<p> This qualitative study involved the creation and assessment of a seven-week heart-focused psycho-spiritual inquiry program, Map of the Heart. The program&rsquo;s curriculum was comprised of heart-based practices and theories designed to develop heart-centered awareness. The purpose of this investigation was to reveal and understand the personal experience and expression of heart intelligence and to define it and its personal meaning while illuminating the clinical relevance of Map of the Heart curriculum in the field of counseling psychology. </p><p> The curriculum was organized into six weekly themes based upon core heart feelings associated with the Four Immeasurable Truths, Buddhist virtues, and practices for cultivating the heart. Informed by East-West psychology, the curriculum highlighted perennial philosophy from both Eastern and Western religions and indigenous and psychological traditions, integrating spiritual discipline with Western neuroscience research and psychotherapy practices. </p><p> The research design used heuristic phenomenology and co-operative inquiry to explicate the individual and group experience of heart intelligence. Data analysis was primarily derived from a series of one-on-one semi-structured interviews and group dialogue sessions with nine state-registered psychotherapists. </p><p> Research findings indicated that Map of the Heart may support psycho-spiritual and clinical skills development and may encourage personal and interpersonal conflict resolution. Co-researchers reported increased experiential awareness of their own heart center and a defined ability to connect internally, reinforcing therapeutic intuition, perception, and sensitivity, subsequently strengthening the therapeutic alliance. Increases in therapeutic presence, empathic listening, attunement, and accurate mirroring were also reported. Co-researchers reported a greater ability to work more effectively with difficult clients and complex mental health issues. As a result, transformative changes in the client were observed. Co-researchers indicated that they were able to effectively use aspects of the curriculum for therapeutic intervention and clinical directives, where the heart became a focal point of the session. For example, the client focused on their own heart center by implementing heart breathing and other heart-related exercises to facilitate self-inquiry and emotional self-regulation. </p><p> Map of the Heart offers the beginnings of a theoretical template and experiential basis upon which psychotherapists, psychologists, and mental health care and other professionals can access and integrate the spiritual, psychological, and physiological terrain of the heart for therapeutic process and intervention. Further investigation is necessary to determine a more comprehensive psychology and theoretical orientation of the heart.</p><p>

This thesis considers the relation of similarity and difference in the comparative study of religion, by examining the doctrines of avatara and incarnation. These doctrines are first considered using a comparative approach, summarizing some of the research that has been done in the general area of avatara and incarnation. A more systematic approach follows, examining the understanding of incarnation in the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Sri Aurobindo. The focus is on the differences between these two thinkers, especially in terms of particularity and universality and in terms of the purpose of incarnation. Similarity arises, though, as both Aurobindo and Bonhoeffer move from the presence of God in humanity to a sense of solidarity with humanity. Aurobindos understanding and Bonhoeffers understanding result in the view that the Divine is present in the world. This breaking down of the duality between God and the world heightens the sense of solidarity in each thinkers work, as each one speaks of the presence of Christ or the Divine in the community and in the neighbour. <p>This study demonstrates the interplay between similarity and difference in the comparative study of religion. Beginning with the seemingly similar ideas of avatara and incarnation, it then focuses on the difference between these ideas, returning to similarity as the notion of solidarity is introduced. In the similarity and difference between avatara and incarnation, solidarity itself appears to have a mediating role. It allows for the claim that there is common ground to begin with, and when differences are discovered or brought together, solidarity with the other keeps difference from becoming division.

This thesis considers the relation of similarity and difference in the comparative study of religion, by examining the doctrines of avatara and incarnation. These doctrines are first considered using a comparative approach, summarizing some of the research that has been done in the general area of avatara and incarnation. A more systematic approach follows, examining the understanding of incarnation in the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Sri Aurobindo. The focus is on the differences between these two thinkers, especially in terms of particularity and universality and in terms of the purpose of incarnation. Similarity arises, though, as both Aurobindo and Bonhoeffer move from the presence of God in humanity to a sense of solidarity with humanity. Aurobindos understanding and Bonhoeffers understanding result in the view that the Divine is present in the world. This breaking down of the duality between God and the world heightens the sense of solidarity in each thinkers work, as each one speaks of the presence of Christ or the Divine in the community and in the neighbour. <p>This study demonstrates the interplay between similarity and difference in the comparative study of religion. Beginning with the seemingly similar ideas of avatara and incarnation, it then focuses on the difference between these ideas, returning to similarity as the notion of solidarity is introduced. In the similarity and difference between avatara and incarnation, solidarity itself appears to have a mediating role. It allows for the claim that there is common ground to begin with, and when differences are discovered or brought together, solidarity with the other keeps difference from becoming division.

<p> This dissertation investigates the meaning and usage of a particular set of linguistically related Talmudic terms in order to show how and in what cultural context the Talmud began to take shape in the emerging scholastic centers of rabbinic learning in late Sassanian Babylonia. The term tistayem is here defined as meaning, "let it be promulgated" and is thus shown to be inherently redactional in nature. By its very meaning and the way it is employed it speaks to the ordering of extant traditions in new literary frameworks. This term has analogs both in early sources dating from Amoraic disciple circles, in which an analogous term was used to indicate the process by which different reports of statements could be combined to achieve a more authoritative version of a tradition, and in later texts from Geonic times in which the term comes to denote a specific kind of scholastic practice in which traditions were ordered for easy memorization and promulgation. Additionally, parallels to these terms are found in the literatures of Syriac speaking Christians providing avenues for comparisons between these scholastic cultures which shared scripture, language and similar modes of study as worship. Finally, this study demonstrates the ways in which increasing sophistication in usage of these terms mirrors increasing academization during the Talmudic period. As such, evidence is marshalled in support of a more gradual model of the redaction of the Talmud. </p>

<p>This dissertation compares the responses of Italian Jewish and Catholic intellectuals to the process of secularization and modernization triggered by Italian national unification (1861-1870). Arguing that, in the case of Italy, the borders separating Jewish and Catholic communities have been more porous than generally thought, my research intends to destabilize simplistic historiographical oppositions based on a dichotomous anti-/philo-Semitic approach. In comparing Judaism and Catholicism vis à vis the new, modern, and secular nation-state, I offer a more complex picture of the relation between these two religions. In order to avoid presenting a one-sided account, my comparative approach brings together studies and perspectives from different fields. The first three chapters analyze a wide variety of sources, ranging from official speeches to journal articles, archival documents, and literature. I analyze the Commemoration of the Capture of Rome (1870) given by Roman mayor Ernesto Nathan in 1910 and Salvatore De Benedetti’s 1884 Opening Address at the University of Pisa on The Hebrew Bible as a source for Italian literature, as well as articles published in the Jewish journals Il Vessillo Israelitico and Il Corriere Israelitico, the Catholic journal La Civiltà Cattolica, and the anticlerical journal L’Asino. The last chapter focuses on the Jewish historical novel The Moncalvos, written by Enrico Castelnuovo in 1908, investigating the problematic appeal of secularism and Catholicism for a Jewish family settled in Rome. By drawing on this variety of sources, my dissertation both scrutinizes the interrelated role of Jewish, Catholic, and secular culture in Italian national identity and calls for a reconsideration of the starting point of modern Jewish-Catholic dialogue, well before the events following the Shoah, the rise of the State of Israel, and the Second Vatican Council declaration Nostra Aetate.</p> / Dissertation

Thesis advisor: John F. Baldovin / This dissertation examines the interaction of communal religious memory and eschatological anticipation within Jewish and Christian liturgical performance, and charts the ways that Jewish and Christian liturgical practices inform the experience of time. It proposes that the liturgical conjunction of the historical sense of time, which encompasses notions of the past, present, and future, and the observance of the cyclical passing of hours creates a unique experience of time. This liturgical experience of time arises through ritual meditation on the religiously envisioned past and future, and is marked by a perceived interpenetration of time. Judaism and Christianity each hold distinct temporal visions that inform the way the past, present, and future are understood. In each tradition, the narrative of the past informs the understanding of the present, and indicates a shape for the future. Inversely, the contours of the envisioned eschatological future inform the perception of the present, and influence the way that the past is remembered. This study argues that the liturgical performance of the temporal orientations of each tradition engenders a transformed experience of time. It demonstrates how the ritual engagement of memory and anticipation contribute to a re-shaping of the experience of time, allowing the liturgical community to experience the past and future as operative in the present. Driven by the conviction that a religiously and ritually shaped vision of time is a significant point of convergence in Jewish and Christian religious experience, yet largely overlooked in scholarship to date, this study addresses both Jewish and Christian contexts. In the study of the Christian context, it focuses on the Liturgy of the Hours, the celebration of which engages communal memory and anticipation within the setting of liturgical services that regularly punctuate the hours of day and night. The study of the Jewish context addresses a wider range of liturgies, focusing on the daily services as well as on highly memorial and eschatological holidays such as Passover and Shabbat, with attention to how each contributes to a transformed experience of time. To address the elusive phenomenon of ritual experience, this study explores the perception of time from a phenomenological perspective, employing an interdisciplinary methodology that utilizes ritual and performance theories, aesthetics, and hermeneutics, in conversation with contemporary Jewish and Christian liturgical thought. Motivated by the notion that the experience of time is integral to faith, this project proposes that the concept of a liturgically transformed experience of time sheds light on essential aspects of Jewish and Christian religious experience. The experience of time cannot be extricated from subjectivity, and this quality is precisely what grants its study the capacity to address some of the most interior aspects of faith. This study proposes, furthermore, that the intimacy of the experience of time grants it the particular gift of communicating across the boundaries of religious traditions, subtly transgressing obstacles to interreligious understanding. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

This study is a comparative analysis of the rise of Neo-Confucianism in China during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the emergence of the school of Kabbalah in France and Spain during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries CE. This comparison is grounded in the observation that the two schools, in spite of their obvious differences, were an outcome of separate reactions to the rising popularity of foreign paradigms. I draw a distinction between synthetic and analytic modes of operation (modalities), arguing they represent contrasting cultural paradigms characterized by divergent cognitive, social, linguistic, and cultural temperaments. I argue that both the classical Chinese and Jewish worldviews conformed to the basic characteristics of the synthetic modality, and that they entered a period of acute crisis as a result of the rising popularity of the analytic Buddhist and Greek philosophical traditions respectively. As I define it, the synthetic worldview is characterized by the affirmation of the body and this-worldly life, an emphasis on ritual and community, cultural particularism, and associative, non-analytical modes of thought. The contrasting analytic worldview stresses individualism, de-contextualization of data, other-worldliness, contemplative spirituality, and universalism. In the context of this project, I develop a methodological framework I call genetic-morphology. This methodology seeks to integrate a synchronic search for cross-cultural patterns with an emphasis on the diachronic evolution of traditions as they change and adapt to new environmental conditions. It also integrates data from diverse academic fields such as religious studies, anthropology, cross-cultural psychology, biology, and systems theory. As such this study offers a gestalt appreciation of cultural systems, their internal dynamic, the symbiotic relationship between their constituent parts, and the function of information in their operation. This dissertation concludes that Kabbalah and Neo-Confucianism can be understood as "defense theologies," or adaptive responses devised to protect their classical synthetic modes of operation from the cultural pressures of analytic paradigms. Kabbalah and Neo-Confucianism were unique in their ability to appropriate powerful features from analytic traditions and subordinate them to native synthetic sensibilities, thereby equipping the Jewish and Chinese traditions with revolutionary theologies that dismantled the challenges of foreign analytic paradigms.

My dissertation investigates the concept of ‘divinization’, or becoming like (or identical to) God or the Buddha in the thought of two early medieval monk-philosophers from radically different religious-philosophical traditions, Maximus the Confessor (580-662 CE) and Kukai (774-835 CE). I use this as a means of comparing the relationship between understandings of identity and praxis advocated by these two thinkers. Maximus was a Christian monk who lived during a period of great theological and political turmoil in the Byzantine Empire and participated in the theological debates of his day. Kukai was a Japanese monk who studied esoteric Buddhism in China and returned to establish an esoteric lineage in Japan, allowing it to survive after its demise in China. In the first half of my dissertation, I investigate their philosophical understandings of identity, what makes a thing what it is and not something else. I consider this their metaphysic (using the term in the broadest sense of an account of reality). I begin by looking at their religio-philosophical contexts which informed their thought and then on texts written by my principles themselves. Maximus’ understanding, shaped by Greek philosophy and early Christian theologians, is embodied in a triad of concepts – logoi, divine ideas and wills which bestow being on created things and hold them in existence; tropoi, the modes of existence of particular creatures and hypostasis, the individual existent or creature which exists in the tension between logoi and tropoi. The core of Kukai’s understanding is funi (不二) or non-duality, a doctrine that has both epistemic and ontological implications. It is grounded in the experience of meditation as well as the esoteric Buddhist teaching of muge (無礙), the mutual interpenetration and non-obstruction of all things. It is a doctrine central to esotericism but also has roots in prajnāpāramitā (“perfection of wisdom”) literature, important to many schools of Mahāyāna Buddhism. How they understand ‘identity’ is central to their philosophy and will reflect in both the practices they advocate and the rationale for them After establishing and explicating their understanding of identity, in consequent chapters I look at the praxes that they advocate and their metapraxis or reasoning behind these practices. I focus on regimes of self-cultivation, such as meditation, prayer, virtuous behavior, various ritual activities and how they lead to the ultimate goal of divinization. In Maximus, this process of divinization is called theosis (θέωσις), ‘deification’. He follows in a long line of Christian thinkers who hold that God created human beings in order to make them like himself, to become by grace what God is by nature. In Kūkai, this process is known as sokushin jōbutsu (即身成仏), ‘becoming a Buddha in this very existence’. He is the heir to an esoteric tradition that holds that all sentient beings are originally enlightened, they have Buddha-mind or already are the Buddha, but this reality is obscured by a profound miscognition of the reality which gives rise to egoistic craving. In the final section, I look more closely at these respective accounts of divinization, to show the profound parallels and divergences found in their thought and elucidate the source of these differences in their respective metaphysic, their accounts of identity; how does identity shape practice? What informs this understanding of identity? This is the larger question I am seeking to address. In doing so, even though my research is limited in focus to two particular thinkers, they do act as representatives of two larger traditions, Early/Eastern Christianity and Japanese Buddhism. The answers they give to this question reflect the insights and positions offered by these larger traditions. / Religion

The question whether the Ruist (Confucian) idea of Tian (heaven) or Taiji (ultimate polarity) is transcendent in comparison to Christian ideas of the Creator-God remains controversial in the history of Christian-Ru interaction. To tackle the debate, this dissertation investigates the intellectual histories of “creatio ex nihilo” in the Greek-European Christian tradition and of “sheng sheng” (birth birth) in the Chinese Ru tradition, and compares these ideas with a methodology combining the pragmatist use of “vague category” and the hermeneutical “situational thinking.” The emergence of the idea “creatio ex nihilo” from Plato to Augustine championed the “ontological dependence” of cosmic realities upon the Creator-God. Divine creation was typically thought of as one process whereby divine intelligence implants ideas and forms into an inchoate form of being so that varying realities are created. However, Descartes’ theory of “created eternal truth” conceptualized divine creation as not being constrained by any rule of intelligence. This Cartesian voluntarism pushes the theistic vocabularies of creation to their limit such that it allows us to delineate a de-anthropomorphic sub-tradition within the main theistic tradition of “creatio ex nihilo.” Descartes’ thought was refined by Schleiermacher and Tillich. There were two distinctive ancient Chinese cosmologies: one Daoist pioneered by the Dao De Jing, and the other is Ruist initiated by the Appended Texts in the Classic of Change. When Wang Bi employed the ontology in the Appended Texts to interpret the cosmogony of Dao De Jing, his understanding of Taiji influenced the Ru tradition to reach an idea of creation similar to “creatio ex nihilo.” Accordingly, Taiji’s creativity can be characterized as “generatio ex nihilo,” an unconditioned constantly creative cosmic power without a creator standing behind the scene. Wang Bi’s thought was refined by Zhou Dunyi and Zhu Xi. As this project demonstrates, the Ru tradition of “generatio ex nihilo” provides the most apt comparison to the de-anthropomorphic sub-tradition of “creatio ex nihilo.” If we define transcendence as what is indeterminate and ontologically unconditioned by the existing world, Taiji’s “sheng sheng” conceptualized as “generatio ex nihilo” is even more transcendent than the mainstream theistic Christian understanding of divine creation.

<p> Harmony Christian School in Rustenburg, South Africa is a missionary outreach program of Bethel Gospel Assembly, Inc., New York. The school was founded in 2006 to educate learners and develop in them a close attachment with God even as they attained high academic standard in their school work. However, while there were established measures of academic progress from grade to grade, there was no comparable measure of the spiritual growth of the students in terms of how closely they were attached to God in their relationship as a result of their exposure to consistent Bible Study. The Researcher thus created an intervention study using the Attachment to God Inventory to measure the level of attachment of the adolescent learners to God in the school. The study did show that there was an attachment relationship between the learners and God. The study also showed that as a result of their consistent exposure to Bible study, there was a shift to a closer attachment to God. The level of the shift was minimal but statistically significant at a low level of confidence. The study then offered ministry recommendations. </p><p>