One of the most controversial actions undertaken by the Catholic Church in the conversion of the Indians of the New World was the destruction of their pre-Hispanic religion through the extirpation of their objects of worship: clay, wooden and stone idols. In the case of Yucatan, the focus area for this study, the Institution that oversaw the arrest and punishment of the Yucatec Maya for idolatry was not the Holy Office of the Inquisition, but rather the little known and less studied institution of the episcopal court called the provisorato de indios. This dissertation examines the little known institution, its procedures and ministers and their impact on colonial Maya religion Using new sources of primary documentation the dissertation suggests a new trend in the conflict between the Catholic Church and the Maya in colonial Yucatan: specifically an increase in the intensity and an institutionalization of the extirpation of idolatry. The dissertation titled 'The Indian Inquisition and the Extirpation of Idolatry: The Process of Punishment in the Ecclesiastical Courts of the Provisorato de Indios in Yucatan, 1563--1821' analyzes the role played by this episcopal court in the 'spiritual conquest' of the Maya by examining its significance in two parts The first part examines the origin and procedures of the colonial episcopal court [Chapters 1--6]. A second part [Chapters 7--10] examines the impact that this institution had on local Maya religion and its central role in inter-ethnic conflict. This case study for colonial Yucatan offers a new approach to the study of colonial Indigenous religion and Spanish/Indian inter-ethnic relations in the New World. The importance of the public administration of ecclesiastical punishment as a form of didactic missionary theatre is emphasized. The dissertation's conclusions suggest that the punishment inherent in the extirpation of idolatry served as the Yucatec Maya's main means of contact with Christianity. In the face of the repressive measures of the ecclesiastical courts the colonial Maya chose either to resist or to engage in flight. This dissertation concludes that both of these options, previously discovered and studied by various authors, were the outcome of their interaction with the processes and ministers of this ecclesiastical court / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation explores the relationship between a women's religious order and the growth of colonial culture and society in New Orleans between 1727 and 1803. The experience of the Ursulines traces a common arc of colonial development from the frontier struggle to survive, to stabilization, and maturation. At the same time, it reveals a distinctive pattern of cultural continuity and adaptation at work. A traditional French institutional form was transplanted to a new environment, leaving its imprint on the society that emerged in the process. The Ursulines influenced slavery and race relations, shaped gender roles and expectations; and played a critical part in establishing and defining Catholicism in New Orleans The Ursulines promoted an aggressively inclusive form of Catholicism that deputized laywomen of all racial and social backgrounds to carry out an active campaign of catechesis among the young and unconverted of the colony. The results of their apostolate were striking. Enslaved Africans were drawn into the fold of Catholicism and women of diverse backgrounds enjoyed a formal educational experience unavailable to the colony's men The spirituality and practices of vowed and lay women in colonial New Orleans invite comparison among English, French, and Spanish experiences, and suggest how different cultural legacies inflected the developmental course of these three colonial societies. The Ursulines' active educational mission contrasts with the contemplative mode of Spanish and Spanish colonial female religious, who were excluded from the process of native and slave conversion. The New Orleans nuns enjoyed economic autonomy and wealth in land and slaves, providing a counterpoint to trends in the English colonies and post-Revolutionary America which reinscribed women within a confining realm of domesticity The history of the Ursulines in New Orleans demonstrates that while the institutions of colonizing nations shared a common developmental trajectory, distinct cultural endowments persisted in the New World. It testifies to the profound impact of religious ideology and institutional forms on colonial development, and offers new perspective on the origins of nineteenth-century conflict over the nature of American identity / acase@tulane.edu

The hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Argentina has been widely denounced for its alleged complicity with the military dictatorship's 'Dirty War' against subversion following the 1976 coup that overthrew the government of Isabel Peron. Criticism of the church's lack of courage began almost immediately, when relatives of the detained and disappeared were frustrated by the bishops' reluctance to intercede on behalf of the victims of systematic human rights abuse A majority of scholars and journalists investigating the period presume the church's guilt without fully examining available documentary materials. What little evidence most writers offer is almost always more circumstantial than documentary The church's official pronouncements form the analytical core of the dissertation. Text-critical and thematic analysis reveals not only the social and political uses of the documents but also helps place them within the context of the larger body of literature on the period. The ecclesiastical documents are themselves the subject of much controversy. Some argue that their primary role during the dictatorship was to provide a 'discourse of support' for the military's Proceso de Reorganizacion Nacional. Moreover, critics accused the hierarchy of masking the church's moral weakness behind carefully timed publications that tried to put the church in more favorable light. This study analyses the integrity of those documents and evaluates their usefulness for research by asking whether the bishops are really talking about what they say they are talking about / acase@tulane.edu

For many critics, the demise of Saint-Cyr stemmed from the transformation of the institution into a convent six years after its opening. This seemingly conservative shift has been used as "proof" that Maintenon abandoned a progressive and feminist pedagogy. A study of Maintenon's writings intended for Saint-Cyr suggests that, though she wavered between theory and practice, she never gave up her utopian and feminist impulses. This dissertation argues that, in the end, despite numerous social constraints, Maintenon found ways to maintain her principles by adopting practices suitable to the context. Chapter I is a study of Saint-Cyr's genesis and Maintenon's goal in creating this institution. Chapters II and III analyze the educational system at Saint-Cyr, its curriculum and methodology. Chapter IV is a study of the theater as practiced at Saint-Cyr, with particular attention to the girls' performances of Racine's Esther, the ensuing scandal and the changes implemented by Maintenon. Chapter V analyzes Maintenon's letters, Conversations, Instructions and Proverbes with respect to the question of the condition of women, arguing that Maintenon possessed a deep desire to free the girls and to give them a better life. Chapter VI analyzes Maintenon's image in modern fiction, specifically, Yves Dangerfield's La Maison d'Esther (1991) and Patricia Mazuy's film Saint-Cyr (2000). In this chapter, I consider to what extent such an image is based on Maintenon's writings, to what extent it is constructed and, finally, how her character is still important for today's public.

During the early 1570s, a dispute over the theological definition of original sin rent the central German county of Mansfeld, homeland of Martin Luther. The controversy, initiated by Matthias Flacius Illyricus, divided the conservative Gnesio-Lutheran clergy into two hostile camps. One, led by the Superintendent Hieronymus Mencel, was centered in the city of Eisleben and rejected Flacius's definition of original sin. The other, centered in the city of Tal Mansfeld, was led by the powerful deacon, historian, and polemicist Cyriacus Spangenberg, and accepted Flacius's definition. This dissertation examines the central doctrinal premises over which these clerics fought, as well as their broader implications for Lutheran theology, before turning to other social, political, and economic factors that influenced the clerics' decisions to side with one group or the other. But the controversy was not limited to the clergy. The counts of Mansfeld, numbering between seven and ten during the period and stemming from three dynastic lines, also split over the issue of original sin. One line sided with the group of clerics centered in Eisleben, two with the pastors headquartered in Tal Mansfeld. This study explores the involvement of the counts in the debate over doctrine, but also addresses the various political and other non-religious forces that caused them to split over the issue. With the pastors preaching and pamphleteering and the counts battling among themselves, it did not take long for the laity to become deeply involved and divided over the issue of original sin. Contemporary sources suggest that the miners of Mansfeld fought in the streets and taverns over the issue. This study explores how the clerics articulated the debate to the laity, and the degree to which these commoners understood it. Furthermore, it explores social and other non-religious reasons why the laity took sides in this doctrinal debate. This dissertation argues that although a variety of forces were at play pushing members of these three groups--the clerics, counts, and commoners--in one direction or another, an interest in the doctrinal issue and its implications for wider theology was a motivating theme central to each group.

This dissertation explores the fluid relationship between monastic women and religious orders. I examine the roles of popes and their representatives, governing bodies of religious orders, and the nunneries themselves in outlining the contours of those relationships. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, many emerging religious communities belonged to small, local groups with loose ties to other nearby houses. While independent houses or regional congregations were acceptable at the time of the formation of these convents, after the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, monastic houses were required to follow one of three monastic rules and to belong to a recognized order with a well-defined administrative structure and mechanisms for enforcing uniformity of practice. This program of monastic reform had mixed success. Though some nunneries attained official incorporation into monastic or mendicant orders due to papal intervention, the governing bodies of these orders were reluctant to take on the responsibility of providing temporal and spiritual guidance to nuns, and for most nunneries the relationship to an order remained unofficial and loosely defined. The continuing instability of order affiliation and identity becomes especially clear in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when war-related destruction forced many nunneries to move into the walled area of the city, often resulting in unions of houses that did not share a rule and order affiliation. Moreover, some individual houses changed rules and orders several times. Though a few local houses of religious women had a strong and durable identification with their order, for many nunneries, the boundaries between orders remained porous and their organizational affiliations were pragmatic and mutable.

This study has three primary, interrelated themes. First, this thesis will show that creating native Christian leadership was a fundamental goal of the Presbyterians who ran the Tucson Indian Training School (1888-1960). Second it will be shown that this pursuit by the Presbyterians, when combined with the motivations and goals of the students and their families, often times expressed itself in Escuela students who were adept at cooperation and cultural brokering. Finally this thesis will address the fundamental difference between federal Indian schools and mission schools to show that a goal of creating Christian leaders was more easily achieved in the mission school environment after the turn of the 20th century. Primary and secondary sources, as well as interviews with Tucson Indian School alumni are used to place this particular Indian boarding school in historical, cultural and personal perspective.

In 1839, the year after slavery's end in the British West Indies, a group of young abolitionist graduates of Ohio's Oberlin College established a Protestant mission in Jamaica. Joining the already numerous British missionaries on the island, these mostly Congregationalist white American men and women created mission churches and schools to aid and convert black Jamaicans as well as to show skeptical whites in the United States a successful model of an emancipated society. The fledgling American Missionary Association adopted their project in 1847, and it continued until the end of the American Civil War. The mission failed to be the shining example of an interracial society its founders had intended because in spite of their devotion to their doctrine of Christian liberty, the missionary men and women positioned themselves as perpetual parents over "childlike" Jamaican converts. The dissertation focuses on the conflicts over the meaning of liberty as different factions in the mission defined it. It does this in two parts: first by showing how abolitionist men committed to liberty instituted mission churches and households based in strictly controlled hierarchies, and second, by examining the challenges brought to those hierarchies by black Jamaicans, white women, and others. The Americans went to Jamaica with an idea of Christian liberty that conflated religious conversion and emancipation. When the missionary men found that few black Jamaicans lived up this initial expectation of a "born again" society, they managed this "licentiousness" by imposing strict church discipline and by becoming increasingly attached to their power as infallible "fathers" overseeing their mission households. Over the course of the mission's almost thirty-year history, disgruntled members of the mission---both black and white---challenged this hierarchy in direct and indirect ways, and most interestingly, the ministers could, at times, be convinced that they were wrong, especially when a white man had raised the complaint. Black Jamaican men and women and the mission's white women had less success. Occurring as they did in the missionary setting, these periodic disputes over the mission's power structure reflected and distorted American discussions about gender and race, religion, and Christian reform.

A genealogy of institutional Catholic discourse on depression reveals a strategic process of epistemic accommodation that supports the construction of the condition as a spiritual and moral problem. The hierarchy defends its stake in Catholic subject-formation through competition and complicity with psychiatric models of depression. Positing secular society as a risk to mental health, the Church proposes a cure for depression that is also a solution to the twin crises of ecclesial authority and postmodern culture. That is the evangelization of EuroAmerican culture through the resurrection of Catholic moral pedagogy and technologies of the self. Thus, depression serves as a discursive field for the operation of Catholic governmentality.

This study is an interdisciplinary history the African American Pentecostal-Charismatic (AAPC) movement in the twentieth century. It aims to place the rise of African American Pentecostal-Charismaticism within the context of African American religious history in general and the greater Holiness-Pentecostal movement in particular. It examines the religious traditions (in both theology and practice) out of which the AAPC arose; the specific historical context out of which the AAPC developed; the role of leadership; the social appeal of the AAPC; and the role of gender, class, and race in shaping the growth and character of the movement. The general field of African American religious history is understudied, with the possible exception of slave Christianity. For the modern period, much of the scholarship has focused on the black church's relationship to the Civil Rights movement, and the emphasis has been on the mainline black denominations. The focus in the history of Pentecostalism has been on the early twentieth-century origins of the movement, showing its interracial nature, but little has been published on such splinter movements as the Latter Rain phenomenon and the African American Independent Pentecostal-Charismatic (AAIPC) movement. My study will be the first scholarly analysis of this movement and its latter-twentieth-century variations, and the first to place them in geo-cultural/historical/religious context. Among the major interpretive points elaborated are the following: (1) contrary to the expectations of early twentieth-century scholars, African American Pentecostalism was hardly a passing phase; (2) the advent of Pentecostalism marked an end to the hegemony of purported mainline denominations in the African American religious experience; (3) unlike mainline Protestantism and Catholicism, Pentecostalism welcomed the participation of women in its leadership; (4) a proliferation of electronic media (radio, television, and the internet) has facilitated a further dissolution of racial, geographical, and denominational barriers; and (5) independent ministers looking toward the twenty-first century have begun to reconsider their initial embrace of complete autonomy and to examine the spiritual and structural ramifications of interdependence and ecumenicalism. Perhaps this is part of the often observed path from sect to denomination that has characterized many earlier religious movements.