Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Commons^™

Otherness And The Trinity: Toward A Critical Reimagining Of Christian Divinity From A Postcolonial Ethos, Taylor Muma

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I address the Trinity’s potential as an emancipatory relational archetype in the philosophy of religion, while at the same time recognizing the complicity of Christian doctrine in colonial conquest. My dissertation will be a reimagining of trinitarian theology as an ecotonal paradigm of multiplicity and alterity that provides a generative means of moving beyond the enmeshment of divinity with constructs of mastery.

The post-structuralist and postcolonial methodologies in this project emerge from the work of such scholars as Homi Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and Gloria Anzaldúa. They foreground critical ideations of otherness and multiplicity in ways …

Islamic Political Anti-Theology: A Discursive Practice Of Contingency Beyond Sovereign Politics, Jason Andrus

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Contributing to the field of political theology from outside the European Christian tradition, this dissertation develops a description of the distinct logics that Islamic theology generates from its metaphysical assumptions. These logics in turn make possible a discourse of political anti-theology where politics operates through contingency rather than sovereignty. Political theology scholarship has excavated how modern politics derives from secularized Christian theological concepts—particularly transcendent sovereignty. This study demonstrates that Islamic theology's absolute insistence on divine transcendence (tawhid) produces something fundamentally different: a politics that renders sovereign authority conceptually impossible. I identify this discursive practice of political anti-theology through …

Radical Hospitality: Height And Excess Of The Other And The New Host Self, Diako Alikhani

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’ ethical framework and its emphasis on the “height and excess” of “the Other,” this thesis explores and develops a sense of “radical hospitality” in Levinas and across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In particular, the thesis explores how encounter with the Other is not only marked by an overwhelming excess, but one which transforms the subject into what I call a “New Host Self:” Where the self is the host who greets the stranger with hospitality, it is ultimately the stranger—the refugee, the migrant—who transforms the host into someone new. Here, the host ultimately receives a gift …

Progressive Paradox In Political Rhetoric: The Hart-Celler Immigration Act Of 1965, Amanda Rolston Henderson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the interplay between U.S. norms for inclusion, the embedded role of religion within these norms, and how political rhetoric challenges or sustains them. Using a historical lens, I outline key moments in U.S. history, unravel central ideologies entrenched in U.S. narratives, and illuminate the ideographic function of the key concepts land, family, and work. These terms serve as conduits for conveying complex systems of meaning, which are entrenched in societal assumptions and concretized through political discourse and action.

These dynamics are demonstrated in a case study of the discourse surrounding the Hart-Celler Immigration Act …

Saint Brigit And Her Habits: Exploring Queerness In Early Medieval Ireland, Jacqueline K. Stephenson

Undergraduate Theses, Capstones, and Recitals

Saint Brigit's behavior and reception by society highlight an avenue by which women in the early medieval period could escape societal strictures, exercising agency over their bodies and their romantic choices, and carve out a distinct and unexpected place for themselves in a Christian patriarchal society. In Saint Brigit’s case, this is especially demonstrated by the breadth of her portrayed power as not just a nun but a saint, her extreme resistance to marriage, and her frequent comparisons to men. Indeed, her hagiography, written by Cogitosus in the seventh century, positioned her as one of the three principal and earliest …

Encounter-Oriented Subjectivity In Levinas And Barth: Conditioned Freedom In Resistance To Ethnonationalism, Michael Laminack

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines philosophical and political subjectivity, or how an individual knows the world and relates to society, through a comparative analysis of the phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas and the Christian theologian Karl Barth. Levinas and Barth share a deep structure of “encounter-oriented subjectivity,” meaning subjectivity oriented by encounter with the Other that calls into question the subject’s freedom and, in this same moment, calls the subject to concrete response. Encounter-oriented subjectivity is critical of the “unconditioned freedom” that orients liberal subjectivity and offers an alternative sense of a “passively conditioned” freedom, or a freedom always already called into question by …

Reevaluating The God-Human Relationship Through The Psychological Origin Of Sin: A Comparative Theology Of Schleiermacher And Kierkegaard On The Doctrine Of Sin, Brandon Tsark

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In his The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard’s decision to have Haufniensis acknowledge Schleiermacher’s contribution to the doctrine of sin continues to raise questions regarding Schleiermacher’s influence on Kierkegaard’s intellectual development. These questions also serve to underscore the general need to locate Kierkegaard properly within the larger context of religious and theological studies in the nineteenth century. Our project here seeks to address these questions with a comparative theology of Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard on the Christian doctrine of sin. I argue that Kierkegaard is right to credit Schleiermacher as a source of inspiration in The Concept of Anxiety because of …

Being And Trauma: A Theory Of Listening As A Dis/Appropriation Of The Listener To The Call Of The Unspeakable In Trauma, Kathleen M. Douglass

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

What is it to have a voice, to be heard? And how is this connected to the need to have someone listen? Through a close reading of Heidegger’s later works woven together with readings of Judith Butler, Jean Luc Marion, Michel Foucault, and Shoshana Felman, I explore a concept of Listening as it is connected to the event of our being, creating a theory of Listening that emphasizes what happens in the Listener as she Listens.

The concept of Listening is relied on, but under-considered, in both clinical and philosophical theories. In order to understand what it means to have …

Repetition Repeated: Reconstructing A Lacanian Subjectivity Through Kierkegaardian Repetition, Thomas R. Ryan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

When Descartes declared “Cogito ergo sum,” he triggered a fundamental shift in the trajectory and scope of the philosophical discourse. Hegel called this the beginning of modern philosophy, but the Cartesian cogito elevated human reason, ushered the Enlightenment, and led to scientific and political revolutions. But as Slavoj Zizek has pointed out, almost from the moment Descartes posited the mind-body problem, there was an anxiety about what it meant to be “one who thinks.”1 This anxiety presents itself as a continuous questioning of the ontology of the subject, and ultimately, whether there is a subject at all. By the time …

Mia San Mia: Professional Club Soccer, Religion, And Social Ethics, Rebecca A. Chabot

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For thousands of soccer fans around the world, soccer is their religion. This dissertation marks the first extended examination of what religious soccer is, what it looks like in practice, and how it impacts the lives of fans in the context of professional club soccer. It provides a framework for non-fans to understand how religious supporters view the game and addresses major moments in the development of soccer throughout the world, paying special attention to the difference between the United States and the rest of the world. Religious soccer is then explored in depth, drawing on ethnographic research with over …

Identity And Resistance: Queer Puerto Rican Subjects, Pentecostalism, And The Shadow Of U.S. Imperialism, Jared Vázquez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

James K.A. Smith argues that the first principle of Pentecostalism is that the same Holy Spirit described in the New Testament is !actively, dynamically, and miraculously present both in the ecclesial community and in creation” today. This ontological experience of the Holy Spirit transforms Pentecostalism into a hermeneutic thorough which Pentecostals interpret their social world. In his attempt to articulate a Pentecostal epistemology Smith leaves implied what this project seeks to make explicit: the emergence of subjectivity is mediated through the experiences of the body and is therefore affective and phenomenological in nature. I argue that pentecostal spiritual practices are …

Economic Theology And The Death Of God In The Context Of The Crisis Of Neoliberalism, Jared A. Lacy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In light of the ongoing political and economic crises in the twenty-first century, this study aims to apply the discourse of political theology, alongside Nietzsche’s concept of the death of God to an understanding of neoliberalism and the problems it faces on a global level. However, because of the centrality of sovereignty in political theological discourse and the view of neoliberalism as diffusing sovereignty in favor of an ordered system, I attempt to further develop an offshoot discourse of political theology referred to as economic theology. This discourse allows a theological signature of power to be traced through the history …

Righteous Remixes, Sacred Mashups: Rethinking Authority, Authenticity, And Originality In The Study Of Religion, Seth M. Walker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation sets out to place emergent theories of “remix” in conversation with scholarship exploring changes in the definitions and practices associated with the word “religion.” Through particular case studies, the dissertation analyzes the ways that certain contemporary creators, writers, and influencers have emerged as constructors of contemporary Buddhism. Specifically building upon the critiques of religion put forth by Jonathan Z. Smith, Russell T. McCutcheon, Brent Nongbri, Jane Iwamura, and others, I am concerned with how individuals who are not part of the religious studies scholarly community participate in the processes of constructing religion, and in this case, in constructing …

Criminalized Houseless Women, Jesus, And The Praxis Of Kinship: An Outsider’S Liberative Ethic, Sarah A. Neeley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Criminalization measures, such as Denver’s Urban Camping Ban, are an attempt to mask systemic causes of houselessness and assign blame to the personal failures of those living on the streets. Unaccompanied houseless women utilize street families to create community, survive houselessness, and fight criminalization measures. Since liberation and solidarity can become forces of oppression, this dissertation considers cultural evidence for the desire and means of liberation. Street families and the praxis of kinship form the basis of a liberative ethic that critiques systemic causes of houselessness and provides a model of relatedness that works toward social justice. The project is …

The Martyr’S Desire: Levinas, Girard, And Infinite Responsibility, Joshua Alan Lawrence

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Perhaps the whole of human history could be summed up with one word: economy. The law of the home and the home of all law. Without fail, this situation results in a structured devotion that must decide what to do with desire. And the economic decision often follows a violent trajectory, most commonly described as sacrifice. Today, states will make efforts to conceal this underlying logic, but the insidious configurations of ‘real politik’ usually surface with a frightening intensity.

My project considers these problematic vestiges through Emmanuel Levinas’s reconfiguration of subjectivity. To address these bio-historical realities, my work highlights the …

Reframing Hegemonic And Fragmented Identities Through Subjective In-Betweenness: A Postcolonial Political Theology Of Care And Praxis In Ethiopia’S Era Of Identity Politics, Rode Shewaye Molla

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Modern Ethiopian imperial religious and political evangelization generated and imposed externally-defined hegemonic fictive identities on all Ethiopians. This fictive identity (based on Amhara) contributes to current identity politics that cause ethnic violence, political instability, war, identity fragmentation, and, most of all, the elimination of in-between spaces where boundaries of identity can be crossed for peaceful co-existence. This dissertation integrates the study of Ethiopian religion and politics to advocate the restoration of in-between spaces and in-between subjectivities of Ethiopians. In-between spaces include political, social, religious, and geographical spaces that enable Ethiopians to live as a diversified community with solidarity, equity, care, …

Immortal Combat: Iconoclasm And The Hebrew Bible, Albert L. Mcclure

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Biblical iconoclasm is any biblical text that describes the disruption of religious observances by physical violence against cult materials. This can include removing cult objects from their appointed places, god-napping divine bodies, outright destruction, cult reform, etc. Biblical iconoclasm, understood this way, is one component of the Hebrew Bible’s iconic politics. Other components of biblical iconic politics – like Idol Parodies, Bildersverbot, and aniconism – have been well studied in the past thirty years. Biblical iconoclasm has not shared the popularity of its collaborators in this respect. This dissertation is necessary because no extended study of iconoclasm in the Hebrew …

Windows Into The Unseen The Power Of Metaphor As Revealed By Paul Ricoeur And Moses Maimonides, Claire E. Molk

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Ambiguous language haunts countless fields of human inquiry. The solution to its confounding nature has repeatedly been to reduce language to its face-value, launching an endless search for the right meaning. This paper aims to examine two thinkers who reveal language to be a more complicated matter. Paul Ricoeur and Moses Maimonides demonstrate the importance of language’s complexity through close examinations of metaphor. While we find different understandings of metaphor, reflecting different metaphysics within each author’s study, both Ricoeur and Maimonides contribute to the notion that language’s complexity is not to be eliminated through literal readings, but engaged to open …

Behind The Mask Of Morality: (E)Urochristian Bioethics And The Colonial-Racial Discourse, Jennifer L. Mccurdy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The discipline of bioethics is insufficient and ineffective in addressing the persistent issues of racism and racial inequalities in healthcare. A minority of bioethicists are indeed attentive to issues such as implicit bias, structural racism, power inequalities, and the social determinants of health. Yet, these efforts do not consider the colonial-racial discourse -- that racism is an instrument of eurochristian colonialism, and bioethics is a product of that same colonial worldview. Exposing mainstream bioethicists to the work of anti-colonial scholars and activists would provide bioethicists a framework through which they would be better equipped to address issues of race through: …

Hope As A Strategy: Messianism In The Philosophy Of Emmanuel Levinas, Gary Ray Sunshine

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This essay is an explication of the role of messianism, often expressed as hope, in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas's single philosophical project from 1933 until his passing in 1996 was to establish ethics as first philosophy. This effort was in opposition to the primacy of ontology in the work of Martin Heidegger. Levinas uses a phenomenological method similar to Heidegger's to establish messianic hope as a fundamental human motivation. Throughout Levinas's work, he borrows a religious vocabulary from his Jewish heritage that he resets into a philosophical domain. He takes a religious concept of messianism, specifically Jewish formulations …

Tragic Creation: Hope For The Future—Moltmann's Creative (Mis)Reading Of Hegel's Philosophy, John Michael Bechtold

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Christian theology, in its many and varied forms, and to the detriment of both the church and the world, is often built upon a shaky epistemological foundation. In this dissertation, I describe this shaky foundation by the term 'insular universalism'. The oxymoronic nature of the term is both intentional and telling. A theology which strives for, or unwittingly arrives at, a position which is here being called 'insular universalism' achieves neither while rejecting or misunderstanding the complexity of both. When considered theologically, insular universalism could be simplistically described as the idea that "one cultural expression of the religion is exclusive …

Narrativizing Theory: The Role Of Ambiguity In Religious Aesthetics, Benjamin John Peters

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project expands S. Brent Plate's "invented religious aesthetics" by bringing it into conversation with Umberto Eco's theory of ambiguity. It articulates the space that ambiguity opens within the field of religious aesthetics when viewed as a liminal or interdisciplinary theory that neither privileges the starting points of transcendental aesthetics nor the "neo-arches" of theories of materiality. It hints at new ways of studying and describing religious worlds while also illustrating the porous borderlines between narrative and theory. It argues that a religious aesthetic rooted in ambiguity emphasizes both the provisionality of knowledge and the narrativization of reality.

"Traditioning" Blackness: A Theo-Ethical Analysis Of Black Identity In Black Theological Discourse, Ben Sanders Iii

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The emergence of James Cone's black liberation theology in the late-1960s and early 1970s marked both a radical challenge to and a historical transformation of the fields of religious and theological studies. Building on Cone's work, black theological discourse has developed a rich tradition of religious and academic inquiry characterized by its commitment to interpreting Christianity in particular, and religious experience more broadly, from the vantage point of oppressed black people. This dissertation shows that James Cone developed a particular understanding of black identity in his early works and, furthermore, that various scholars have critically engaged this conception of black …

The Power Of Resurrection: Early Christian Resistance Through The Rise Of Disciplinary Power, Patrick G. Stefan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is an analysis of the spread of Christianity in the first three centuries and the commensurate activation and development of what Michel Foucault calls disciplinary mechanisms of power. It sets out to explore two questions, first, what were the theoretical conditions that led to Christianity's rapid expansion? And second, what were the historical precursors to the mechanisms of disciplinary power? It then seeks to put these two questions together to propose that early Christianity was successful in overtaking the Roman Imperial government because it activated underlying disciplinary mechanisms of power in a world governed and controlled by sovereign …

Living Through Terror And Terror Through Living: The Biopolitical Dimensions Of Religion, Security, And Terrorism, Donnie Featherston

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Recent emphasis and attention by thinkers, media pundits, and politicians on terrorism requires new, critical evaluation of the processes by which terrorism is understood. By investigating the concept of biopolitics, as developed specifically through Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, new insights into the interactions between terrorism, politics, and religion can emerge. Most notably, the attempts to explain terror as simply an economic problem, an excessive form of violence, and/or as religious fervency gone awry rely on embedded biopolitical concepts. The continual attempts to solve terrorism through increased biopolitical strategies, thereby making terrorism a problem for biopolitics, only further substantiate the …

"Revolution In Religious Language": The Relevance Of Julia Kristeva's Theory Of 'Signifiance' For Theology, Timothy O. Inman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation applies Julia Kristeva's theory of revolution in the practice of signifiance to religious discourse. In particular, it argues that the salient features of signifiance are present and active in religious speech as well as poetic language, the subject of Kristeva's doctoral thesis Revolution in Poetic Language. Signifiance describes the process in which meaning is produced in linguistic utterance, and its intentional practice is subversive not only in terms of language but culture in general.

Catholic Literary Theory: The Conditional Existentialism Of Four Protagonists And Their Creators, Jacob Patrick Pride

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

According to Catholic literary theory, the novelist, like the Divine Mystery to a certain extent, creates her characters freely and free with the possibility and probability that they may speak against their creator and even finally rebel. This dissertation reflects upon the relative infiniteness of four literary authors - Flannery O'Connor, Mary McCarthy, Walker Percy, and Cormac McCarthy. In the three novels and one imaginative memoir considered in particular, these authors create their existentialist protagonists, who in their turn reflect the conditional existentialism of their creators. This dissertation, thus, seeks to resurrect, with modern sensibilities, the pre-renaissance and renaissance commonplace …

The Myth Of The Saving Power Of Education: A Practical Theology Approach, Hannah Kristine Adams Ingram

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

U.S. political discourse about education posits a salvific function for success in formal schooling, specifically the ability to "save" marginalized groups from poverty by lifting them into middle- class success. The link between education and salvation is grounded in the historic relationship between Christianity and the establishment of public education in the United States. Initially, churches invested in schooling to form a Christian society. Today, the public institutions of education operationalize the ideology of meritocracy and promise individual success in the economic realm. Discourse analysis of political speeches and charter school programs demonstrates that education primarily offers its salvation to …

The Entanglement Of Anzaldúan Materiality As Bodily Knowing: Matter, Meaning, And Interrelatedness, Robyn Henderson-Espinoza

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project weaves together the theoretically rich and diverse work of ancient materialist philosophers, modern philosophy which advanced a theory of monism, and contemporary philosophies that further extends monism into new terrain, including 'new materialism.' While monism is a strand of this project, the core features of this project are materiality and bodies; these two concepts create the particular entanglement and central thrust of this project, which is becoming. While this project is conceptually organized around matter and bodies, and a particular notion of becoming traced from ancient through contemporary thought, this project, also, introduces the importance of Gloria Anzaldúa …

To Have Done With Forgiveness: Capitalism, Christianity, And The Politics Of Immanence, Timothy Snediker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This essay seeks to formulate a critical account of the genealogical link between capitalism and Christianity by interrogating the ontology and the processes of subjectivization which subtend these two apparently disparate social and political formations. To this end, I make use of the philosophical thought of Gilles Deleuze, in particular his readings of Spinoza, Foucault, Nietzsche, and Sacher-Masoch. The central themes of the essay--the identity of God and money, and the vicissitudes of the creditor-debtor relation--culminate in a theory of a theodicy of money, which deploys an apparatus of forgiveness in order to obscure and displace the stakes and …