This is the beginning of our writing and our writing is about the relationship between Abraham and his sons, it is about how this relationship affects all relationships, how the relationship between Abraham and his sons impacts us all. For the Tanakh, the Christian Bible, and the Quran all share the story of Abrahams sacrifice of his son. For the Jewish and Christian stories that son is Isaac. For the Muslims it is either Isaac or Ishmael. This paper will explore that development among other things. The paper focuses primarily on trying to understand how the sacrifice of the son mimics the sacrifices we make everyday, all the time, with every decision. This understanding is presented in the paper after we explore the steps needed to get there. First, we begin with the story of Ibrahim and his sons, which is followed by an analysis of the story as it relates to the Islamic milieu. Then we transition to the work of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida in an effort to explain the Derridian concepts that we conclude with. These concepts, the concepts of hospitality, decision, the gift, and sacrifice, are all intertwined, co-dependent, and co-named. Eventually we come to the conclusion that in all things, in all decisions, if such a thing exists, we repeat the sacrifice of Isaac, the sacrifice of Ishmael, the sacrifice of Abrahams son. And then we come to the central focus of the paper, whether or not Abraham was culpable, whether or not he was a murder, as named by Kierkegaard. We will show that the philosophy of Derrida provides a new re-interpretation of the story of Abraham and that it does not fall outside the bounds of Islamic ethics. We will show that the story of Abraham benefits from an analysis using the concepts of the gift, decision, and hospitality.

In the early 1960s the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) entered a period of conflict and change including disputes over biblical interpretation and womens ordination. The Biblicist and Autonomist parties emerged and struggled for control between 1979 and 1990, and the conflict eventuated in a schism of the SBC. Recent studies portray womens ordination as a primary cause of the split. However, the lives and experiences of clergywomen have rarely been studied as a viable source for interpreting the religious conflict. This dissertation challenges the oversight and asks: How can the narratives of Baptist clergywomen interpret the fracture of Americas largest Protestant denomination? As a project of practical theology, the study makes its case by exploring the two intertwined situations: the rise of Baptist women in ministry and the schism of the denomination. The study argues that between 1920 and 1960 Baptists negotiated tensions of belief and practice, as described by Bill Leonard. Between 1960 and 2000 the intertwined stories of SBC schism and womens ordination escalated and polarized those tensions. Narratives from eight Baptist clergywomen, gathered in ethnographic interviews, are analyzed for ways they reinterpret the key Baptist concept of soul competency, which holds in tension the dialectical authorities of the Bible and the individuals liberty of conscience. The theological anthropology of Edward Farley and object relations theories of D.W. Winnicott and Jessica Benjamin are utilized to expose the underlying anatomy of soul competency, highlighting its flexibility and durability. Clergywomen reinterpret soul competency by rejecting its effective history of sexism, and incorporating their experiences and vocations. Their reinterpretation shows how Baptist beliefs and practices of soul competency withstand conflict and change individually and institutionally. Clergywomens choices to remain Baptist in the face of widespread opposition, demonstrate how late-twentieth century Baptist culture was not only a site of contest, hostility and division, but also one of clarity, creativity and freedom. Rather than being merely a cause of schism, clergywomen are better understood as exemplars of the changing shape of Baptist identity, creators of new roles for women in Baptist life, and innovators for understanding ministerial identity in the Baptist culture.

This dissertation explores the importance of critical social theory for womanist theology and ethics. Womanist theo-ethical discourse has done well in explaining the manner in which culture representations have contributed to the socio-economic subordination of poor urban black women. However, neo-liberal economic institutions that intensify and exacerbate the poverty of urban black women are not addressed within womanist discourse, which does not allow one to explore how culture and economy relate in structuring the life chances of these women. Deploying the critical social theory of Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, and Nancy Fraser, I argue that critical social theory offers a rigorous methodology for womanist theo-ethical discourse, providing this discourse with the analytic categories to critique free-market ideology and its neo-liberal interests as well as articulate the conditions for the possibility of thriving for poor urban black women within advanced capitalist arrangements.

This study employs qualitative methods to describe black South African womens experiences of HIV/AIDS in two Pentecostal church communities. It analyzes beliefs and practices, connecting gender roles and divine healing to the HIV/AIDS pandemic while grounding ethical claims in these communities shared norms of faithfulness to God and Scripture and living the abundant life. The study concludes by analyzing the global AIDS initiatives of leading U.S. evangelicals (most notably those of Rick and Kay Warren of Saddleback Church) according to their effectiveness at preventing the spread of HIV to wives who remain faithful to husbands who participate in extramarital sexual relationships. Regarding A-B-C prevention strategies, South African and U.S. Evangelicals tend to teach congregants to abstain and be faithful, but they are ambivalent towards condoms. This dissertation argues for an A-B-C-D approach, not only emphasizing condom use but also permitting divorce for women whose husbands are unfaithful.

This dissertation argues that development has failed in fulfilling one of the primary tasks that it set for itself as an expression of Christian mission. Christian development failed to resolve the crisis in Christian foreign mission that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century as Christians became increasingly concerned with the colonial legacy of Christianity. By the end of World War II, the age of Christian foreign missions seemed to be ending for many Christians. In response to this crisis, Christian development gave new life and new theological justification for Christian foreign missions. By offering a critical history of the emergence and maturation of Christian development, this dissertation traces the attempts to resolve this crisis in Christian mission and shows how these attempts went astray as development increasingly involved Christians in precisely those sorts of missionary activities that constituted the original crisis. Yet, Christians were right to identify a crisis in Christian mission that stems from the colonial legacy of Christian mission, and this insight should retain its critical function in the current expression of Christian mission as development.

RELIGION RIGHTEOUS GENTILE AND DIVINE DAUGHTER: AN ANALYSIS OF BAT PHARAOHS CHARACTER AND IDENTITY IN ANCIENT, MEDIEVAL, AND MODERN TIMES DANIELLA PRESSNER Thesis under the direction of Professor Annalisa Azzoni This thesis explores the character of Bat Pharaoh in the Exodus 2:1-10 narrative and the interpretations of this story in traditional Jewish scholarship. By analyzing myths as dynamic and changing depending on the societies that create and promulgate their variations, it investigates how earlier traditions shape and perpetuate the social and cultural expectations of their time and how foundational myths function to create identity, meaning, and purpose for the societies in which they are imagined. The extent to which the commentators are willing to address the conflicts presented in the biblical narrative is, in many ways, reflective of the societies and cultures for which they write and the anxieties and aspirations of their times. While the rabbis of the Talmud and Midrash present an ongoing struggle between Bat Pharaoh, Pharaoh, Moses, God, and Israel, the commentators in the medieval time period are more interested in viewing the textual ambiguities as part of the divine plan or inner logic of the story. Feminist scholarship focuses on finding ways to make the stories of old relevant and purposeful for the communities for which the myth is being retold today. By focusing on the nuances contributed by each commentary to the myth, this work offers a new perspective regarding the characteristics that are considered less crucial, as well as those that are vital in creating the boundary lines of our existence and our self-identification as a nation. Approved _________________________________________________ Date _______________

This study argues that the story of the book of Jonah may be interpreted as a transformation of a familiar topos in which the protagonist undergoes a rite de passage during a quest that takes him towards a foreign land. While in a liminal "no man's land" the hero overcomes several challenges before reintegrating with humanity in an act of communitas, but Jonah fails in this and the prophet is consequently depicted as an antihero. To demonstrate how the story's structure adapts recognizable components from this topos, I have compared the Jonah story with two other fantastic tales from the ancient Near East. This portrayal of Jonah reflects the unsettled social situation in which the narrative took form, and I suggest several ways the story might be interpreted in this context.

This thesis investigates the notion of divine inscrutability as expressed in Wisdom Literature of Ancient Israel and Mesopotamia. Working with a definition that Wisdom Literature is a group of texts that advocates a way of living life, this thesis analyzes these texts divided into compositions that convey traditional thought and those that provide a nuanced approach to traditional thought. It is argued that critical wisdom compositionsparticularly the categories of the "Righteous Sufferer" and the "Vanity Theme"were not marginal viewpoints but prevalent and important manifestations of ancient thought. While divine inscrutability occurs in a variety of ways and serves a variety of functions, this notion challenges the worth of human efforts to change ones circumstances. The emphasis upon the unknown sin, the failure of omens, the inability to understand the behavior of gods, the inability to enter the divine realm, and the concealment of wisdom render the correlation between sin and sufferingitself an emphasis upon human actionto be unimportant. The change of focus finds two answers within compositions of the Hebrew Bible and Mesopotamia: total submission to divine mercy and the exhortation to enjoy the moment.

This dissertation is a study of the pneumatologies of Augustine and Karl Barth, and argues that pneumatology is the performative discourse of participation in Jesus Christ. I claim that for both theologians trinitarian doctrine is the logic of the gratuity of the divine self-giving, and the function of pneumatology in particular is to articulate the human enactment of that participation as itself inherent in the historical self-donation of God. This thesis is argued in the course of two investigations. First, I examine the problem of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit in Latin Christian thought in terms of the rhetoric of Geistesvergessenheit in the late twentieth century revival in trinitarian interest; I analyze the principal historical claims about the shortcomings of the Latin trinitarian tradition and, insofar as Barth and Augustine are representative of that tradition, show these historical claims to be unsubstantiated. Moreover, through a reading of the philosophy of Hegel as interpreted by Jacques Derrida, I argue that much of contemporary trinitarianism is based upon ontological assumptions which undermine its intended goals, notably the construction of a relational or social ontology as derived from a reconstructed trinitarian personalism. Second and most substantively, I undertake a close reading of Augustines De Trinitate and Barths Church Dogmatics in order to construct a pneumatology of Christian knowledge. I argue that Augustine and Barth both articulate their pneumatology as a textual strategy that performatively corresponds to the construction of the ethical subject as a participant in grace. This logic of grace is therefore a self-involving understanding of the knowledge of God as an ethical and enacted, not simply epistemological, matter of correspondence to Christ. Furthermore, both theologians employ pneumatology as a discourse that christologically appropriates and displaces a metaphysical system: Augustine, through his transformation of the Neoplatonic mystical ascent, and Barth through his dependence upon Hegel. Finally, I undertake a comparative analysis of the two theologians to explore ways in which their theology of the Spirit mutually corrects and enriches.

This dissertation utilizes a womanist cultural analysis to evaluate religious media and its implications for black womens sexual decision-making. The dissertation offers a constructive womanist sexual ethics that uses an articulated methodology of womanist sociological analysis and poststructural cultural analysis to argue for a more holistic model for women who receive religious messages about their sexuality. This project contributes to both the disciplines of womanist ethics and cultural studies because of its interest in televangelist Prophetess Juanita Bynum and her faith-based sexuality ministry. Prophetess Bynum gained notoriety with her video No More Sheets, and her message is a penultimate example of the various faith-based mass media productions that are providing messages to black women about sexuality. While I am focused on decoding the conservative sexual rhetoric produced in such faith-based media/ministries, it is my intent to push the boundaries of both disciplines to provide a constructive sexual ethics that advocates black womens sexual agency.