History of Religion Commons^™

Hidden Jews Of The Balkans, Joshua A. Futtersak

Capstones

The history of the Jewish people is one filled with trials, triumphs, and often devastation. Many believe themselves to be educated in Jewish history, but we often have blind spots in our research and schooling. This project aims to look at just one region of Jewish history to tell the stories that are not usually told.

The Balkan region is incredibly diverse in its ethnicities and cultures. The history of the Jews in this region expresses that diversity. This project focuses on the unique stories of the Jewish communities in Bosnia, Serbia, and Greece. These stories of survival and perseverance …

Review Of Muslims And Jews In France. History Of A Conflict By Maud S. Mandel, Bryan Turner

Publications and Research

The mood of European scholarship with respect to the recognition and integration of Islam is typically pessimistic. The rise of anti-immigrant and anti-Islam political parties – Golden Dawn in Greece, the Northern League in Italy, Marine Le Penn and the National Front in France, and the English defense league in Britain – have exposed a hitherto hidden or ignored under-current of resentment against foreigners. In the context of these developments, Maud Mandel’s study of Muslims and Jews in France is a welcome corrective to the dominant focus on anti-Islam in the academic literature and in the popular media. The historical …

The Epic Of Gilgamesh: Selected Readings From Its Original Early Arabic Language. Including A New Translation Of The Flood Story, Saad D. Abulhab

Publications and Research

This book introduces the earliest known literary and mythology work in the world, the Epic of Gilgamesh, in its actual language: early Classical Arabic. It provides a more accurate translation and understanding of the important story of the flood, one of the key stories of the monotheistic religions. In this book, the author was able to decipher the actual meanings and pronunciations of several important names of ancient Mesopotamian gods, persons, cities, mountains, and other entities. He was able to uncover the evolution path of the concept of god and the background themes behind the rise of the monotheistic religions. …

Edwin Fischer And Bach Performance Practice Of The Weimar Republic, Bradley V. Brookshire

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Edwin Fischer (1886-1960) provided a synthesis of approaches to Bach pianism that resolved dialectical tensions of long standing between schools that opposed one another throughout the nineteenth century. I argue that Fischer’s synthesis––which permits exegetical interpretation while maintaining a preservationist stance toward the integrity of the text––resembles both Felix Mendelssohn’s bifurcated approach to Bach’s music and Moses Mendelssohn’s description of a similar duality within modern Judaism. Such resemblance may not be coincidental or superficial, given that Fischer married into the Mendelssohn family at the height of its cultural influence in Weimar-Era Berlin. Although pieces of the Mendelssohnian construct were in …

Engagement And Resistance: African Americans, Saudi Arabia And Islamic Transnationalisms, 1975 To 2000, Jeffrey Diamant

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the 1960s, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has financed missionary efforts to Muslims around the world, attempting to spread a Salafi form of Islam that professes strict adherence to Islamic sacred scripture. The effects of this transnational proselytization have depended on numerous factors in “host countries.” This project explores the various impacts of Saudi transnational religious influence in the United States among African-Americans. By relying on previously unused documentary sources and fresh oral histories, it shows how Saudi “soft power” attempted to effect change in religious practices of African-American Muslims from 1975 through 2000. It provides the most detailed …

Locke's "God" Problem: Predicating God And Liberty Amid The Secularizing Effect Of "Uneasiness", Kathleen M. Ryan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Notorious among philosophy texts, Locke's Essay stands between the God-intoxicated 17th century and the science-intoxicated 18th century and has had a significant role in the transition of the one intoxication to the other. That the Essay itself underwent major revisions before it emerged in the posthumous form we've canonized for our enlightenment today obscures many of the issues Locke was contending with at the time to which he may not have found the kind of final answers we've come to attribute to him. This dissertation attempts to justify an examination of one particular chapter in the Essay -- the "Of …

The Gawain-Poet And The Textual Environment Of Fourteenth-Century English Anticlericalism, Ethan Campbell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The 14th-century Middle English poems Cleanness and Patience, homiletic retellings of biblical stories which appear in the same manuscript as Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, offer moral lessons to a general Christian audience, but the introduction to Cleanness, with its reference to men whom "prestez arn called," suggests that a central feature of their rhetoric is anticlerical critique. Priests do not appear as exemplars but as potentially filthy hypocrites who inspire God's harshest wrath, since their sins may contaminate Christ's body in the Eucharist.

Using Cleanness's opening lines as a guide, this dissertation …

Jesuits In The Philippines: Politics And Missionary Work In The Colonial Setting, Francis B. Galasi

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Images Of Egypt In Early Biblical Literature: Cisjordan-Israelite, Transjordan-Israelite, And Judahite Portrayals, Stephen C. Russell

Publications and Research

This book suggests a regional paradigm for understanding the development of the traditions about Egypt and the exodus in the Hebrew Bible. It offers fresh readings of the golden calf stories in 1 Kgs 12:25-33 and Exod 32, the Balaam oracles in Num 22-24, and the Song of the Sea in Exod 15:1b-18 and from these paints a picture of the differing traditions about Egypt that circulated in Cisjordan Israel, Transjordan Israel, and Judah in the 8th century B.C.E. and earlier.
In the north, an exodus from Egypt was celebrated in the Bethel calf cult as a journey of Israelites …

On The Intellectual Sources Of Laïcité: Rousseau, Constant, And The Debates About A National Religion, Helena Rosenblatt

Publications and Research

That French Protestants gave strong support to laïcité is by now well established. In recent work, Patrick Cabanel has even made a compelling case for the Protestant sources of laïcité, placing particular emphasis on the Protestant entourage of Jules Ferry (1832-1893) and stressing the inspiration provided by the pro-Protestant intellectual, Edgar Quinet (1803-1875.)

This article suggests that we look even earlier in time for the intellectual sources of laïcité. Seminal ideas can be found in the writings of two liberal Protestants, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) and Benjamin Constant (1767-1830.) Rousseau is usually counted among the opponents, and not the …

Two Liberals On Religion: Constant And Tocqueville Compared, Helena Rosenblatt

Publications and Research

As founding fathers of modern liberalism, Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville shared a common sensibility as well as a number of key concerns. Of central importance to both men was the need to protect individual rights and freedoms against what they saw as an encroaching social power. Having learned the lessons of the French Revolution, they knew that power, whether concentrated in the hands of one man, or executed in the name of the "people", was a dangerous thing. Thus they worked throughout their lives to establish and defend a representative system with constitutional guarantees that would protect fundamental …

Nouvelles Perspectives Sur De La Religion: Benjamin Constant Et La Franc-Maçonnerie, Helena Rosenblatt

Publications and Research

Dès la fin du Directoire, pendant le Consulat, puis sous l'Empire, la maçonnerie française connait une période d'expansion. Les historiens s'accordent à dire qu'elle devient alors "le conservatoire des idées de 1789", "l'officine du libéralisme politique et social". Ainsi n'est-il pas surprenant de constater que plusieurs des amis, collègues et alliés de Constant sont franc-maçons.La franc-maçonnerie de 1789 est fortement anti-"ultra", ce qui explique pourquoi, dès 1820, des "ultras" s'adressent à la justice ou à la Chambre des Pairs pour obtenir l'interdiction de l'ordre. Cela étant, et vu que De la religion est un ouvrage anti-"ultra" écrit par un libéral …