From their inauspicious beginnings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Mississippi evangelical churches--the Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian-- expanded dramatically and set the moral tone of society. Early churches were founded on egalitarian principles by members of both races. A study of unpublished church records reveals that before 1830, blacks and whites received equal treatment in the churches. White evangelicals welcomed slaves into the churches, often opposed slavery, and defended slaves' religious freedom. The rapid expansion of slavery in the state, the movement of slaveholders into the churches, and the growing wealth of the membership presented evangelicals with a serious moral dilemma. As sectional tensions rose and the debate over slavery intensified after 1830, most evangelicals embraced slavery. Religious leaders articulated the most accepted justification of slavery, one based on Biblical teachings. The Biblical defense of slavery emphasized the spiritual welfare of slaves. After 1830 evangelical efforts to minister to blacks increased, and black church membership grew. As they moved from sect to denomination, churches became more hierarchical and less egalitarian. Ministers sought a higher social position and placed greater emphasis on the ministerial gift. Lay participation in worship services was discouraged. Because of their preference for a different style of worship and because of white discrimination, blacks often preferred segregated services. Some historians have characterized biracial churches as simply another white control device against slaves, but an analysis of approximately 1600 disciplinary actions from 30 churches demonstrates that while whites sometimes used church courts to punish slaves who violated the slave code, most cases against blacks involved the same charges made against white offenders. The coming of the Civil War highlighted the divergent goals held by black and white evangelicals. With varying degrees of enthusiasm, white evangelicals lent their support to sectionalism, secession, and war. War and defeat brought about a crisis in many churches, yet out of that malaise grew a powerful, and heretofore unexamined, revival on the home front. Blacks joined in the revivals. The war disrupted life in the slave community, but many slaves saw the war as an answered prayer for freedom. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)

Evangelical moralism was the ideological foundation of the southern defense of slavery between 1830 and 1865. By 1830, evangelical culture had begun to attain a remarkable ascendancy in the South and the United States as a whole. The sectional debate over the morality of slavery took place largely within the confines of evangelical conceptual categories. In an era when religious ideas still permeated the life of the mind in America, the Old South was less culturally distinctive than historians have usually acknowledged. Southerners, through the medium of their evangelical world view, participated in mainstream nineteenth-century intellectual developments and modernizing trends. The obsession with bourgeois freedom, liberal economics, and material progress apparent in northern (and British) thought and society found expression in the slaveholding South. The southern encounter with Victorian modernity was most clearly reflected in the region's main cultural product: proslavery arguments written by evangelicals. Evangelicals' individualistic view of the work ethic, freedom, and man's relation to God constituted the premise of most proslavery tracts. Southern ministers popularized the identification of individual morality with economic utility and success in a free market environment. They, likewise, promulgated a definition of freedom that equated liberty with moral self-discipline. On the basis of their prior defense of individual freedom and progress southerners supported slaveholding primarily as a form of ethical success--a providential result of and reward for individual virtue and self-discipline. This justification of particular slaveholders did not lead most southerners to an abstract vindication of the institution of slavery or critique of the ideal of individual freedom. According to the dominant proslavery argument, slaves still possessed the inviolable conscience and autonomous will that were the irreducible touchstones of Christian liberty. Southern slavery, therefore, did not contradict one explanation of personal and economic freedom. Proslavery spokesman maintained that any inequities in southern society resulted from an open and ongoing competition to develop moral will power. Racial and labor subordination originated in failure to develop character. On this fundamental level, southern evangelicals' explanations of their economic order were not at odds with northern evangelicals' understanding of free society.

This study analyzes the relationship of Douglas Clyde Macintosh to the time in which he lived using the concepts of irony, innocence, and myth. By employing these concepts, the author identifies four significant moves that Macintosh made to break with philosophical idealism. The author explores Macintosh's relationship to an older, reigning Ritschlian liberal theology, and the development of neo-orthodoxy by his students H. Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr. This Yale strand of neo-orthodoxy is relevant to the "new historicism" as described by William Dean. The author explores the relevance of Macintosh's work to the developing new historicism including neopragmatism in philosophy, radical empiricism, the American evasion of epistemology, and the role of apologetics in inter-religious dialogue. Macintosh's Yale strand of empirical theology emerges as a significant critique of the new historicist position. In response to the social, intellectual and religious crisis of modernity, Macintosh moved to recover objectivism in theology, attempted to rehabilitate the apologetic arguments for the existence of God and the reasonableness of religious belief, employed the Radical Method in theology to define and to defend an essence of Christianity, and employed the Anselmian apologetic tactic of leaving Christ aside to prove his necessity for human salvation. His use of the Ritschlian Radical Method in theology produced differences in Macintosh's and Ritschl's theological content. The author also analyzes the criticisms that H. Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr leveled against Macintosh. Eight reasons are presented for the eclipse of Macintosh's empirical theology in scholarship.

Two centuries after its formulation, the American doctrine of the separation of Church and State yet remains a continuing source of controversy and confusion for many. For the interpretation of that idea--as embodied in the First Amendment to the Constitution--has been frequently beset by two historical myths or misunderstandings. From early in our history on, for example, there has been an attempt to cast our national beginnings in explicitly Christian terms, exemplified by such notions as "redeemer nation" and the belief in ours as a Christian republic. A clearer reading of the evidence suggests, however, that such an interpretation is not warranted by the facts, nor has it ever been. Yet likewise, neither true is the suggestion that has frequently been advanced by the other historical misunderstanding, namely, that the Founding Fathers set out to create an intentionally "secular" state, wishing to completely deny any significant role for religion within the affairs of public life. For the reality is that the First Amendment was the finely balanced product of compromise, reflecting not simply the more well-known elements of Jeffersonian rationalism and Enlightenment political theory, but an equally significant theological pedigree, as well. One may see within even its few words, in fact, the reflections of such Christian thinkers as Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Edwards, and particularly perhaps, Roger Williams. Taken together with the insights of Locke, Jefferson, and Madison, American separationism thus emerged as a synthesis of sorts between those two visions, as well as a practical solution to the very real problem of vastly different religious experiences between the American states. As a compromise, therefore, the Amendment (and the subsequent American understanding of Church and State), should not be "pushed" too far in either direction. Rather, the key to understanding its continuing relevance for today is to both recognize the complex and varied context out of which the notion of separationism was adopted two hundred years ago, and the truly revolutionary changes which the American experiment was to represent.

The post-modern predicament can be seen in the conflict between general hermeneutics and deconstruction. General hermeneutics seeks to develop the "modern" project of understanding understanding. It is concerned with universality and meaning, sublimating otherness and difference in the "merging of horizons". Deconstruction subverts such a drive to universality, seeking to open up differences where there is a presumed unity. It tears horizons apart. Protestant interpretation of Scripture has been closely associated with general hermeneutics. However, an evaluation of Rudolf Bultmann's thought shows how any so-called general hermeneutic involves implicit commitments to natural theology which conflict with doctrines of special revelation that are implied by the principles of sola fide and sola gratia. In this way the generality of general hermeneutics is deconstructed. Instead of beginning with an independently derived hermeneutic, which directs the interpretation of Biblical texts, one should begin with the kerygmatic content, and develop its hermeneutical implications. Through a careful examination of the implications of Luther's account of justification, it can be seen that the point of departure for interpretation is not a generally determinable "plain sense" of the text, but rather a particularly determined ambiguity, opacity and polyvalence. Through the text's content, which is the Word of God, there is a metaphorical transfer from a grammatical metaphoricity to a divine metaphoricity, in which an initial linguistic displacement in the text is reduplicated existentially as a shift from the indeterminate absence to the hidden presence of God. This metaphorical metaphoricity provides an alternative to Babel, which is the Derridian "metaphor of metaphors". The metaphorical metaphoricity that grounds justification can be seen in the incarnation, which is thematized by John's Gospel. Through an account of the logic and rhetoric of revelation in John's text, a hermeneutic of revelation can be derived, which does justice to the unique dynamics of Scripture and its function in the Christian community. The singular juxtaposition of universality and particularity that takes place in the incarnation provides a third alternative to the competing movements that constitute the post-modern predicament.

Filial obligations are moral requirements that adult children have for the well-being of their parents. These obligations are non-voluntary special obligations. An examination of selected cultural (classical Greek and imperial Chinese), religious (Judaic, Islamic and Christian) and philosophical (Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes and Locke) views concerning filial obligation is provided. Several candidates emerge for the basis of filial obligations. An analysis of the arguments for each of these candidates is provided. Personal identity is rejected as an inadequate basis for filial obligations because it relies on a fallacy. Friendship is rejected because (1) there are morally relevant features of the filial relationship that are not captured by this account and (2) the lack of equality of autonomy and the lack of independence make friendship between children and parents impossible. Reciprocity is rejected when it is shown (1) that the motive of parents for benefiting children is morally irrelevant on a reciprocity account and (2) that the requirement of the repayment of a debts is damaging to the parent-child relationship. Gratitude is supported as the basis of filial obligations because it does not fall prey to the inadequacies listed above. In addition, it addresses all features held to be important to the structure of the parent-child relationship. The argument defended is adult children whose parents have intentionally, voluntarily and benevolently benefitted them for their own sake, have an obligation to cultivate attitudes that are constitutive of the virtue of gratitude. The virtue of gratitude includes the dispositions of appreciation and goodwill. Filial obligations require that one act according to the possession of such attitudes. Application of the gratitude account of filial obligations to cases shows that the specific content of the obligation is context-dependent and cannot be determined across cases. This finding strengthens the argument for gratitude as the basis of filial obligations as it may be applied to our pluralistic society without undermining the values and customs for a particular community.

G. K. Chesterton (1874--1936), an English journalist and man-of-letters, gained an broad audience for his cultural criticism in the first decades of the twentieth century. This dissertation presents an explanation for Chesterton's widespread popularity based on a reading of contemporary reviews of Chesterton's work. It argues that one of the chief reasons for Chesterton's popularity was that he provided an understanding of English national identity at a time when this was problematic for the British public. His early literary criticism on Charles Dickens and Robert Browning, written in the context of the Anglo-Boer War and widespread anti-war agitation, questioned the Kiplingesque glorification of the British Empire and the racial identifications of Englishness. In attempting to create a spiritual or cultural rather than racial genealogy for Englishness, Chesterton got involved in debates over England's religious heritage, the Church of England's establishment, and the role of religion in state education, the nature of English liberalism, and the possibilities for a native English brand of socialism. These debates led him eventually to reformulate the Whig history of England---particularly in his epic poem of King Alfred, The Ballad of the White Horse (1911), his propaganda during World War I, and his Short History of England (1918)---to tell a tale in which the persistence of Christian orthodoxy was the key to England's peculiar liberal cultural inheritance. After his death in 1936, Chesterton's conception of England as a nation with a past rooted in European Christendom contributed to rhetorical understandings of England's identity and role during World War II.

Seventeenth-century Lives of colonial saints in Peru reflect the Spanish colony's growing independence and changing missionary strategies. Lives of saints Luis Bertran, Francis Solano, Toribio Alfonso de Mogrovejo, Juan Macias, Rose of Lima, Martin de Porras and the unrecognized Nicolas de Ayllon reveal the symbolic resolution of alterity as a dominant theme. Concern with alterity appears most prominently in discourses about language and bodies. Hagiography provided Creole communities with religious narratives of self-legitimization and self-definition. This questions a general scholarly assumption that saints of the Early Modern period are the creations of the ecclesiastical powers in Rome. Likewise, the assertion that hagiography is written in order to provide exemplars of virtue for ordinary people is qualified by my study. The Lives mirror two phases of colonial development: the first phase described Spanish evangelization and confrontation with native populations. Saints were strongly identified with Europe and their Lives reflected the cultural struggle with external others and the need to justify Christian missions. Hagiographers focused on the power or language and gave little attention to the physical world of bodies. The second phase was marked by an increasing sense of Creole identity. Hagiographers shifted the focus from words and language--now treated as suspect--to the body itself. Lives of these saints showcased mortifications of the body in order to dissociate the saints from inferiorities associated with their race or gender.

<p> This thesis establishes a link between conceptions of female virtue and the practice of veiling by women from ancient to medieval times in the Mediterranean region. This is evidenced by the consistent advocacy and prescription of veiling in ancient and medieval theological texts, including Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian, and Islamic texts. Veiling practices are shown to have a religious foundation, grounded in the ideas of honor and virtue. These notions were reflected in society over time with veiled aristocratic noblewomen and unveiled marginalized classes. While acknowledging class-based theories of female veiling, the thesis concentrates on the religious factors for veiling, particularly for medieval Muslim societies. The argument of this thesis is that while veiling did not originate in Islamic societies, Muslims validated the practice through their own literature and laws. The paper also includes evidence of female seclusion, which co-exists with the spread in the practice of veiling by women. </p>

<p> The Indian churches in the United States consist of mostly two groups of people, namely, those who migrated directly from India known as the first generation, and those who are born and brought up in the United States, otherwise known as the second generation. The first generation keeps many traditions, practices, and ideologies they brought from their country of origin. They assume that these are superior to most of the other cultures, and hence need to be preserved by future generations. The second generation does not think much about the first generation's cultural and ethnic norms and are not willing to give such prominence to their prerogatives. Since they were born into a different cultural scenario and raised in a postmodern society, these traditions and ideologies of their parents' generation do not seem to have contemporary relevance in their day-to-day lives. Therefore, the silent encounters, otherwise called inter-generational conflicts, occurring between these two groups culminate in the exodus of the younger generation from "their home churches and possibly from the Christian faith" itself. </p><p> The thesis examines how participation in integrated Christian activities affects inter-generational relationships in the first and second generation of the Indian Pentecostal Churches. The project also identifies the dynamics of inter-generational relationships in order to build healthy families, because such families will be the basic units for the existence of healthy churches and societies. </p><p> In reference to the aforementioned thesis, the project provided an incredible opportunity for both groups to interact together and bring forth better solutions for healthier inter-generational relationships. It is evident that even though all churches are very much concerned about this phenomenon, many have not been able to do much in addressing the problem with plans for corrective actions. Therefore, the evaluation and research opened the way for greater discussion between both generations. Moreover, the researcher is confident that positively touch the generations to come.</p>