Traditionally, Judaism has constructed barriers to separate itself from Christianity. Anti-Christian apologetics fill the Talmud, and, as a result, function as the fundamental premise for centuries of Christian-themed responsa, spanning time and place from Maimonides to Moshe Feinstein. Considered within the broader context of the halakha, this approach follows similar patterns of separation in Jewish tradition. Much of the halakha, for example, functions to divide oppositestamei from tahor and kodesh from hol (Lev. 10:10); therefore, when Leviticus says that God has set you apart from the peoples, (20:26), the concept of separation broadens to encapsulate a functional role of the Torah as way of preserving the halakhic Jewish culture from the non-halakhic Gentile way-of-life. After nearly two thousand years of Jewish development as a religious minority living in primarily Christian territories, this segregationfueled by textual support for dissociation and an often tense history of relationstriggered alienation between the two sibling religions. However, using historical circumstances as context and recent trends in Jewish-Christian relations as a foundation, Jewish religious approaches to Christianity should be re-evaluated. As the social and intellectual realms verge on harmony, the time for religious cooperation commences. While many potential religious undertakings exist as options for Jews and Christians going forward, joint worship, as this paper will examine, offers significant potential for forming bonds in the next phase of dialogue.

RELIGION LASHON HA-RA (THE EVIL TONGUE) AND THE PROBLEM OF JEWISH UNITY CHARLES BERNSEN Dissertation under the direction of Professor Shaul Kelner The premise of this project is that the ancient rabbinic prohibition against lashon hara the sin of speaking badly about another Jew is more than an ethical concept governing interpersonal relations. Because it has implications for discourse aimed at excluding or marginalizing social deviance and independence, the prohibition against lashon ha-ra mediates the tension inherent in the question of how much difference and autonomy can be tolerated within Jewish society. Part I examines contested notions of lashon ha-ra in early rabbinic texts. It identifies two main traditions one that is quite restrictive of demeaning or harmful speech and another that is more tolerant of it. The former was more prevalent among rabbis who were socially or politically vulnerable. The latter was more prevalent among rabbis who were more powerful and felt relatively more secure. Part II looks at how this tension plays out in Sefer Chafetz Chaim, the nineteenth-century legal code and commentary on lashon ha-ra by Lithuanian Rabbi Israel Meir Kagan. Like the early rabbis who emphasized the danger of lashon hara, Kagan was responding to the presence of polemical discourse that he viewed as a profound threat to Jewish social cohesion. But also like the early rabbis there were limits to his concern. Although his primary aim was to suppress rhetoric that was alienating Jews from each other, he nevertheless permitted and even encouraged it for certain pragmatic, ethical and ideological purposes. I argue that in regard to delimiting Jewish collective identity, Kagan responded pragmatically to the forces of religious divergence at work among traditional Lithuanian Jews while at the same time emphatically rejecting the ideology of the Jewish enlightenment that challenged the primacy of traditional texts and the authority of rabbis to interpret them.

This project develops a homiletic for preaching persuasively about race in white American evangelical congregations. I analyze racism in America through the lens of critical race theory, stressing the prevalence of unconscious racism, the inadequacy of color-blindness, and the importance of sacrificing white privilege. I outline a theology of racial atonement based on Ephesians 2:11-22, arguing that Jesus Christ died to establish racial equality and reconciliation without racial sameness. In correlating critical race theory and Eph 2:11-22, I propose that white churches provide racial reparations to black churches in accordance with the biblical theme of justice, specifically the Apostle Pauls Jerusalem collection. I further argue that since racism historically has been legitimated through biblical and theological appeals, both critical race theory and Christian preaching need more critical race theology, as exemplified in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois. Finally, I propose that preachers employ Eph 2:11-22 to re-script racial reality in white evangelical churches, casting racism as a personal and social structural sin and advocating righteous race consciousness rather than color-blindness.

God invites us to share in holy communion in the whole of life. Holy communion is the feast of wholly charitable life together through which we participate in the holy nature and work of Gods perfect love. The problem I address is the present participation of the church in the unholy communion of the global market economy, which joins participants from around the world in a social and ecological web of relations marked by the unholy energies of self-interested love. Drawing upon resources from the holiness-communitarian and agrarian-ecological traditions, with a focus upon the agro-economic production, distribution, and consumption of our daily bread and common cup, I argue that Christians are called to join in holy communion in the whole of life by participating in modes of economic life together that are consonant with the gracious, convivial, enfleshed, mutual, and creative love of God.

RELIGION HER PREACHING BODY: A QUALITATIVE STUDY IN MEANING, AGENCY AND PROCLAMATION IN CONTEMPORARY FEMALE PREACHERS AMY P. MCCULLOUGH Dissertation under the direction of Professor Ted A. Smith While homiletics has long recognized the importance of the preachers body, its theories have been dominated by prescriptive advice about best postures, voices and movements. Scholarship has also been governed by an assent to the male preaching body amid an increasingly diverse field of preaching bodies. Consequently, the actual body of the preacher awaits full examination as an essential resource for preaching. This dissertation seeks an exploration of the preachers body by beginning with the preachers experience of her body as she prepares to and does preach. It assumes a phenomenological foundation based on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in which meaning always emerges from a persons perceiving, acting body or their being in the world. Fourteen contemporary female preachers participated in a qualitative study focused on the decisions they made about their bodies in relation to their preaching. Through interviews and one-on-one observations, the preachers revealed their choices around clothing, accessories, preaching posture, voice and movement. They shared stories of preaching amid pregnancies and with the challenges of a chronic disease. To analyze their choices, the researcher employed a lived body approach. The lived body theory defines embodiment as the complex and evolving interaction of an individuals materiality, culture and agency. Believing we are our bodies whenever we preach, this study pushed towards uncovering the meaning preachers assigned to and discovered in their embodied preaching decisions. At the outset, this dissertation was concerned with agency. The researcher hoped to gain insight into how women encountered bodily constraints and labored towards bodily freedom. While freedom and constraint were not without value, deeper insights emerged in how a preacher grasped the knowledge within her body and came to understand herself as an embodied being. A preachers recognition of the embodied nature of all life, which contains both depth and contradiction, heightened her capacity to view embodiment as a tool for proclamation. The move towards self-conscious and intentional embodiment calls for changes in how homiletics conceives of a fully embodied sermon and how homileticians teach preaching.

This dissertation seeks to connect the notions of race and religion to the scholarly construction of Judaism and Jewishness (Judentum) by analyzing the work of nineteenthcentury German Protestant biblical scholar Wilhelm Bousset. A key figure in the history of religion school that sought to situate the study of Christian origins as objective scholarship, Bousset was instrumental in producing Spätjudentum as the normative term for what is now referred to as Second Temple Judaism in a way that both maintained the assumed theological superiority of Christianity and rendered Judaism a dead end within the history of religion. Moreover, the dissertation argues that the phenomenological notion of religion that grounds Boussets construction of Spätjudentum reflects the primary binary of spirit/matter that is used to construct and maintain hierarchical difference, allowing the traditional theological binary of Christian/Jew to be read as a racialized German/Jew binary. Bousset is first situated within the intersecting discourses of Western colonialism and comparative religion (Religionswissenschaft), German völkisch ideology and anti-semitism, and traditional Christian supersessionism. The dissertation then examines how his representation of Spätjudentum/Judentum within an evolutionary framework of the history of religion draws upon the tropes of development and degeneration that are also embedded within scientific racial theory in order to construct and maintain Judentum as always other. By comparing Boussets specific construction of Spätjudentum/Judentum to that of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the prophet of anti-semitism at the turn of the twentieth century, the dissertation demonstrates how Bousset reflects, and thus legitimates, the racialized construction of Judentum within anti-semitic discourse. The final chapter situates Boussets construction of Judentum within orientalist scholarship by considering how Bousset creates, fills, and controls the space of Spätjudentum, effectively colonizing Judentum as an object of study within the academy. Noting the implications for the contemporary study of Christian origins, the study concludes by emphasizing the need for further research on how Judaism has functioned within the academic study of religion.

Narrative critics of the Hebrew Bible can describe the biblical narrators as laconic, terse, or economical. The narrators generally remain in the background, allowing the story to proceed while relying on characters and dialogue to provide necessary information to readers. On those occasions when these narrators add notes to their stories, scholars characterize such interruptions as asides. A narrative interruption occurs when the narrator steps out of the shadows and remarks on the story, perhaps by providing a historical reference or information about a character. The omniscient narrator employs most of these notes to aid reader understanding. In rare cases, the narrator wishes to force the narrators opinion on the reader, exceeding the boundaries of omniscience and becoming an obtrusive narrator. Obtrusions are comments that the narrator inserts into the text actively attempting to hinder reader response because the narrator wishes to foreclose potential issues in the text that will create problems for readers, either because of questions the narrator believes the reader may ask or because of the assumptions the narrator fears the reader may have. An obtrusion may be recognized by the forcefulness of the comment as well as its essentiality and location within the narrative. Although previous scholarship has characterized these narrative intrusions as asides or redactions, this study argues that the narrator occasionally breaks into the text to respond to reader questions and assumptions or to protect a favored character. In many cases, the narrator obtrudes by invoking the divine. This project examines localized break frame and non-breakframe obtrusions in the Deuteronomistic History while considering examples of omniscience and obtrusiveness in other books of the Hebrew Bible and in ancient Near Eastern literature.

In this dissertation, I have raised a question about the Korean ethnic churchs failure of playing a pivotal role of leadership including proposing new visions for Korean immigrants in America, when it was urgently needed during and after the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Through my inter(con)textual readings of Pauline new creation passages such as Romans 8:18-25, 2 Corinthians 5:17, and Galatians 6:15, I have attempted to provide possible answers to this question. By reading Pauls texts, I have argued that scholars conceptualization of Pauls new creation may ignore or diminish its tangible features, which are clearly shown in Pauls establishment of an alternative assembly of believers, the ekklēsia, as an embodiment of Gods new creation in the midst of the imperial powers. The concrete features of the new creation also appear in Pauls collection for the poor saints in Jerusalem through which Paul sought to create an alternative economic system against the exploitative and hierarchical structure of the Roman Empire.

This project focuses on the political theology of Johann Baptist Metz and its critique of Enlightenment rationality or technical reason. I examine Metzs critique of the Enlightenment and his counter to its defective tendencies: the fundamental concepts of memory, narrative, and solidarity encapsulated in the dangerous memory of Jesus Christ. My concern then shifts to biblical connections within Metzs theology by investigating his dangerous memory of Jesus Christ and his Israelite-Biblical paradigm. I seek to expand the Israelite-Biblical Paradigm through the critical lens of the Frankfurt school. I throw light on three Enlightenment denialsthe denial of death, tragedy, and bounded timeand then offer a biblical-theological corrective via the Old Testament. In this way recognizing the Old Testament as interruption of Enlightenment rationality furthers the insights of Metzs Israelite-Biblical Paradigm and opens up a means by which the Old Testament may offer equally dangerous memories to the Church.

I conducted ethnographic research on ritual, race, evangelical faith, and southern civil religion in the rural West Tennessee community of Bald Eagles. I asked: What can death rituals disclose about Southern evangelical Christianity, civil religion, and the racial politics of this American town? The American public and some scholars fail to recognize the distinctive forms of Evangelical faith, the racialized nature of Evangelical faith and civil religion, and civil religion and how it functions in different communities. Rituals, I suggest, sacralize public and private spaces in this locale. I study how members of two institutions, the Church and civil religion, employ death rituals to reinforce their political understanding. Death rituals such as American military ceremonials, U.S. civic holidays, and other practices pay homage to ancestry by venerating the dead. In that way they exemplify the faith and civil religious practices of townsfolk. I seek to explain how non-traditional death rituals are central to the functioning of civil religion and to show how evangelical faith undergirds its operation. To do this I used three research methods. First, I created a macro-level case study of two congregationsone white, the other black. Second, I employed Don Brownings concept of a critical hermeneutic theory of society to generate a thick description of these rituals. Third, I used a (&quot)revised critical correlational(&quot) method to bring psychological and anthropological discourses about ritual spaces into conversation and to enhance each. Five important findings emerged from this empirically-based, social psychological study. I show how these public and private rituals answer the question: (&quot)How should we live?(&quot)