Thesis advisor: Andrew Prevot / This dissertation seeks to contribute to the discipline of theological anthropology by engaging the histories, writings, and aesthetic contributions of women within the African diaspora. In particular, the dissertation crafts an approach to analyzing the concept of the imago dei in relation to the experiences of flesh, bones, land, and sea that have shaped Black women’s poetics, theory, and praxis in the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States. Womanist approaches to theology often center Black women’s lived experiences and literature as resources for religious inquiry. Decolonial scholarship tends to critique the remnants of colonialism in the present, imagining futures beyond hegemonic categories. As a methodological contribution, this dissertation combines insights from womanist theology and decolonial thought, identifying M. Shawn Copeland and Sylvia Wynter as major interlocutors with each respective discipline. This dissertation questions what it might mean for humanity to image God, especially after the dual crises of colonialism and slavery. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2024. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

With the rise of religious plurality and the global public resurgence of religion, deep social unrest and even fatal violence have resulted in a compelling need for plural societies to construct a framework of ‘public civility’. Recently, secularist frameworks such as multiculturalism and legal pluralism have been put forward. Yet, insofar as these approaches are considered non-moral, they are relativistic, and thereby lack the resources needed to ground a universal public civility. Also, approaches to building a ‘just society’ within both Catholic social thought and Islamic jurisprudence have been made specifically on the basis of ‘the common good’. The problem with these approaches is that the so-called ‘common good’ is internally defined such that the ‘good’ is ineluctably uncommon. A more promising basis on which to construct a universal framework of public civility is found in the classical notion of ‘the human good’. The argument proceeds in three main stages: (1) a critical assessment of ideological and sociological forces which have resulted in the fragmentation of modern society and the decline of public life; (2) a delineation of ‘the human good’ on the basis of which I construct a framework of public civility between Catholic and Islamic traditions; and (3) an illustration of the proposed framework in Mindanao, Philippines which represents one of the longest standing internal conflicts in history. The main contention is that Catholic and Islamic political theologies enhance the construction of public civility when reframed in terms of ‘the human good’ in contrast to ‘the common good’. In support of this thesis, I explore the Catholic doctrine of the imago dei and the Islamic notion of fiṭra as prospective conceptual counterparts to the idea of ‘the human good’. I conclude by analyzing the cosmopolitan scope of a framework of public civility as based on ‘the human good’.

This thesis for the first time critically and comparatively examines contemporary Christian and philosophical ethics of war. Thus it contributes to an investigation of current possibilities of moral-political action. Exploring various combinations of political ethics and the tenets of faith, it compares three Christian with two secular thinkers. Each chapter first shows how Just War ethics are constructed between ‘realism’ and ‘idealism’. The former prioritizes individual or national self-defence and power; the latter the universal value of each individual. Each analytical section reconstructs the author’s moral understanding of political authority, violent force and political reality. These foci are investigated in terms of how they understand, envision or reject the mediation between politics and Christian morality. As the inner logic of each Just War proposal is thus brought out, continuities and differences between authors can be explained. Part I looks at Christian authors. Jean Bethke Elshtain’s realistic, ‘naturalistic’ Just War ethic of the sovereign state rejects humanist idealism. For Paul Ramsey Christian agape provides a transformative ethic between idealism and realism. Developing this, Oliver O’Donovan’s evangelical approach practically fuses idealism and realism. Dogmatically, this is conditioned by moving from Elshtain’s modern theological dualism to Ramsey’s Christ-transforming the world, though still indebted to philosophical idealism. O’Donovan, however, suggests that after the singular mediation of the Christ event, moral-political categories disclose the divine order. Part II investigates the idealism-realism divide amongst philosophers. Both David Rodin’s idealist demand for a global state and Uwe Steinhoff’s individualist Machiavellianism seek to protect human rights. After Kant, they presuppose an unbridgeable division between politics and ‘religious’ morality. Theology, having become anthropology, replaces the mediation of Christ with immanent mediators: legal, statist or individualist moral agents. But this echoes and intensifies the Christian tradition. Whereas Rodin introduces a renewed, violent papacy, Steinhoff seeks to renew the liberal-democratic status quo through a secular ‘radical reformation’. It is concluded that both modern Christian and philosophical ethics of war can oscillate between impractical triumphant justice and the failure of tragic antagonism. If the singular mediation between Is and Ought in Christ is recognized as a universal paradox, doing justice effectively becomes possible.

The point of departure of this thesis is derived from a modern tendency to create a dichotomy between selfless love and human flourishing. Modern attempts to liberate the human being from heteronomous oppression and the moral norms promoting this have sometimes led to the conclusion that selfless love is harmful to human flourishing. Such a conclusion has gained momentum also through modernist re-conceptualisations of the self as an autonomous but empty consciousness which must guard itself against determination by the other. In effect, significant thinkers have replaced the notion of selfless love with a call for self-assertion over against the other, as key to the individual person’s well-being. This has been matched by Christian dismissals of the individual’s pursuit of human flourishing. In the face of modern insights into the ‘desirous’ nature of the human being, modern Christian theology has equally struggled to sustain the tension between the traditional Christian notion of selfless or self-giving love and human beings’ desire to affirm themselves and to find personal fulfilment in this world. Strands of Christian theology have, for instance, affirmed a self-surrendering love at the cost of dismissing the individual’s worldly desires entirely. In this thesis, I outline this situation in modern thought and its problematic consequences. With a view to discerning whether selfless love and human flourishing can be re-connected, I then undertake close studies of the theologian Paul Tillich’s and the moral philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch’s conceptualisations of the self and of love. As I will argue, Tillich’s and Murdoch’s engagement with modern thought leads them to develop accounts of the self, which correspond with understandings of love as both selfless and conducive to human flourishing. On the basis of their thought I thus argue that selfless love and human flourishing can be understood as interdependent even today.

This thesis examines the rationale for religious liberty in England and Wales. Currently, United Kingdom religious liberty literature shows very little sustained interrogation of the topic. Authors are likely to assume religious liberty is, most notably, a species of personal autonomy. This fails to explain why we should care about religious liberty and deepens religion’s privatisation, its separation from politics or public life. Drawing from a theological sensibility known as Radical Orthodoxy (RO), this thesis criticises current assumptions and argues that religious liberty discourse should be re-envisioned. The Introduction and Chapter One explore the current problems facing religious liberty discourse and map rationales given by prominent authors. Chapter Two argues that the main problem is that current discourse is shaped by a secularisation narrative: the differentiation of religious and secular spheres. Chapter Three relates the RO argument that this differentiation is underpinned by three themes, all of which have theological components: the rise of secular order as the protection of individual rights; the invention of private religion in modernity; and the contemporary shift to 'authenticity' or diffuse individual experiences as the hallmark of religion. Chapter Four contends that these three themes are echoed in religious liberty discourse and jurisprudence, leaving us with the question of why religious liberty matters. Chapters Five and Six explore the RO-influenced alternative, in theory and with reference to common questions in religious liberty discourse: the relationship between an individual claimant and the group; the reality of plural religious traditions; and the tension between sexual orientation non-discrimination and religious liberty. On the RO-influenced account, religious liberty concerns, against sphere differentiation, a commitment to the flourishing of multiple groups contributing to desirable social ends, understood ultimately as participating in the life of 'charity', the love of God and of others. This encapsulates two themes, both rooted in the Christian tradition: judgement against politics (as reflected in the secular order), and transformation of society along social pluralist lines. These two themes, the thesis argues, better explain why religious liberty matters.

At the most general level, this project seeks to engage the question, "What is disability?" The conceptual exploration is undertaken against the background of the philosophical literature addressing the nature of disease, illness, and disability. This work contends that much of the literature bearing on the nature of disability fails to distinguish sufficiently between different domains of philosophical explanation and concern--ontological, non-moral normative, and moral normative, respectively. Specifically, this involves a failure to distinguish among (a) disputes regarding the proper ontological characterization of disability, particularly as expressed in medical-scientific explanations of the phenomenon; (b) disputes regarding the role of non-moral (aesthetic, epistemic, cultural) values or norms in the constitution of those explanations (i.e., non-moral normative concerns); and (c) disputes regarding moral and political considerations that shape the character of the social reality within which persons with disabilities live (i.e., moral normative concerns). This work advances the thesis that disabilities, like diseases, are "natural," in the sense that they are not mere social constructions, but that values of various sorts nevertheless do enter into the identification of states of affairs as disability, and that the "disability" designation has important socio-cultural implications that are inevitably the subject of ongoing political negotiation. Specifically, this work argues that "disability" involves a complex interplay of ontological realities, non-moral normative, and moral normative considerations or values. This interplay is captured well by a "biopsychosocial" (BPS) approach to disability, one which incorporates these various considerations into a single account, involving an integration of different levels of explanation (biological, psychological, social) of the disability phenomenon. This work first develops the theoretical underpinnings and rationale for a BPS approach to disability (Chs. 1-3), then explores in detail some of the relevant ontological (Ch. 4), non-moral and moral normative (Ch. 5), and sociological and political (Ch. 6) considerations that enter into the identification of states of affairs as "disability," concluding (in Ch. 7) with a brief consideration of some of the study's implications for understanding the nature of disability, the future of disability studies and the disability rights movement, and the relationship between the disabled and the broader society.

This dissertation examines one of the most counter-intuitive southern responses to the rise of the Christian Right. Texas Baptists made up the largest state association of Southern Baptists in the country. They were theologically conservative, uniformly uncomfortable with abortion, and strident in their condemnation of homosexuality. Yet they not only rejected an alliance with the Christian Right and the Republican Party, but they did so emphatically. They ultimately offered a more robust critique of the Christian Right than even many of their secular counterparts. While their activities might seem surprising to contemporary readers, they were part of a long and proud Baptist tradition of supporting the separation of church and state. On issues like organized school prayer, government regulation of abortion, and private school vouchers, they were disturbed by the blurring of lines between church and state that characterized the Christian Right as it emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. Texas Baptists were also uncomfortable with the backlash against integration and sought to promote racial justice in any way they could. While many southerners adopted a politics of cultural resentment, Texas Baptists often worked for racial justice and promoted interracial cooperation. They also fought the move towards economic conservatism in the South. From their campaigns to raise the welfare cap in Texas to their promotion of Lyndon Johnson's Community Action Programs, Texas Baptists defended government activism to alleviate poverty. They embodied a very different economic ideology than that of the ultraconservative southerners who have dominated the scholarship of southern politics after 1960. On all of these issues, the experience of Texas Baptists challenges prevailing ideas about southern political change. Their story is one that undermines the notion of a unified evangelical reaction to the racial, economic, and political changes that swept the South (and the nation) after 1960. It should give pause to those who have assumed that the alliance between Southern Baptists and the Christian Right was inevitable or unavoidable and force us to reconsider the complexity of southern evangelicalism.

My dissertation traces the contemporary American assimilation of Asian enlightenment traditions and discourses. Through a close reading of three communities, I consider how Asian traditions and ideas have been refracted through the psychological, political, and economic lenses of American culture. One of my chapters, for example, discusses how the American Insight community has attempted to integrate the enlightenment teachings of Theravada Buddhism with the humanistic, democratic, and pluralistic values of the European Enlightenment. A second chapter traces the American gum Andrew Cohen's transformation from a Neo-Advaita teacher to a leading proponent of "evolutionary enlightenment," a teaching that places traditional Indian understandings of nonduality in an evolutionary context. Cohen's early period shows the further deinstitutionalization of traditional Advaita Vedanta within the radically decontextualized Neo-Advaitin network, and evolutionary enlightenment engages and popularizes another less-known but influential Hindu lineage, namely that of Sri Aurobindo's integral yoga. a A third chapter examines contemporary psychospiritual attempts to incorporate psychoanalytic theory into Asian philosophy in order to reconcile American concerns with individual development with Asian mystical goals of self-transcendence. In conclusion, I argue that the contemporary American assimilation of Asian enlightenment traditions is marked by a number of trends including: (I) a move away from the rhetoric and privileging of experience that scholars such as Robert Sharf have shown to be characteristic of the modem Western understanding of Asian mysticism; and (2) an embrace of world-affirming Tantric forms of Asian spirituality over world-negating renouncer traditions such as Theravada Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta. I also reflect on how the cultural shift from the modem to postmodern has affected East-West integrative spiritualities.

Victorian scholars of fiction have hitherto largely overlooked that fiction was an important site for Victorian authors and readers to engage in open discussion of religious issues in the Victorian period, often known, even to itself, as the "Age of 'Faith and Doubt.'" Along with sermons and religious tracts, which often directly addressed popular audiences, fiction became one of the most popular arenas for debating theology and religious practices. My project aims to revive interest in the religious novel genre by defining the genre, positioning it within its cultural context, and looking at how it engages in active and reciprocal conversations with other genres, fictional and nonfictional. This new approach reveals how the religious novel, long derided or ignored by critics, often leads the way with narrative innovations. Most interestingly, the religious novel, whose alternative name is tellingly the "theological romance," embraces and adopts one of the most popular plot lines of the Victorian novel tradition, namely the marriage/courtship plot, and develops it into the post-marriage plot, a plot that focuses on and examines marital life. The marriage plot serves, for many of these novels, in place of detailed theological arguments as a way of producing and embodying conversion. The religious novel actually anticipates changes in the nineteenth- century novel by expanding the plot beyond courtship and marriage.

Univ., Diss--Frankfurt (Main), 2006.