The poetry and songs of the radical Jewish Labor movement in the United States were derived from their Russian populist past in Russian and German, but delivered to the Soviet socialist future in Yiddish. What transpired in the interim, from exile to return, is examined in this study. In the 1920s, the power brokers of Soviet Yiddish culture argued the value of the American Sweatshop poets using the lens of Bolshevism and unpredictable state policies as the instruments to guide their analysis. This thesis will look closely at affective factors that contributed to the songs persistence, documenting literary and political influences, nodes of transmission, movement shifts, and language and cultural developments during this fifty-year span beginning around 1880. The case of the poetry and songs of Dovid Edelshtat in particular illustrates that the works survival into the 1930s and beyond is a testament to the triumph of pragmatism over ideology and emotion over intellect.

To understand the phrase become all eye, I will first examine optical imagery in Eastern Christianity as it relates to a theology of vision and theological anthropology. The occurrence of optical imagery in Eastern Christianity offers insight into how many Christian authors built their theological anthropology, i.e. how human beings participate in and behold God. The main Christian author with which this thesis is concerned is Pseudo-Macarius. Ps.-Macarius expounds on the phrase become all eye as a part of his theological anthropology. For Ps.-Macarius, become all eye is an ontological state in which ones soul has become so transparent that the divine light shines in as part of the Christians being and is refracted out for one to see God. Tracing optical imagery through several Eastern Christian authors up to Ps.-Macarius, I will investigate their conceptions of theological anthropology and discover what implications their understanding of eyes (and particularly Ps.Macarius phrase become all eye) has on Christian theology.

Nineteenth-century American Protestants saw the Holy Land as a material gospel: a place that preserved an authoritative and experiential account of sacred history that could be plainly read, interpreted, and reproduced. Veneration for this Holy Landwhich such Protestants imagined as a network of biblical locations that spanned a crescent-shaped swath of the Mediterranean world from Rome to Cairooccurred at the same time as increasing theological challenges to the material reliability of the Bible itself. This dissertation offers an historical account of the rise of this material gospel theology around the mid-point of the nineteenth century and its subsequent weakening at the turn of the twentieth. Engaging spatial theory, this dissertation considers a wide variety of objectsincluding theological tracts, hymns, travelogues, Sunday school literature, newspaper articles, novels, poetry, maps, illustrations, and photographs. Chapter one documents the historical and theological roots of the material gospel theology, tracing, in particular, how the nineteenth-century quest for the historical Jesus fueled widespread interest in the Holy Land. Chapter two delineates different spatial ideologies operating within the material gospel theology, taking note of the varied understandings of space, place, and landscape implicit within Protestants view of the Holy Land as a fifth gospel. Chapter three, then, explores the ritual practices Protestants used to discern the Holy Lands material gospel, with a focus on the embodied practice of walking. Chapter four considers how the material gospel theology spurred a profusion of Holy Land reproductions and examines how Protestants regarded three different mediumsword, illustration, and photographas peculiarly suited to reproducing the Holy Land. The final two chapters document a weakening of the material gospel theology at the close of the nineteenth century. From a historiographic perspective, this dissertation adds a popular, material dimension to the history of biblical interpretation and debates over higher criticism. It also enriches our understanding of the nineteenth-century American Protestant encounter with the Holy Land, particularly the tremendous diversity of spatial and material ideologies operating within the construction of the Holy Land as another gospel.

In recent decades, feminist exegesis has had a profound and wide-ranging effect on biblical studies. Many scholars have treated the accounts of Jael in Judges 4 and 5 from a feminist perspective, examining the interplay of gender and violence in the story. Other scholars have done similar work for the Book of Judith, and a handful have taken a feminist look at Pseudo-Philos reimagining of Jael in Biblical Antiquities. In the last few years, a small number of scholars have begun to look at one or the other of these stories through the lens of queer theory. To date, however, no one has undertaken a systematic study, both text-centered and deeply engaged with queer-theoretical frameworks, of the motif of the woman-turned-warrior in ancient Jewish literature. This dissertation asks how the character of Judith and the two different portrayals of Jael play with the signifiers of gender and sexuality, also researching possible parallels for this play in Ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman literature. I also ask how gender interacts with the tone and goals of each book. I show that Judith and both Jaels were characters who did not closely resemble the feminine ideal of their time periods. I argue that putting on the gender female and playing with the signs of womens sexuality allowed these characters to get in position to slay their respective enemies. In other words, their efficacy as assassins is directly tied to their performance of the feminine. This project advances the scholarship on Judith and the two Jaels regarding how gender and sexuality factor into the portrayals of the main characters and the resolution of their stories. More broadly, it provides a new understanding of how the woman warrior motif plays with conventional notions of sex and gender. Feminist interpretation has helped bring these characters out of the shadows, but it has not gone far enough. I employ promising methods of analysis derived from queer theoretical frameworks to shine new light on three strong female characters from the Hebrew Bible and the early days of Jewish literature.

The vision for personalized medicine is rooted in the hope that omics-based laboratory technologies will be used to tailor medical care to the individual needs of patients, including by providing patients with direct access to information about their genome. In order for this vision to bring about positive change in healthcare, it requires a more robust account of the way scientific knowledge can be applied to the circumstances of individual patients. This dissertation is intended to provide such an account, with a particular focus on explaining how personalized medicine might be incorporated along with other science-based traditions in clinical decision-making. Building on the pragmatist perspective of Jeffrey Stout, and the practical philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre and Hans Georg Gadamer, I develop a hermeneutic account of clinical practical reasoning that demonstrates how healthcare providers are able to draw on a range of traditions when developing a clinical course of action. This effort to synthesize different sources of knowledge, however, highlights that healthcare providers must continue to play an important role in health and wellness, despite the personalized medicine vision for "empowered" patients to take independent responsibility for applying omics-based results to their health.

RELIGION FORGIVE US, AS WE FORGIVE: A REFORMED POSITION ON THE VISIBLE HOLINESS OF THE CHURCH SARAH GRACE SANDERSON-DOUGHTY Dissertation under the direction of Professor Paul DeHart This project in constructive theology responds to a perceived weakness in Reformed ecclesiology, that being a deficient account of visible ecclesial holiness and a tendency to clericalism that runs contrary to the Reformed understandings of ordination. In this dissertation, I first seek to establish the plausibility of the problem I perceive by attending to two significant moments of controversy and division in American Presbyterian history. I then examine four substantial Reformed theological sources (Karl Barth, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Jean Calvin, and Augustine of Hippo) to gain further insight into the problem of conceptualizing visible holiness and a default to clericalism and to draw out resources for a resolution to this problem. From Barth I detect the difficulty of ascribing any visibility to holiness. From Schleiermacher and Calvin I draw out the Reformed emphasis on the preaching of the word and the weight thereby placed on preachers. I find in Augustines Donatist opponents a distinctly clerically centered construal of ecclesial holiness. I also identify a picture of the church that emerges in each thinker: humility, mutuality, progression, and forgiving love. And in each source I identify the insistence that God alone is the source of sanctification and the foundational character of forgiveness to ecclesial life. I ultimately argue that the practice of forgiveness needs to be identified as the third mark of the church. Word and sacrament, the traditional, Protestant marks of the church, are too tightly linked to the clerical office in Reformed order. The practice of forgiveness is part and parcel of Christian discipleship, as each baptized believer is to forgive as we have been forgiven; this is a mark of holiness because it is an operation of the Holy Spirit (eg. John 20:22-23). This is a leveling practice as all within the fellowship stand in need of and responsible for the extension of forgiveness. Concrete implications for ecclesial life are briefly explored in the concluding chapter.

Ambiguity, Liminality, and Unhomeliness in the Book of Judges: An Analysis of the Gendered Pairs and Families by Jennifer Johnson Williams Dissertation under the direction of Professor Jack M. Sasson This dissertation investigates the creation and dissolution of families in four stories in the book of Judges (Judges 19, 4-5, 11, and 13-16), providing a nuanced feminist interpretation of some of the books most challenging and violent stories. The foundation of this study is a literary analysis of the four episodes, focusing principally on characterization of the gendered pairs in each story. The approach also deploys contemporary reading strategies from feminist, anthropological and postcolonial thought. A literary and ideological reading of these stories reveals that the history in the text is concerned with many issues such as social deterioration and the movement toward kingship, war and families, Israels apostasy and YHWHs guiding hand, the stories of individual people and the story of all of Israel. The project demonstrates that as the condition of Israel deteriorates in the course of the book, clear boundaries and divisions of gender also break down. This blurring of boundaries and narrative ambiguity often occur in the narratives through the exploitation of liminal spaces, times, and characters and in the representation of unhomeliness. In turn, this deconstruction creates elements of complexity and ambiguity, fear and suspicion. A literary reading that focuses on what happens at the level of family divulges an ideological concern with the roles, places, and statuses of women and the ways in which they operate in domestic and extra domestic functions. A concern with how women contribute to the realization of the ideal group identity becomes apparent. Similarly, the embedded ideology of the text reveals a concern with pressure from inside and outside groups, not just through war but through marriage, kinship, and inheritance issues.

According to public opinion polls, a majority of U.S. Americans think that torture can be justified against suspected terrorists to gain key information. Eighty percent of these respondents consider themselves Christian, and in fact torture acceptance is higher among this population than members of other faith traditions, the religiously unaffiliated, and the nation as a whole. This begs the question: What is the role of religion in public opinion of torture? To address this question I performed a quantitative meta-analysis of torture opinion data between 2001 and 2011. My analysis yielded two main findings. First, the role of religion in torture opinion is subordinate to political party and ideology. The latter are the most significant determinants of torture opinion, with greater torture support associated with Conservative and/or Republican political orientation (Consv-Reps) and greater torture opposition associated with Liberal and/or Democratic political orientation (Lib-Dems). Second, the role of religion in torture opinion is not only subordinate to but also mediated through political orientation and race, with religious affiliation increasing torture support among Whites on the political left and decreasing torture support among Blacks and the political right. Drawing on sources from cultural psychology, political science, and psychology of religion, I interpret these key findings in the following ways. I attribute differences in torture opinion among Consv-Reps and Lib-Dems to (1) different political psychologies, defined by distinct attitudes towards change and equality, and structured in part by (a) distinct social dominance orientations, as well as (b) distinct positions on the authoritarian spectrum; (2) different moral intuitions, which are characterized by (a) different emphases and interpretations of the Care, Fairness, and Liberty foundations, and (b) a broader moral palate and monopoly on the groupish foundations among conservatives; and (3) ultimately different social motivations and community boundaries. These differences interact with religion in ways that may account for the decrease in torture support among religious Consv-Reps and Blacks, and the increase in torture support among religious white Lib-Dems relative their non-religious counterparts.

Die jüdische Reformbewegung veränderte nicht nur den liturgischen Ablauf des Gottesdienstes, sondern wirkte sich auch auf das Synagogengebäude aus, in das nun Orgel, Chor und Predigtkanzel als neue Elemente integriert wurden. Nach dem Seesener Jacobstempel (1810) adaptierte man die neuen Ideen in Berlin und anderen Städten, so dass eine eigene Typologie von Reformsynagogen entstand. Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts repräsentierten Synagogen deutlich den Integrationswillen der jüdischen Gemeinden. Die vielbeachteten Wettbewerbsbeiträge für neue großstädtische Synagogenbauten zeigten die unterschiedlichen Möglichkeiten zur Einbeziehung von Orgel und Chor im Innenraum. Die vorgestellten Beispiele führen so die allgemeine Entwicklung der Synagogenarchitektur und die verschiedenartigen Ausprägungen der „Orgelsynagoge“ im Besonderen exemplarisch vor und zeigen, wie die musikalisch durchkomponierte Liturgie mit der neuen „Komposition“ des Synagogenraumes korrespondierte. / The Jewish Reform Movement initiated changes in Jewish services and in synagogue architecture – organ and choir had not only effects on liturgy but also on the interior. The paper shows the development of German Reform synagogues during the 19th and early 20th centuries. After the inauguration of the Seesen Jacob’s Temple (1810), the new ideas were transferred to Berlin and other German places. Reform synagogues developed an own typology, differing from traditional synagogues and finally became integral parts of the German cities, and their styles were statements of identification and the will of integration. Competitions for new synagogues gained attention among architects. Their projects show different ways to integrate organ and choir, and again the question of an adequate style arose. The given examples reveal the general change in architecture and the diversification of the “Orgelsynagoge”. The musically composed liturgy corresponded with the new architectural composition of the synagogue interior.

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