History of Religion Commons^™

The Tying Of The Ceremonial Wedding Thread: A Feminist Analysis Of “Ritual” And “Tradition” Among Syro-Malabar Catholics In India, Sonja Thomas

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article presents a feminist analysis of patriarchy persisting in Catholicism of the Syro-Malabar rite in Kerala. The article specifically considers the impact of charismatic Catholicism on women of the Syro-Malabar rite and argues that it is important to interrogate this new face of religiosity in order to fully understand how certain rituals are allowed to change and be fluid, while others, especially concerning female sexuality, are enshrined as “tradition” which often restricts the parameters for women’s empowerment and may reinforce caste and patriarchal hegemonies preventing feminist solidarity across different religious- and caste-based groups.

Daughters Of The Sun: "The Birth" (An Excerpt), Megan Lynn

Scholarly and Creative Works Conference (2015 - 2021)

“You have never heard of me before. You have never heard of me, but my name has come out of your mouth thousands of times.”

So begins my novel, Daughters of the Sun, the story of Jesus’s twin sister, Alleluia. Using the narrative framework seen in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Alleluia tells her story over one night—Saturday into Sunday morning—in an appropriated apartment facing a church. She weaves into her story another tale of women who have lived in shadows cast by the men around them, women whom history chose to vilify—Lilith, Adam’s first wife who was written out of …

To Be Magic: The Art Of Ana Mendieta Through An Ecofeminist Lens, Elizabeth Ann Baker

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Ana Mendieta was a Cuban-born American artist whose unique body of work incorporated performance, activism, Earth art, installation, and the Afro-Cuban practices of Santería. She began her career at the University of Iowa, were she initially received her degree in painting in 1969. It was not until 1972 that Mendieta shifted radically to performance art.

Though she was raised Catholic, she developed an interest in the rituals involved with Santería, a culturally predominant Cuban religion, and it deeply influenced her work in her choice of materials and settings. Santería is one of the major faith-based lifestyles of Cuba …

Fawad And Zakeela, Fawad, Zakeela, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Fawad and his wife, Zakeela, have three children. Zakeela was a beautician, and Fawad was a singer in the Baghlan district in Afghanistan. The music he produced was not in accordance with the strict restrictions of the Taliban. They threatened his life and assaulted him many times, so he decided to leave with his family to Kabul. Fawad’s day job was as an FM radio producer; at night, he moonlighted as a singer and musician. He produced music for ceremonies and weddings, often performing for the women’s part, which the Taliban did not accept. Eventually, his life was again threatened, …

The Beautiful Mystery: Examining Jonathan Edwards’ View Of Marriage, Russell J. Allen

Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History

In contemporary evangelical circles, Jonathan Edwards has gained wide popularity for his theological writings and vital role in the First Great Awakening. However, despite these often romanticized views, Edwards nonetheless stood in the midst of an eighteenth century society that began to develop new norms for sexual practice and new legal guidelines to support them. In order to combat what he saw to be a decaying moral culture, Edwards took a strong stance on marital issues, often to the displeasure of his congregation. What lay behind these convictions was a deep theological understanding of the sanctity of marriage. These views, …

Charles Lewis Cocke Papers, Beth S. Harris

Finding Aids: Guides to the Collections

Personal and professional papers of Charles Lewis Cocke, educator, founder and first president of Hollins University, and Baptist layman.

The Dichotomy Of Pudicitia, Amber L. Harvey

Young Historians Conference

The lives of women in the Roman Republic were incredibly restricted and controlled by their male counterparts, yet key counters to this restriction are often overlooked, mainly that of a woman’s pudicitia. Pudicitia was a defining moral quality that encompassed state, familial, sexual, and other duties, a woman held in society. These qualities, are shown in the mythical Rape of the Sabines, and allow female participation in the Conflict of the Orders and the defiance of the Vestal Virgins. These allowances are countered by aspects of pudicitia that restricted rights and participation, ultimately yielding a system that paradoxically encouraged …

Stoning In Iran: A Sexist And Overlooked Practice, Megan R. Haugh

What All Americans Should Know About Women in the Muslim World

This paper seeks to dissect and expose the ancient practice of stoning in Iran, and to analyze the injustices that are built into this punishment.

Reclaiming And Reconciling What Was Originally Ours--Christianity And Feminism: A Concise History, Soquel Filice

History

No abstract provided.

Building Bridges: Church Women United And Social Reform Work Across The Mid-Twentieth Century, Melinda M. Johnson

Theses and Dissertations--History

Church Women United incorporated in December 1941 as an interdenominational and interracial movement of liberal Protestant women committed to social reform. The one hundred organizers represented ten million Protestant women across the United States. They organized with the express purposes of helping to bring peace on Earth and to develop total equality within all humanity.

Church Women United was the bridge between the First and Second Wave of Feminism and the bridge between the Social Gospel and Social Justice Movements. Additionally they connected laterally with numerous social and religious groups across American society. As such, they exemplify the continuity and …

The Queer And The Bodily: Explorations Of Power In Women's Visionary Writing In The Book Of Margery Kempe 2014, Jayne Emerson Stacconi

Master's Theses

The provocative Book of Margery Kempe is a seminal text in the history of female authorship. Claiming to be the first written autobiography, The Book serves as a literary representation of womanhood during the late fourteenth to the fifteenth centuries when Margery was writing, and also speaks to circulating medieval discourses of religion, pilgrimage, and sexuality. Participating in medieval women’s visionary writing as a genre, Margery’s visionary power is a tool by which she is able to emancipate herself from the limiting roles of wife and mother. Additionally, by working within the conventions of visionary writing, Margery is able to …

Case Study Two: Jewish Time Jump: New York, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

Gottlieb presents an early case study of his mobile augmented reality game Jewish Time Jump: New York design on the ARIS platform for the iPhone and iPad (iOS). The game is set on-location in Washington Square Park in New York city. Players in 5th-7th grade take on the role of time-traveling reporters, landing on site on the eve of the Uprising of 20,000, the largest women-led strike in U.S. History. Based on their GPS location they receive media from over 100 years in the past, interactive with digital characters as they work to gather a story for the fictional Jewish …

The Chorus Of Disapproval: The Battle Of St. Paul's And Women's Protest In Occupied New Orleans, Denice J. Richard

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Although scholars have explored women’s public resistance in occupied cities during the Civil War, few have explored women in occupied New Orleans. Studies have been limited to the rambunctious activities of women in the city streets, armed with sharp tongues. The use of private spaces, specifically religious spaces, as a platform for protest, has not been explored. By analyzing the events surrounding the closure of an uptown church on October of 1862, known as “The Battle of Saint Paul’s,” this thesis will address Confederate female activism and protest to Union occupation in New Orleans. It will do so by examining …

Finding Margaret Haughery: The Forgotten And Remembered Lives Of New Orleans’S “Bread Woman” In The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Katherine Adrienne Luck

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Margaret Haughery (1813-1882), a widowed, illiterate Irish immigrant who became known as “the Bread Woman” of New Orleans and the “Angel of the Delta” had grossed over $40,000 by the time of her death. She owned and ran a dairy farm and nationally-known bakery, donated to orphanages, leased property, owned slaves, joined with business partners and brought lawsuits. Although Haughery accomplished much in her life, she is commonly remembered only for her benevolent work with orphans and the poor. In 1884, a statue of her, posed with orphans, was erected by the city’s elite, one of the earliest statues of …

The Catholic Church: Shaping The Roles Of Medieval Women, Ashley N. Just

Young Historians Conference

The paradoxical modern expectation for women to remain virgins while simultaneously being sexual objects for men to enjoy as they please is a result of the ideology of the Catholic Church in Medieval Europe. Christian doctrine at this time presented an image of women as inherently weak and prone to sexual sin as a result of Eve's Original Sin. This weakness then led to the expectation that women would remain chaste and subservient, which in turn inhibited the power and influence women possessed Medieval society. Many of the issues modern feminism fights to remedy result from these historical Christian ideas.

Atatürk's Balancing Act: The Role Of Secularism In Turkey, Patrick G. Rear

Global Tides

The intersection of religion and politics in the form of a civil religion has been present since time immemorial. This paper looks specifically to the relationship between Turkey’s development of a secular civil religion after gaining independence and the advancing of women’s rights and democratic values. In examining the intersections of state and religion in a secular Islamic society, it draws parallels to the French civil religion as it came to be following the French Revolution. Though Atatürk and other secularists were strong forces in developing the civil religion, the paper also examines liberal democratic and conservative Islamic groups in …

Finding The Witch’S Mark: Female Participation In The Judicial System During The Hopkins Trials 1645-47, Shannon M. Lundquist

Departmental Honors Projects

Between the years of 1645 and 1647 in East Anglia, a series of witch trials known as the Hopkins Trials took place. In all, 250 witches were accused and 100 hanged. The ability to convict a person of the crime of witchcraft relied heavily on evidence which was hard to come by given the nature of the crime of witchcraft. Tangible proof of an intangible crime was needed; this came in the form of witch’s marks. To the learned population, marks were a symbol of the witch’s covenant with the devil. To the lay person, they were called ‘teats’ and …

Freedom Indivisible: Gays And Lesbians In The African American Civil Rights Movement, Jared E. Leighton

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This work documents the role of sixty gay, lesbian and bisexual individuals in the African American civil rights movement in the pre-Stonewall era. It examines the extent of their involvement from the grassroots to the highest echelons of leadership. Because many lesbians and gays were not out during their time in the movement, and in some cases had not yet identified as lesbian or gay, this work also analyzes how the civil rights movement, and in a number of cases women’s liberation, contributed to their identity formation and coming out. This work also contributes to our understanding of opposition to …

Women's Use Of Violence: An Ecological Systems Model, Sara Byczek

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

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 …

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 …

'My Happiness Overturned': Mourning, Memory And A Woman's Writing, Rachel Greenblatt

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

In the late seventeenth century, Beila Perlhefter mourned her seven children in the introduction she wrote to a Yiddish ethical work written (at her urging, she tells her readers) by her husband, Ber. While the autobiographical information provided in the introduction is sparse indeed, it shares certain generic characteristics with other self-writing by early modern Jews from Prague, including Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller's "Megillat eivah." At the same time, each voice is a different voice, all the more so the rare instance of a woman's voice, and this short piece defies easy categorization.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

• Sefer …

The Much Married Michael Kramer’: Evangelical Clergy And Bigamy In Ernestine Saxony, 1522-1542, Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Sanctified ‘Adultress’ And Her Circumstantial Clause: Bathsheba’S Bath And Self-Consecration In 2 Samuel 11, J. D'Ror Chankin-Gould, Derek Hutchinson, David H. Jackson, Tyler D. Mayfield, Leah Rediger Schulte, Tammi J. Schneider, E. Winkelman

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Bathsheba's actions in 2 Sam. 11.2-4 identify crucial aspects of her character. Past commentators interpret these words in connection with menstrual purification, stressing the certain paternity of David's adulterine child. This article demonstrates that the participles rōheset and mitqaddesšet and the noun mittum'ātāh do not denote menstrual cleansing. Bathsheba's washing is an innocent bath. She is the only individual human to self-sanctify, placing her in the company of the Israelite deity. The syntax of the verse necessitates that her action of self-sanctifying occurs simultaneously as David lies with her. The three focal terms highlight the important legitimacy of Bathsheba before …

An Army Of Housewives: Women’S Wartime Columns In Two Mainstream Israeli Newspapers, Shira Klein

History Faculty Articles and Research

At the height of Israel's 1948 war, women's columns in the newspapers Ha'aretz and Ma‘ariv offered readers advice, stories, and letters. They focused on domestic practices such as preparing food, sewing clothes, dressing fashionably and providing comfort. At first glance, they completely ignored the war raging around them. However, this essay shows that the columnists portrayed housewives' roles, no less than men's front-line fighting, as an important part of the nation's wartime effort. The columnists and their responding readers took the housewives' domestic practices, which made them seem so unfit for battle and turned them into a battlefield of their …

Clerical Marriage And Territorial Reformation In Ernestine Saxony And The Diocese Of Merseburg In 1522-1524., Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

0757: First Presbyterian Church [Huntington, Wv] Records, 1839-1990, Marshall University Special Collections

Guides to Manuscript Collections

The First Presbyterian Church of Huntington Archives contain material dating back to the early nineteenth century, with the bulk of the items dating from between the 1880s and the 1990s. The collection consists primarily of 'Minutes of Session,' which relate to official church business; 'Bulletins,' which give information about church sermons, calendars, and events; and 'Church Groups,' which provide information on the social structure and individuals within the Church. There are extensive financial records pertaining to the church, as well as membership rosters for many Church groups, and some marriage/baptism registers. Also included are a few "histories" written by Church …

Two Cases Of Apostasy In Dubno In 1716 Jews, Christians, And Family Life, Magda Teter

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

This text relates a trial of two Christian women who accepted to Judaism that took place in the city of Dubno in eastern Poland in 1716. The text presented here comes from a collection of primary sources published in Kiev [now Kyiv] in 1869, as part of effort by scholars at the time to collect and publish primary source materials about Ukraine. The collection is called Arkhiv Iugo-zapadnoi Rossii, or The Archive of South-Western Russia, and contains documents from the South-Western part of Ukraine.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

• Two Cases of Apostasy in Dubno in 1716

“The First Duty Of Nature Is To Preserve Life” A Jewish Woman’S Plea For Divorce In Late 18th-Century Trieste, Lois Dubin

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The presentation discusses a letter from Relle [Rachele] Morschene (1770-1844) of Trieste to Chief Rabbi Raffael Natan Tedesco, written in the throes of her three-year long effort to extricate herself from her marriage to husband Lucio Luzzatto (1755-1801). From 1793 to 1796, Morschene pursued separation and civil divorce through the Habsburg courts at the same time as a Jewish religious divorce. Indeed, she was one of the first European Jewish women to seek and obtain a civil divorce. Her legal situation was novel because Jews in the Habsburg Monarchy were among the first to be subjected to civil marriage regulation …

The Woodstruck Deed The Documentation Of Accidental Defloration Among The Jews Of Early Modern Italy, David Malkiel

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The “woodstruck” (mukat ets) deed, a Hebrew document that officially records the accidental defloration of a young girl, appears in sixteenth-century Italy, in a block of deeds recorded by Jewish notaries in Rome, in a rabbinic responsum and in the record book of the Padua community. Prior to that, there is no record of such an instrument anywhere in Jewish history and literature, despite the fact that the frequency of accidental defloration must have been a constant. Moreover, the registers of the Jewish notaries of sixteenth-century Rome contain over a hundred such deeds for the sixteenth century alone. The appearance …