and there a great unselfish soul forgets himself into immortality.” And in this vein Vincent de Paul (1581- 1660) said that, “Love is inventive to infinity.” I would like to begin my comments about the Vincentian footprints in China by acknowledging that, based on my research, the Lazarist footprints there were at their root directed toward the goal of charity. And while I will necessarily recount instances of conflict, both cultural and religious, I acknowledge that much …

Beijing's "Benedictine" Age: A Report On China's Renewal In Catholic Worship, Anthony E. Clark

History Faculty Scholarship

Confucius’ disciple, Yan Hui, once asked the Master how to become a good person. “Goodness,” the Master said, comes about when “one forms himself according to ritual.” China has never quite lost its Confucian sense of ritual, for ritual is what forms a person in goodness, and in his final exhortation to his inquisitive student, Confucius suggests that ritual forms our vision, our speech, and our actions. Little wonder, then, that when Jesuit missionaries first went to China in the late sixteenth century, one of the aspects of Christianity that attracted Chinese most was the richness of Catholic ritual. Few …