The report of the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe to a humble native peasant in Tepeyac, in the first decades of the sixteenth century, has been considered one of the crucial elements in understanding the Mexican national identity. Unlike other reports of the miraculous presence of the Virgin Mary among the recently converted Indians, the account of the apparition of Guadalupe became intensely popular and widely known among all social levels of the Spanish colony But as early as the middle of the sixteenth century, criticism began to be exerted on the historicity of the origin of the Marian cult in Tepeyac since no contemporary eye-witness reports were found. Many scholars, particularly in modern times, began to consider the account of the apparitions only as pious legends Everything we know about the supernatural presence of the Virgin Mary and her early cult comes from a group of 46 documents. According to several of those sources, the apparitions actually took place in a historically determined space and time. Sometimes the documents give us very detailed information. Such as the case of the famous Hueitlamahuizoltica, the long Nahuatl account now considered the 'official version' of the Mexican Catholic Church Our study of the origin and the content of these 46 documents confirmed that none of them can be considered historical since none of them contains a contemporary eye-witness report. Furthermore, it was found that five sources traditionally considered to be Guadalupan documents have no relation to the apparitions, the image, or the early cult A close examination of the documents leads us to believe that they have their roots in a group of native oral traditions created collectively between 1521 and 1649. The oral traditions served as the basis for what was later recorded by both Indian and Spanish writers. Our hypothesis may explain the incongruities found in the texts. It may also explain why most of the native documents are by unknown authors / acase@tulane.edu

This study analyzes, from a mortgage banking perspective, capital formation and lending in Guadalajara, Mexico during a period of economic growth. The analysis focuses particularly upon the Church as a financial institution The following questions are answered as the basis for conclusions about the influences which most affected the formation and conservation of capital and about the influence of lending policies upon colonial economic development and social structure: (1) What was the legal framework under which lenders operated? (2) What were the important sources of capital? (3) How did the Church generate capital? (4) What were the loan underwriting and servicing policies of the Church and other lenders? The most important sources of capital within the Church were nun convents and funds which the diocese owned or controlled. As enforceable contracts, chantries and dowries were financial instruments as well as religious institutions. They funneled wealth into the Church, supplementing unrestricted donations and other revenues. However, sometime during the period 1750-1800 the volume of loans by individuals overtook the total for Church lenders Because no more than 5 percent interest could be legally charged, the diocesan Cabildo and other Church underwriters concerned themselves primarily with security of principal. Loans were usually collateralized and well-margined. Productive farms were the preferred collateral Individual lenders made mostly short-term loans, while most Church loans were for intermediate terms and usually could be extended. As a result of slow turnover, Church capital was periodically scarce Because the Church preferred haciendas as collateral, the agricultural sector of the colonial economy benefitted most from the favorable 5 percent interest rate. Merchants became members of the landowning elite, often after acquiring land through marriage alliances in which their part of the arrangement was to furnish liquid capital for the expansion of production. This was in effect equity financing which circumvented the 5 percent interest limitation. The manipulation of colonial capital resources contributed to the maintenance of an agrarian, relatively immobile society. However, colonial society was not characterized by lavish living, perhaps partly because its members often carried heavy burdens of debt / acase@tulane.edu

The female protagonist of the Apocryphal Book of Judith inspires myriad representations in the arts and humanities. Numerous transformations in her mythos move beyond her representation as a wealthy young widow who chooses to live as a solitary ascetic. The apocryphal Judith, who destroys an enemy general and is feted as a national hero in Israel is interpreted in the twentieth century as a "phallic woman" and a "femme fatale". This dissertation asks "how do we account for this" and analyzes the phenomenon from a feminist critical perspective. / Part one. Social Location, proposes that representations and realities of women in the social cultural milieu of authors and artists influence characterizations of Judith. A dialogue which examines the social location of Jewish women in the late Second Temple period and that of the fictional Judith as a wealthy widow, solitary religious ascetic and educated woman indicates Judith would not have been considered anomalous in the cultural ambient of the author. / Part two. Psyche and Persona, traces transformations in the Judith mythos among theologians and biblical scholars. This analysis determines the extent to which Judith is represented as self-actualizing subject or as objectified and functioning to perpetuate the patriarchal ethos of Jewish and Christian traditions. / Part three. Judith and the Cultural and Personal Agendas of Artists discerns patterns in representations of Judith over the centuries as well as the influence of the personal agendas of artists upon the Judith mythos. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-08, Section: A, page: 2955. / Major Professor: John F. Priest. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1991.

<p>This dissertation introduces readers to the major figures and features of the twentieth-century American prosperity gospel. It argues that these diverse expressions of Christian faith-fuelled abundance can be understood as a movement, for they stem from a cohesive set of shared understandings. First, the movement centered on Faith. It conceived of faith as an "activator," a power given to believers that bound and loosed spiritual forces and turned the spoken word into reality. Second and third respectively, the movement depicted faith as palpably demonstrated in wealth and health. It could be measured in both in the wallet--one's personal wealth--and in the body--one's personal health--making material reality the measure of the success of immaterial faith. Last, the movement expected faith to be marked by victory. Believers trusted that culture held no political, social, or economic impediment to faith, and no circumstance could stop believers from living in total victory here on earth. Though its origins lay in the late nineteenth century, the prosperity gospel took root in the Pentecostal revivals of the post-World War II years. It reached maturity by the late 1970s as a robust pan-denominational movement, garnering a national platform and a robust network of churches, ministries, publications, and media outlets. Using the tools of ethnography and cultural history, this dissertation argues that faith, wealth, health, and victory served as the hallmarks of this American phenomenon.</p> / Dissertation

This dissertation investigates the rhetorical practices of a tradition: the Reform Movement in Judaism. I analyze the three platforms written in 1885, 1937, and 1999 to define the collective identity of the Reform Movement in America. I begin this study by concentrating on how the Reform Movement framed its collective identity in each of its platforms focusing on what this group agreed on and disagreed on and how they represented those disagreements. Through my investigation, I discovered that these documents reflected different stages in the tradition's development. In this dissertation, I argue that how the Reform tradition framed its collective identity depended on the tradition's stage of development. I argue that in the tradition's first stage of development, it questioned the external, broader tradition from which it diverged, yet it did not question its own internal beliefs, texts, and authorities, and it projected an authoritative identity uncomplicated by disagreements. For example, in 1885 the rabbis authoritatively declared that traditional Jewish practices were no longer meaningful in the modern era. As the tradition developed, the community no longer deferred to internal authorities unquestioningly, but became self reflective and asked questions about itself---questions that enabled the community to understand the lessons from its history and identify inadequacies. So in 1937, the rabbis stated that some of these practices were worthwhile, can be revised to be more meaningful, and can help keep Jews connected as a collective---as a people. Then, in 1999, the tradition faced an epistemological crisis because conflicts over rival answers to key questions could no longer be settled rationally. The problem was that the movement could not resolve the apparent contradiction of having a belief system that valued individual differences and being able to define itself as a collective. It was through the writing process of the 1999 platform that the movement articulated the tradition's most significant beliefs and solved its epistemological crisis by defining reform not by the contents of its changes but in the very process of change---the belief in the value of change and diversity.

This dissertation is a cultural-historical reading of the text entitled Las Mercedes y La Escala Mistica written by Isabel Flores de Oliva, later canonized as Santa Rosa de Lima. The purpose of the present study is to analyze her iconolexic discourse as a unique type of mystic text within the realm of colonial Latin American feminine Literature. The first chapter describes, simultaneously, the discursive masculine tradition in the New World immediately following the Conquest, and the lack of discursive and written testimonies of women of the same era. Furthermore, we approach Santa Rosa's work with the help of Walter Mignolo's theory about colonial semiosis and its applicability to pictorical, oral and other cultural discourses. The second chapter centers its study on the socio-historical elements that surrounded Rosa at the time of her life and all those ideological and cultural variables that shaped her, allowing her to become the most venerated and beloved saint in the Americas. The third chapter focuses on the critical and analytical study of Santa Rosa's Mercedes and Escala Mistica. It shows the kind of strategies and conventions that the Saint employed in her texts. The dissertation concludes by desmitifying erroneous ideas about the saint, and demonstrating the fact that Santa Rosa was indeed the first mystic writer of colonial Peru and why she should be studied as such.

It is common but too simplistic to say that Old English literature shows the unconscious blending of the traditional Germanic heroic ethos and the early Christian aversion to war. The matter is more complex. Throughout the Latin West, Christian perceptions of a tension between sanctity and warfare changed over the period from the arrival of Roman Christianity in England (AD 597) to the period following the Norman Conquest of 1066. Christian disdain for and rejection of warfare (at times no more than nominal) gave way eventually to active participation in wars considered "just" or "holy." Anglo-Saxon literature, in both Latin and Old English, documented this changing ethos and also played a significant role in its development. The earliest extant Anglo-Saxon hagiographic texts featured a new type of holy man, the martyred warrior king, whose role in spreading Christianity in England culminated in a dramatic death in battle fighting enemies portrayed by hagiographers as bloodthirsty pagans. During the same period, other Anglo-Saxon writers depicted warriors who transformed themselves into soldiers of Christ, armed only with the weapons of faith. These and later Anglo-Saxon literary works explored the intersection of violence and the sacred in often conflicting ways, in some instances helping to lead Christian spirituality toward the more martial spirit that would eventually culminate in Pope Urban II's preaching of the First Crusade in 1095, but in other cases preserving intact many early Christians' radical opposition to war. Aspects of crusading ideology existed alongside Christian opposition to war throughout the Anglo-Saxon period. This study examines hagiographers' changing literary tropes as subtle but important reflections of medieval Christianity's evolution from rejecting the sword to tolerating and even wielding it. Hagiographers used various narrative topoi to recount the lives of warrior saints, and, as the ambient Christian ethos changed, so did their employment of these themes. The tension between forbearance and militancy, even in the earliest English lives of saints, is more profound and more culturally complex than what is generally understood as merely the Germanic heroic trappings of Anglo-Saxon Christian literature.

In the midst of revolution as the Qing Dynasty faded into the twentieth century, metropolitan Chinese Muslim leaders took initiatives in their communities, which shaped change. As a result, a process was set in motion, one that effected the identity of urban Chinese Muslims in more ways than one--within the new political scene nationally, internationally, and in regards to other Muslims in China. The process stimulated a self-awareness among Chinese Muslim urban populations, which promoted new perceptions of their identity as Hui. The process also triggered a debate among Chinese Muslim intellectuals in which ideas of minzu-ness, ethnicity, and religiosity were argued. The process fostered a sense of solidarity among the urban Muslim communities. Chinese Muslim activities paralleled those of other Chinese. Chinese Muslims took part in the New Culture Movement, many joined the army. At the same time they focused attention on improving their communities. This dissertation examines the activities of urban Chinese Muslims: the creation of study groups and associations; the revamping of Muslim schools; and the publishing of books and periodicals. The dissertation is a look at strategies used in adapting to change. The goal has been to illustrate that the Chinese Muslims accepted change, even welcomed it, but in so doing altered perceptions of themselves and their religion. The metropolitan Chinese Muslims got swept up in the enthusiasm of the early republican era. Many influential members of the community endorsed the Nationalists' revolution and the new republic. Chinese Muslim urbanites welcomed modernization and nationalism, seeing them as vehicles that would facilitate their efforts, and protect them. Chinese Muslim motives were nationalistic, as Chinese they wanted a strong China. Their motives were also parochial. They wanted a strong local community, and they actively set out to improve conditions. By strengthening their communities they could insure the survival of Chinese Muslim culture, just as a strong China would insure the survival of Chinese culture.

This study investigates the medieval Chinese formation of the cult of Dizang (Skt. Kṣitigarbha; Jpn. Jizō), a Buddhist divinity especially popular in connection with East Asian beliefs about the afterlife. It explores why and how Dizang, an obscure figure from the pre-Chinese Buddhist pantheon, became in medieval China an important object of cult worship. A tendency to focus on the popularized characterization of Dizang as " the savior of the damned" has distorted scholarly understanding of this Bodhisattva, obscuring other developments of his personality, including afterlife trends other than the underworld function. To arrive at a more accurate re-construction of the medieval Chinese Dizang cult, this study examines a diverse range of evidences (canonical and non-canonical, textual and visual, as well as Buddhist and non-Buddhist) so as to ferret out threads of Dizang belief not documented in standard sources. Non-canonical sources are particularly highlighted since they frequently capture largely neglected aspects of religious development which must be studied in order to uncover the full complexity of medieval Chinese Buddhism. In particular the formation of the Dizang cult supplies a crucial key to unlocking the larger cross-cultural patterns of religious assimilation operating in medieval Chinese society, which have wider implications for the study of Chinese religion. Previous studies on sinification in Chinese Buddhist history have focused on a particular thinker, a specific text, a single doctrinal concept, or one ritual practice, thus demonstrating the development of only one pattern of assimilation and reducing the complexity of the cross-cultural dynamic in which assimilation really took place. The Dizang cult instead allows one to better contextualize the patterns of cross-cultural assimilation in medieval Chinese religion. What distinguishes the Dizang cult from other examples of sinification is the manner in which the figure of Dizang functions as a religious symbol that integrates diverse religious planes, doctrine, mythology, ritual, and soteriology. The Dizang cult, in short, offers a single but kaleidoscopic lens that encompasses a multivalent religio-cultural assimilation, thus resisting usual bifurcations between doctrine and ritual, as well as between so-called "elite" and "popular" religion.

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.