RELIGION ON THE LIMITS AND POSSIBILITIES OF SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION: A STUDY OF THE PROPHETIC PRAGMATISM OF CORNEL WEST, THE CHRISTIAN REALISM OF REINHOLD NIEBUHR AND THE THEOLOGICAL LEGACY OF BENJAMIN ELIJAH MAYS RONALD B. NEAL Dissertation under the direction of Professor Victor Anderson This dissertation is concerned with the social impact, and meaning of political conservatism for secular and theological political projects that seek to empower the disenfranchised and address ongoing social inequality along the lines of race, class, and gender. My thesis is that progressive political projects, both secular and theological, have been eclipsed by political conservatism and, if they are to remain viable, they must undergo internal criticism and reformulation. This dissertation addresses these concerns on three levels: first, it treats the eclipse of progressive politics by political conservatism; second, it offers a theological interpretation of this eclipse; and lastly, it identifies a theological resource for the reconstruction of progressive politics and political theology in the 21st century. Prominent in this dissertation is the social impact of political conservatism, over that last two decades, and the movement to end affirmative action in the United States. In my estimation, these forces symbolize the eclipse of progressive politics in America. In identifying the kind of progressive politics that has been eclipsed by political conservatism, I turn to the political philosophy of Cornel West. In my view, Wests political philosophy, prophetic pragmatism, represents the kind of progressive politics that is no longer influential in the United States. In making sense of why progressive politics is no longer influential, I turn to the Christian realism of Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhrs reflections on history, liberalism and radicalism are insightful for interpreting the eclipse of progressive politics. In an effort to reform progressive politics and political theology, I turn to the theological legacy Benjamin Elijah Mays. Mays was a mid-twentieth century African American public theologian, who forwarded a theological perspective that placed a premium on democratic theological and political discourse and promoted education, as a strategy for social transformation. His theological legacy is a resource for progressive politics and political theology today. In the end, I build on the concerns drawn from my treatment of West, and the insights drawn from my treatment of Niebuhr and Mays, and make recommendations for the reconstruction of progressive politics and political theology in the 21st century. Approved ___________________________________ Date______________________

The dissertation is a history covering the years from 1912-1963 of the Women's Department of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC). COGIC, the largest African American Pentecostal denomination, founded in 1897, has a Women's Department established by denominational head C.H. Mason that centers around the Church Mother. The Church Mother in the African American religious tradition is an older woman of the congregation, with exemplary spiritual and organizational skills, who acts, as sociologist Cheryl Townsend Gilkes terms " as a counterfoil to the Pastor". The office of Church Mother, an unordained leadership role, has extraordinary temporal and spiritual power within the congregation. Within COGIC, the role of Church Mother has been institutionalized, and has been used as an organizational tool to build the denomination, transmit doctrine, and shape behavioral and belief patterns by using a fictive family structure to achieve cohesion throughout the denomination. The Church Mother in COGIC operates parallel to, and in tandem with the exclusively male episcopate. The goal of this work will be to substantiate that although the ordained leadership roles were exclusively male, COGIC Church mothers were and are the teachers, enforcers, modelers and re-definers of Holiness-Pentecostal beliefs in COGIC, through their organization and participation in what is termed the "sanctified life". The dissertation chronicles the lives of three integral Church Mothers in the COGIC Women's Department, and their roles in shaping the policies and the theology of the denomination and the female members.

This examination of the rhetorical form and logic of 2 Corinthians 1013 accounts for the macro-rhetoric of the discourse, showing how it responds coherently and potentially effectively to the criticism that Paul is a weak leader and to the effect of rival ministers at Corinth. The discourse both denies and agrees with the criticism: Paul is not weak in any way that prevents his performing his apostolic commission; but Paul is weak in ways essential to his re-presenting Christ to the Corinthians (e.g., he is weak rhetorically, in his humble and low-status presence, and in his avoiding severity and embracing the meekness and gentleness of Christ as he expresses authority). In this positive weakness lies Pauls conflict with his sophistic rivals, whose hubristic manner of leadership has de facto imported another Jesus, spirit, and gospel into the church. The discourse begins forcefully with appeal to believers and the threat of divine war against the rivals (10.16). It calls the Corinthians to examine the evidence regarding the criticisms, which it rebuts with three claims (10.711). A first section of rhetorical proof (10.1211.21a) supports those claims and proves why Paul cannot compare his ministry with the rivals, through an ongoing synkrisis that rehearses Pauls history with the Corinthians and contrasts his ministry against the rivals activities. The Fools Speech (11.21b12.10) proves both that Paul is not weak (through a hardship list that boasts, foolishly and kata sarka, that he is a better servant of Christ, 11.21b11.29) but simultaneously divinely weak (boasting of his weaknesses, en kyrio, with a climactic divine oracle that valorizes the weakness critics disdain, 11.2912.10). Rivals now forgotten, the remainder of the discourse resumes the opening appeal that the Corinthians mend their ways, allowing Paul to continue to be weakexercising his authority without severity, for their upbuilding, not their destruction. Throughout, the study also supports other pertinent topical theses.

Ecological feminists have identified a conceptual dualism in western philosophy and religion. According to their analyses, this dualism is a conceptual structure which supports gender, racial and ethnic oppression and the exploitation of the non-human beings. They argue that, within this dualism, the body is denigrated as inferior to and separate from the mind. Although this critique of dualism invites an exploration of the relation between mind and body (also human and nature), ecological feminists want to avoid biological reductionism and holism. Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his notion of the flesh is one understanding of the mind-body relation that can help ecological feminists formulate an alternative to dualism. Merleau-Pontys sense phenomenology and his axiom of the flesh, developed in the posthumously published The Visible and Invisible, describes sense perception and the language which emerges out of our senses as a reciprocity between body sensed and sensing. He argues that the mind is not separate from nor superior to the body, but that perceptions, concepts and language result from an intermingling of the sensed and sensing body. This understanding of the primacy and reciprocity of the senses suggests an ethics of relation in which bodies, particularly suffering bodies, have moral value. The ethical norms that emerge from the flesh are relational and responsive to diverse beings and contexts. Some of these norms include interdepence, mutuality, diversity and flourishing. These norms correspond with and contribute to ecological feminist ethics. Since the ethical norms are rooted in bodies and their relations, Merleau-Ponty recovers the ethical potency of bodies. His flesh supports the understanding of the body as a site of resistance. Judith Butler, Jeffner Allen, Luce Irigaray and other feminists have appropriated elements of Merleau-Pontys work to resist oppressive cultural identities. Ecological feminists can also draw on the flesh to resist and transform dualism.

SWEATING IN THE JOINT: PERSONAL AND CULTURAL RENEWAL AND HEALING THROUGH SWEAT LODGE PRACTICE BY NATIVE AMERICANS IN PRISON EMILY R. BRAULT Dissertation under the direction of Professor Volney P. Gay This project is concerned with the traditional ceremonial practice of the sweat lodge by Native Americans in prison. In this dissertation I explore the ways in which the legacy of colonization and oppression affect Native American inmates, and whether the sweat lodge practice provides these inmates with a means of resistance to systems of oppression and assimilation, and, if so, how this resistance is accomplished. Through interviews with inmates and research, I discovered an interdependent link between cultural and personal renewal and healing for these inmates. Sweat lodge practices provide for learning about heritage and self in ways that can promote healing and growth.

RELIGION VIRTUALLY INVISIBLE: THE REPRESENTATIONS OF HOMOSEXUALITY IN BLACK THEOLOGY, AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURAL CRITICISM, AND BLACK GAY MENS LITERATURE ROGER ALEX SNEED Dissertation under the direction of Professor Victor Anderson This dissertation is an exploration of black gay visibility in Black Liberation theology and African American cultural criticism. This work begins with an examination of the controlling themes in black theology and black cultural studies. Themes such as experience, black culture and black religion are examined as to how they apply or do not apply to sexual difference in black communities. Further, this is an interpretive study. This dissertation follows the method of black theologians and cultural critics and turns to the literary expressions of black gay men. Three questions are critical to this interpretive study. What are black gay writers saying about their experiences? How do they construct their self-understandings vis-à-vis black culture and black religion? What can we glean from black gay literature and how may we use this literature in revising our theological understandings of black life in America and our descriptions of black culture? Using queer theory, I argue that the term gay in both black liberation theology and black cultural criticism represents a particular conception of sexual difference that is static and rigidly dichotomous. However, queer is suggestive of a sexual politics of difference and an ethics of openness. This dissertation examines how black queer writers construe black queer identity in experience, culture and in black religion. The goal of this study is to suggest an ethical reorientation of these critical discourses towards an ethics of openness. This ethics of openness is not predicated upon a perpetual crisis. Rather, an ethics of openness is oriented towards acceptance and appreciation of sexual difference in African American life rather than appropriating such difference in order to combat white supremacy.

Celestial divination may be understood as the interpretation of celestial phenomena as signs portending the occurrence of future events. In ancient Mesopotamia, schools of professional diviners and scholars existed as early as the Old Babylonian period (ca. 1800 B.C.E.) for the primary purpose of interpreting these signs. It is for this reason that diviners became a valuable asset that could be exploited by rulers and kings in order to avert any calamities that might affect the kingdom or nation. Over the centuries celestial omens were collected in systematized compendiums, the most famous being Enûma Anu Enlil, and they became authoritative reference sources for diviners in Mesopotamia until the Hellenistic period. The development of omen interpretation in Mesopotamia did not take place in a cultural vacuum but was forged under the auspices of Mesopotamian religion, mythology, and cosmology. It is within the religious and cultural context of ancient Mesopotamia that omen literature was born and developed. The purpose of this project is to elucidate how Mesopotamian narrative and mythos influenced the interpretation of celestial phenomena and how this influence was manifested in the schematic formulation of omina. In this way it is possible to determine how and to what extent Mesopotamian cosmology and mythology are expressed in celestial omina.

RELIGION THOMAS JEFFERSON AND POLITICAL PREACHING: TWO CASE STUDIES OF FREE RELIGIOUS EXPRESSION IN THE AMERICAN PULPIT McKINLEY S. LUNDY, JR. Thesis under the direction of Professor Kathleen Flake This work is concerned chiefly with Thomas Jeffersons understanding of and reaction to the phenomenon of political preaching. The longstanding tradition of occasional preaching in New England, along with the viciously partisan Presidential election of 1800, both serve to contextualize Jeffersons ideas in light of American clerical tradition and personal political struggle. Though he explicitly argues against religious politicking in an 1815 unsent letter to Congressman Peter Wendover, Jeffersons largely ignored relationship with the Episcopal minister Charles Clay clearly provides evidence that for some period of time, he not only approved of politically charged religious rhetoric, but actively sought to utilize it as a tool of influencing public opinion. Using his relationship with Clay and the 1800 election as historical points of departure, I argue that one can better see Jeffersons 1815 reproach of political preaching more as a deeply personal political response to the mode of his public critics attacks rather than as a calculated discourse on the limits free speech and free exercise. Approved______________________________________________ Date____________

This project is concerned with visual images of the Wandering Jew, an antisemitic Christian legend. In this thesis I explore the appropriation of the figure by eleven Jewish artists beginning in the year 1899. The conversion of Wandering Jew imagery is a direct response to the fin de siècle dialectical interplay of modern antisemitism, modern Zionism, and modern Jewish art. <BR><BR> In Chapter I, I briefly describe the origins and functions of the antisemitic Wandering Jew legend, and examine the icons pernicious resonance with the traditions and political realities of Jewish wanderings. I also enumerate the attributes of stereotypical Wandering Jew images and explore two paradigmatic examples. In Chapter II, I analyze selected Jewish responses. My critical readings consider the presentation, representation, and context of the Wandering Jew figure, taking into especial account the manipulation of iconographical details. This undertaking explores social-historical influences while investigating each work as a document of its time and/or as a personal record of the artist.

This project analyzes the effects of consumerism on identity and consumerisms misunderstanding of freedom and identity. The dissertation argues that identity cannot be easily defined because paradoxically it does not abide continuously but is rather given anew continually; it is not the subsistent essence of the individual but rather the selfs complete dependence on an external source for its foundation. The dissertation draws primarily upon three Christian thinkers: René Girard, Søren Kierkegaard, and Saint Augustine. Each contributes to an understanding of consumerism through his analysis of the human desire for self-sufficiency. According to Augustine, all sin is rooted in pride and the desire to be like God, that is, responsible for ones own being. Kierkegaard discusses the human tendency to judge oneself based on endless comparisons with others, as if one might become like God by outdoing other human beings in competition. Girard describes a common belief in the divine auto-sufficiency of ones models and the hope that one can share in their divinity through imitation. All three thinkers believe that the Christian is one whose desires are transformed by grace, who becomes like God not through self-glorification, but through humbling oneself before God, and who imitates not the desires of those this world glorifies, but rather the desires of Jesus Christ who was ridiculed and murdered. The dissertation proposes the gratuitous bestowal of identity by God as the true understanding of identitys source. The Church should make clear that identity cannot be earned or purchased; it can only be given. To look for the source of identity in some possession, accomplishment, or trait (as is the norm in consumer society), is to look among particular items of difference for a common, universal organizing principle. An other must bestow it; the agent concerned cannot orchestrate it for such orchestration would simply be one among other actions in need of organization. The self-given identity would always fail to incorporate the very act of identity bestowal.