Digital Commons Network^™

Spirit Politics: Radical Abolitionists And The Dead End Of Spiritualism, Robert Nelson

University Libraries Faculty and Staff Publications

On June 30, 1858, abolitionist Parker Pillsbury wrote William Lloyd Garrison and readers of the Liberator that he had “just returned from attending one of the largest and most important Reformatory Conventions ever held in this or any other country.” In his report on the “Free Convention” held at Rutland, Vermont, Parker praised the “character and quality” and the “large brains and full hearts” of the convention participants. “The most numerous class” among these participants, he noted, were Spiritualists. Spiritualism had burst on the American scene a decade earlier, quickly attracting thousands of adherents who believed that communication and communion …

Dream-Spirits And Innovation In Aboriginal Australia’S Western Desert, Robert Tonkinson

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

Among the Mardu Aborigines, dreams (kapukurri; jukurrpa) may carry at least the same weight as the events of waking life. ‘Travelling’ in dream-spirit form enhances the possibility of revelations both dangerous and enlightening. In the Australian case, a major cultural dilemma is to accommodate and rationalize an inevitable dynamism when the dominant ideology is one of timelessness and stasis. Two key cultural symbols, the Dreaming and the Law, still substantially shape worldviews and behaviour of the Martu people, who live in the remote Western Desert region. Much of my focus is on a category of popular, largely public contemporary ritual …

Written To The Lamanites: Understanding The Book Of Mormon Through Native Culture And Religion, Gary P. Gillum

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

Latter-day Saints have always been encouraged to seek the truth wherever it can be found. With the Book of Mormon being written especially to the Lamanites, we can assume that the more we know about Lamanite and Native American culture, the more we can understand, appreciate and gain insights as we read that inspired scripture. In this article the writer has compared examples from Native American culture and history to what we read in the Book of Mormon and experience as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Most importantly, as we read through the eyes of …

Ascending The Heavens On Conjured Dragons: Differentiating Between Magic And Religion In Chinese Daoist Practice, Estefan Rodriguez

Theses & ETDs

This thesis examines the theoretical relationship of magic to religion in the Chinese Daoist tradition through a ritual lens with the intent of deriving a model suitable to the purpose of differentiating magic from religion in a Chinese Daoist context. By analyzing various theories of magic from the early 1900s through the early 2000s this thesis grapples with the complexities of the theoretical relationship of magic to religion while simultaneously recognizing a tendency of theories to focus on the ancient and classical Mediterranean. In light of this tendency, this thesis derives a model of the relationship of magic to religion …

Habermas, Same-Sex Marriage And The Problem Of Religion In Public Life, Darren R. Walhof

Peer Reviewed Articles

This article addresses the debate over religion in the public sphere by analysing the conception of ‘religion’ in the recent work of Habermas, who claims to mediate the divide between those who defend public appeals to religion without restriction and those who place limits on such appeals. I argue that Habermas’ translation requirement and his restriction on religious reasons in the institutional public sphere rest on a conception of religion as essentially apolitical in its origin. This conception, I argue, remains embedded in a standard secularization framework, despite Habermas’ claim to offer a new account of secularization. This approach betrays …

Men's Modesty, Religion, And The State: Spaces Of Collision, Karen M. Morin

Faculty Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

The Invention Of The Native Speaker, Thomas Paul Bonfiglio

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

This paper argues that employing the designations “native speaker” and “native language” unreflectively is to engage in a gesture of othering that operates on an axis of empowerment and disempowerment. Bonfiglio examines the ideological legacy of the apparently innocent kinship metaphors of “mother tongue” and “native speaker” by historicizing their linguistic development. He traces the construction of ethnolinguistic nationalism, a composite of national language, identity, geography, and race, which informed the philology of the early modern era and culminated most divisively in the race-conscious discourses of the 19th century. Bonfiglio makes the case that scholarship should scrutinize the tendency to …

Theological Empowerment : Engaging Laity In Multicultural Marketplace Ministry, James Rodney Curpanen

ATS Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Examining Religion And Spirituality As Diversity Training: A Multidimensional Look At Training In The American Psychological Association, Michael J. Vogel, Mark R. Mcminn, Mary A. Peterson, Kathleen Gathercoal

Faculty Publications - Doctor of Psychology (PsyD) Program

What sort of psychotherapeutic approaches might work well with a client who identifies as Muslim, and would they be different from what might work well with a client who identifies as Christian, a client who identifies as atheistic, or client who identifies as Buddhist? Despite ethical commitments to religiosity and spirituality training, it seems that most training programs in professional psychology have neglected to incorporate content from these areas of diversity into their curricula. The current study evaluated religious and spiritual diversity training in both APA-accredited doctoral programs and predoctoral internships, garnering the perspectives of 292 students, interns, faculty, and …

The Effects Of Charismatic Leadership And Religion On Decision Making, Brandt A. Smith

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

We examined the effects of leadership and religious priming on decision-making in a resource allocation task involving a decision between funding hydro-fracture mining research and/or solar energy research. We found strong main effects for charismatic v. non-charismatic leadership, and for religious priming v. non-religious priming. Further, we found a significant interaction in that the effects of religious priming on economic decision-making in a resource allocation task was stronger in the non-charismatic condition than in the charismatic condition. Implications of this research and recommendations for future studies are discussed.

Secularity, Religion And The Possibilities For Religious Citizenship, Lyn Parker, Chang Yau Hoon

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Scholarly predictions of the secularization of the world have proven premature. We see a heterogeneous world in which religion remains a significant and vital social and political force. This paper reflects critically upon secularization theory in order to see how scholars can productively respond to the, at least partly, religious condition of the world at the beginning of the twenty first century. We note that conventional multiculturalism theory and policy neglects religion, and argue the need for a reconceptualization of understanding of religion and secularity, particularly in a context of multicultural citizenship — such as in Australia and Indonesia. We …

An Exploration Of Worship Practices At An African American Church Of Christ, Lamont Ali Francies

Doctoral Dissertations

The identity of the African American Churches of Christ is deeply rooted in the American struggle for racial equality. Without a formal governing body, the Churches of Christ have survived throughout the majority of the 20th century without making an official stance on racial relations. Many leaders in the religious movement have claimed racial immunity but have not addressed the evident division among ethnic lines. This study explored the extent of cultural influence that Caucasian Churches of Christ have on African American congregations.

This study observed these influences and how they shape religious culture and tradition in Black churches. The …

Religious Groups And The Freshman Experience, Tess Culton

ISU Ethnography of the University Initiative

This study examined the benefits provided to first-year students by religious based organizations on university campuses, with an emphasis on the campus of Illinois State University. It also looked at the relationship between the university and these groups. Individuals involved with these groups, both freshmen and adults affiliated, were interviewed. There was also a great deal of observation of group meetings and discussion with university representatives.

Beyond Abortion: Human Genetics And The New Eugenics, John R. Harding Jr.

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Compromising Scholarship: Religious And Political Bias In American Higher Education, George Yancey, Bruce A. Chadwick

BYU Studies

George Yancey, a professor of sociology at the University of North Texas, has focused his research on racial and ethnic bias. His recent books include Interracial Families: Current Concepts and Controversies and Interracial Contact and Social Change. Yancey's newest study in Compromising Scholarship documents the bias of university faculty against members of various groups. Professor Yancey, aware that scientists, just like other Americans, are hesitant to reveal any prejudice or bias, focused his study on "collegiality" in an attempt to distract respondents from the research interest in bias. Yancey conducted his study via Internet survey and blog analyses in the …

Lynch And The Lunacy Of Secularized Religion, Frederick Mark Gedicks

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

"Women With No One": Community And Christianity In A Secular South Indian Homeless Shelter, Connie Etter

Anthropology - Dissertations

This dissertation examines daily life and social service practices in a secular homeless shelter for women in Tamil Nadu, south India. The residents of the shelter have diverse backgrounds but local staff members and volunteers describe them collectively as "women with no one": unwed mothers, orphans, widows, women abandoned or abused by husbands and lovers, former sex workers, prisoners' wives, and women deemed mentally or physically unfit for marriage. Daily negotiations of belonging take place among this transient and diverse group of marginalized women and equally diverse and transnational care providers. The closed shelter campus provides an opportunity to query …

Settling And Laying Down: A Cultural History Of Quakers In Savannah And Statesboro, Georgia, Jonathan Hoyt Harwell

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This descriptive cultural history follows a hybrid methodology often applied to ethno-histories. This approach combines archival research, oral history, and ethnography, with reflexive aspects. I explore some similarities and differences between two Quaker meetings in Southeast Georgia, the small but growing urban meeting in Savannah and a discontinued rural one in the small college town of Statesboro (that sometimes met in the village of Guyton). These case studies of local and personal histories, combined with my observations as a participant in the life of the community, are designed to illuminate fine details of Quaker culture in the recent Deep South.

The Sociology Of Harriet Martineau In Eastern Life, Present And Past: The Foundations Of The Islamic Sociology Of Religion, Deborah A. Ruigh

Department of Sociology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This paper is a critical analysis of Harriet Martineau’s philosophical stance and epistemological modes, her systematic sociological methodology, her use of this methodology, and her sociology of religion. How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838), Eastern Life, Present and Past (1848), and other relevant works will be used to examine Martineau’s evolving epistemological modes as well as her sociology of religion. How to Observe, Martineau’s treatise on systematic sociological methodology and cultural relativism, will serve as an exemplar for analysis of Martineau’s methodological practice as evidenced in Eastern Life. The research problem herein is three-fold: (1) to examine …

Hagiographic And Hymnic Representations Of Women, Dress, And Identity In The Early Christian East, Jenny Bledsoe

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

In the early Christian East, as now, dress indicated conformity or nonconformity to social norms, projecting and sometimes concealing the individual’s gender and religious identities in a social context and indicating their position in the Church hierarchy. In the vitae of female saints Pelagia of Antioch, Anastasia, and Mary of Egypt and the hymns of Ephrem the Syrian, dress also functioned as a textual device to illustrate fundamental changes in the life of the individual Christian and, especially in the case of Ephrem, to convey theological truths about virginity and the relationship between Christ and humanity to an audience of …

Shugendō: Pilgrimage And Ritual In A Japanese Folk Religion, Andrea K. Gill

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

The religion of Shugendō has no shrines and it has no temples. It only has the liminality of the mountains; a space that is viewed in Japan as being ground that only gods, demons, and ghosts may set foot on. But the Yamabushi are not human, gods, or even demons. Instead they are believed to be living Buddhas, rare people that, through practice in the secluded mountains, have become privy to sacred knowledge that has awakened them to their internal Buddha nature, to borrow the words of Kukai, “in this very lifetime”. One of the defining features of Shugendō is …

Theocratic Governance And The Divergent Catholic Cultural Groups In The Usa, Charles L. Muwonge

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This study investigated how the Roman Catholic Church, as a bureaucratic organization, governs the widespread and divergent Catholic cultural groups in the United States. The purposes of this research were (a) to examine the nature of the ecclesiastical governance structure in the Vatican, (b) to explore the nature of the American Catholic cultural environment, (c) to analyze the types of relationships between the divergent American Catholic subcultures, and (d) to establish ways in which ecclesiastical authorities in the Vatican govern the American Catholic cultural environment.

This study was historical in nature and longitudinal in scope. This study examined the relationship …

Mitchell, Eleonore Beck (Fa 71), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid and full-text scan of paper (Click on “Additional Files” below) for Folklife Archives Project 71. “Pre-Lent Celebrations: Shrovetide and Carnival. An Annotated Bibliography.” This collection consists of an annotated bibliography complied by Eleonore Beck Mitchell for a folklore genres class at Western Kentucky University. The collection offers a brief historical account of Shrovetide and Carnival and their connection to Catholicism. The bibliography contains a total of 168 bibliographic entries and annotations for 97 of those entries.

Abraham's Folly, William Paul Haas

Community Scholar Publications

This study is a philosophical reflection, not a formal exegesis, on the text of Genesis 12-22, tracing the interaction between Abraham and God, which led gradually to the Akedah, the binding of Isaac on the altar of sacrifice. The study rests on the hypothesis that Abraham, under the wise tutelage of Yahweh, slowly discovered that he had profoundly misunderstood God, thinking that God, like all the other gods Abraham had known, would eventually demand the sacrifice of his son as a condition for his having any more offspring.

In the light of this assumption attention of given to the rich …

The Tangled Law And Politics Of Religious Freedom, Peter G. Danchin

Faculty Scholarship

This symposium Essay comments on four interrelated themes regarding the right to religious liberty in international law that emerge from Seval Yildirim's article Global Tangles: Laws, Headcoverings and Religious Identity, 10 SANTA CLARA J. INT’L L. 52 (2012). The first is the paradoxical language of freedom in struggles over attempts to proscribe the wearing of the hijab, especially regarding the principles of gender equality and women’s rights. The second is the apparent comfort that governance feminism exhibits with the state imposition of new (presumably woman liberationist) norms and how institutions such as courts may act not only as …

Social Memory And Ritualized Practice In Prehispanic Honduras, Julia A. Hendon

Anthropology Faculty Publications

This paper discusses ritualized practices in domestic spaces as signs of an ongoing and dynamic engagement between the people living there and non-human material and incorporeal social actors, using archaeological evidence from the ancient town of Cerro Palenque and related sites in northwestern Honduras occupied from the 7th to 11th centuries. The paper considers the ways that figurines, pottery, and other kinds of material culture were given meaning through their involvement in these ritualized practices, the materiality of the objects themselves, and their association with human bones. These practices are situated in particular spaces and occur at particular points in …

The Aesthetics Of Religious Freedom, Benjamin L. Berger

Comparative Research in Law & Political Economy

What influence might legal aesthetics have on the shape of religious freedom? Focusing on time and space as foundational elements of the perception of phenomena, this paper argues that these aesthetic intuitions are an under-examined and yet elemental component of what conditions and shapes religious freedom in liberal constitutional orders. If one takes law to be a cultural form, attention to these basic facets of legal perception is essential to understanding law’s encounter with religion. Drawing from a range of examples in the Canadian jurisprudence, this paper shows that legal approaches to religious diversity, multiculturalism, tolerance, and accommodation are all …

Created In The Image Of: Mormonism And The Rhetorical Production Of Identity In Privately-Published Family Histories, Michael K. Peterson

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a qualitative study of seven privately-published family histories written by descendants of Mormon polygamists. Using methods of discourse and rhetorical analysis, these texts and various interviews are analyzed with the contention that identity is a rhetorical production and that the authors (either intentionally or unwittingly) fictionalize each of the identities involved---their own, their readers', and their ancestors'---to bring them together in moments of Burkean identification. These moments of identification are also analyzed in terms of communal and generational memory, temporal proximity, and communal discourses. An important conclusion in this study is that this rhetorical production of identity …

Tibetan Buddhism And The Chinese Communist Party: Moving Forward In The 21st Century, Evan Zwisler

CMC Senior Theses

I examine the state of Tibetan Buddhism that exists in China in the 21st century and what are the best methods to increase religious freedom and political autonomy. I look at what cause China and Tibet to reach this point, and why do the respective nations do what they do. Man people fundamentally misunderstand the reasons why the Chinese Communist Party oppresses Tibetan Buddhism; they aren't concerned with eradicating religion, they want to simply maintain longterm political legitimacy in Tibet.

An Exploratory Study On The Relationship Between Creativity, Religion, And Religiosity, Kim-Lien Thi Nguyen

Master's Theses

Religiosity and religion are often said to be negative influences on one's creativity level. Creativity and religiosity have been looked at as a single dimension, which is a simplistic view. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between creativity and religiosity using scales that measure each construct multidimensionally. Religiosity was measured by one's level of inclusion of transcendent reality and symbolic interpretation of religious content. Creativity was evaluated in terms of fluency, originality, elaboration, abstractness, and resistance to premature closure. It was predicted that participants who exhibit high inclusion of transcendence and literal interpretation of religious content …