Studies of the Solomonic Temple rely on the descriptive account found in 1 Kings 5-9 as the most extensive source available for understanding the form of the ancient temple. Although the description is superfluous by contemporary standards, there is much left to be desired: the text ignores many critical details such as the presence and location of an altar and important architectural specifications.<p>Often scholarly studies of the temple attempt to resolve the difficulties and theorize the temples actual appearance. This study, however, integrates several new approaches within ancient Israelite naology that appreciate the text for its symbolic value as a created space or built environment rather than as a source of historically based data. To this end, the temple description of 1 Kings 5-9 is compared to paradigmatic features of ancient Near Eastern temples. In this light, it seems that the texts main concern is not the form but the function of the temple as a working link between the heavens and earth and the concomitant societal features sanctioned by this connection.

This thesis investigates the problem of the disappearance of the Church, which is a result of the fracture of Christian praxis. First, the problem is introduced and outlined according to the maxim that the Church can only appear as it is one. Then a response to the problem is given by way of analogy to the early Christian understanding of Baptism. Baptism is here considered as the rite of dispossession that grounds the possibility for Christian Eucharistic unity. The identity of the unified Church is thus one that lives into the dispossessive character of baptism. This premise is used to further demonstrate that the Church today refuses such unity by its possessiveness, particularly in the political realm. Then follows an investigation of the mystics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which serve as a model for how the Church might live into the dispossessive character of its baptismal identity. In conclusion, the dispossessive identity of the Church is given ground in the dispossessed of this world; Church unity, and thus the overcoming of the disappearance of the Church, is only possible when the Church lives into its mission to become a Church of and for the dispossessed.

THE CORE BELIEFS OF SOUTHERN EVANGELICALS: A PSYCHO-SOCIAL INVESTIGATION OF THE EVANGELICAL MEGACHURCH PHENOMENON JENNIFER EATON DYER Dissertation under the direction of Professor Lewis V. Baldwin In this dissertation, I explore the worldview of southern evangelicals. In doing so, I first describe the current, thriving evangelical subculture including the social, political, and commercial spheres of influence and behavior. Because evangelicalism predominantly arises out of southern culture, I explore the interplay of influence between southern cultural themes and evangelical themes in myth, perception, and reality. Furthermore, I consider how southern evangelicalism and evangelical behavior now influence greater America, particularly through the evangelical megachurch phenomenon. I investigate the evangelical megachurch phenomenon from both a sociological and psychological perspective. With a critique of rational choice theory, I suggest the theatre, as an alternative model to the marketplace, may be the best model by which to understand the megachurch today. Concomitantly, I approach a psychological understanding of evangelicals from three different psychological schools of thought: object-relations theory, psychoanalytic development theory, and cognitive theory. All provide a different angle by which to understand the thought-world of evangelicals in the megachurch, yet all point to the fundamental core beliefs of evangelicals as helplessness and unloveability. Thus, cognitive theory provides the best theory by which to understand the psychology of evangelicals. In this research, I provide a new way to understand southern evangelicals using a psychological lens. Approved: Professor Lewis V. Baldwin Date: March 12, 2007

This project is concerned with exploring how gender socialization affects males, females, and causes gender-conflict on masculinity. I apply a pastoral care approach for treating perpetrators of military domestic violence from my faith tradition, which is The United Methodist Church's doctrines and its resolutions. Throughout my research, I learned that pastors must actively preach from the pulpit about their church's stances on marital rape, battering, and the cycle of violence against women, while educating parents to be flexible with gender-role socialization. In this research, I suggest pastoral care techniques, for all faith based traditions, that will provide a congregational support network to help the victims and hold the perpetrators accountable for their actions.

White conservative Protestants (fundamentalists, evangelicals, charismatics, and Pentecostals) in the early twenty-first century United States construct for themselves a religio-cultural identity by which they hold themselves to be at once both identified with the American mainstream and removed to the cultural margins, at once both the keepers of a traditional Christian America and the ideological outcasts of modern plurality and secularity. Based upon in-depth interviews and in-home observations with fifteen home schooling families, I explore the creation of such an outside-yet-inside, white conservative Protestant cultural identity as accomplished by white conservative Protestant home schooling parents. Using the notions of practice and performativity, I argue that their religious identity emerges through the pragmatic organization of their practices of educating, parenting, and home-keeping. I analyze their diverse practices as the deployment of three, more general schemes of action: unification, privatization, and gendering. I explore the ways in which they practice: the unity of family, education, and their Christianity (chapter 2); the individualization and the domestication of religion, education, and female labor (chapter 3); and the distinction of gender as a differentiation of authority and of laboring activity (chapter 4). As they do their Christianity by such pragmatic means, they also do their racial, class, and gender selves. Specifically, I argue that the unity of faith, family and education practiced by these families, as well as their claim to privatized self-determination, makes and marks their whiteness in opposition to the racial and religious diversity of public education and to the more social identification of racial others. I also read the privatization both of education and of female labor in home schooling families as the co-production of conservative Protestantism with middle-class identity. Lastly, I understand the domestic authority and domestic labor of home schooling mothers to produce not only the difference between two genders but also the difference between conservative Protestants and other Americans. Conservative Protestant home schooling families make for themselves a religious identity of distinction, even as they are embedded in the social structures of racial, class, and gender stratification.

The interpretation of body of Christ (soma christou) in 1 Corinthians is a pressing contextual/ideological concern for me because its predominant interpretation as an ecclesiological organism characterized by unity and homonoia (concord) serves as a boundary marker that tends to exclude the voices of marginality and diversity. This traditional reading, while plausible, ignores a deeper, ethical meaning of body of Christ that questions an ideology of hegemonic power in both the Corinthian context and today. The body of Christ re-imagined in terms of Christ crucified calls for a deconstruction of power ideology that exhorts the Corinthian community to live as a Christic body (viewed as a living metaphor) through radically identifying the body of Christ (as Christ crucified) with the broken bodies of the community and in the world. Re-imagining a hermeneutics of embodiment based on Christ crucified and marginality requires 1) reviewing the history of interpretations of the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians; 2) a postmodern hermeneutical approach to embodiment acknowledging marginalized voices; 3) recognizing voices pointing to both a hegemonic body and a democratic-inclusive body in the Greco-Roman and the Jewish world and in 1 Corinthians. This dissertation asks: When Paul talked about the body of Christ and Christ crucified, whose voice did he represent? A Was he concerned with a lack of unity in a Corinthian community? Or with the marginalization and exclusion of the weak and marginalized, because of a problematic view of body of Christ? The dissertation shows that this hermeneutics of marginality and embodiment is grounded in the figurative discursive structure of the letter, which focused on the figure of body of Christ. This analysis deconstructs power-seeking ideologies of the Corinthians (and of many readers of the letter), and reconstructs an ecclesia based on Christ crucified and others-centered love. Pauls phrase in Christ interrelates Pauls theology centered on the body of (the crucified) Christ to a way of lifean ethics of dying with Christ, or being in Christ.

This dissertation is an historical and critical study of sound as spiritual power in Qawwali, the Islamic devotional music of the Chishtiyya Sufi order of South Asia. My intention is to show that music and religion are, by both implication and design, coextensive in traditional Qawwali performance. Although much effort is expended by Sufis to ensure that the sung text is primary in the performance of traditional, religious Qawwali, it is the transmission of baraka [spiritual power, or blessing] through musical sound that distinguishes Qawwali as the particular performance of expressive culture that it is. The explicit religious function of Qawwali is to act as a catalyst for ecstatic states of religious experience. In this context, the music itself is not simply a vehicle for the sung text, it is also a vehicle for the transmission of spiritual power [baraka]. According to many Chishtiyya Sufi saints [Awliya], spiritual music is identical with spiritual power, that is, it is coextensive with religious experience and communion with the divine. Using a combination of case studies from ethnographic fieldwork in Maharashtra, India, and a variety of textual sources on Sufism, in this study I contextualize the sounds of Qawwali as a cultural system of symbols in its historical setting, the South Asian dargah [Muslim tomb-shrine].

RELIGION JOHN COTTON: THE ANTINOMIAN CALVINIST GREGORY ALLEN SELMON Dissertation under the direction of Professor James P. Byrd This project is a theological assessment of John Cottons life and ministry. This dissertation begins with the premise that Cottons early theological training and ministry experiences shaped him into an ardent defender of predestinarian thought. It argues that Cottons self-understanding as a defender of predestination against all forms of Arminianism provides the key to understanding his role in the numerous debates he faced during his lifetime. In particular, Cottons theological tendencies explain his role throughout the Antinomian Controversy in New England. They also explain how Cotton remained within the Puritan mainstream throughout his life and ministry. This dissertation argues that one theological key to the Antinomian controversy was the tension between Cottons emphasis on Objective assurance found in Christs completed work as foundational for authentic assurance of faith while Thomas Shepard and other New England Elders emphasized Subjective assurance found through the evidence of personal holiness or the syllogism as foundational for authentic assurance. This dissertation illustrates that Cotton did not eliminate the need for Subjective assurance through the syllogism even as he emphasized Objective assurance as foundational for the Christian life. It also illustrates the many ties to Cottons theological emphasis concerning Objective assurance within the Puritan and Reformed communities. This includes the work of William Perkins and Richard Sibbes who had been used as primary examples in the work of previous scholarship to illustrate Cottons theological deviancy from orthodox Puritanism. This dissertation concludes that the root theological cause of the Antinomian controversy was the difference in emphasis concerning Objective and Subjective assurance. This dissertation concludes with an investigation into Cottons ties with and dissimilarities from the Antinomian and Familist movement in England in the 1630s and 1640s. It argues that Cottons theology did not embrace any of the major tenets of Antinomianism or Familism. Instead, Cottons theology remained in tension with these theological critiques of Puritanism even as his thought retained an emphasis on Gods grace as primary within the Christian life.

RELIGION NATURAL THEOLOGY AND NATURAL HISTORY IN DARWINS TIME: DESIGN, DIRECTION, SUPERINTENDENCE AND UNIFORMITY IN BRITISH THOUGHT, 1818-1876 BOYD BARNES Dissertation under the direction of Professor Dale A. Johnson Nineteenth-century British natural theology and design arguments are studied in relation to contemporaneous geological and biological science. Close attention is given to the logical and evidential relationships of theological superintendence and the uniformity of nature as rival explanations for the evidently progressive direction of the history of the earth. The public and religious significance of the evidence for a theological superintendence of geological history is discussed, with special attention given to the science and natural theology of William Buckland, Adam Sedgwick, William Whewell and Baden Powell. Other works of natural theology, published in the 1830s and controversially significant although less overtly scientific, are more briefly considered. The increasingly scientific and decreasingly religious character assumed by natural theology over the course of an extended public controversy between superintendential and developmental explanations of natural history is then discussed, with special attention to Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Thomas Henry Huxley, Asa Gray and Alfred Russel Wallace. Other natural theologies of the same period are more briefly considered. The conclusion is reached, that nineteenth-century natural theology in Britain, having partly originated as a significant theological discourse in public religion that was founded upon a gloss of geological science, reached its historical term as the largely private and deeply scientific discourse of a relative few Darwinian men of science. Darwinism, therefore, may be appropriately considered a late episode in the history of natural theology, in addition to its significance for the history of science.

This dissertation elaborates and evaluates the proprieties of genetic counseling as they are accounted for in three models: 1) the teaching model 2) the psychotherapeutic model and 3) the responsibilist model. The elaboration of these involves an identification of the larger traditions, visions, and theories of communication that underwrite the models. In relation to these broader contexts, the models are explicated in the terms offered by key proponents. Each models theses are assessed and their adequacy is tested and compared in response to two important concerns in genetic counseling: the value of nondirectiveness and the assessment of spirituality. Nondirectiveness is a central and contested norm within genetic counseling that posits the appropriate ways to respect the understanding and decision making of patients. Spiritual assessment is an intervention being considered by some genetic counselors that would formalize inquiry into a patients spiritual life. These are discussed in reference to a case study about a pregnant woman who receives prenatal genetic counseling. All of these theoretical efforts support the claim that the responsibilist model provides the most adequate account of the proprieties of genetic counseling.