This thesis examines the Jesuit mission to New France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The various sources of support and opposition are described using the lens of the massive set of primary documents preserved in The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, translated and compiled under the direction of Reuben G. Thwaites between 1896 and 1901. The central argument of this thesis is that the Jesuit reductions of New France, where Amerindian converts of various tribes lived together, acted as microcosms of the broader French-Canadian colonial milieu. Each of the sources of support and opposition for the Jesuit missions can be found in these reduction towns. This approach to the Jesuit missions in New France could also have a broader use for historians examining similar colonial contexts. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the Master of Arts. / Spring Semester 2017. / April 13, 2017. / Hurons, Jesuits, Missions, New France, Quebec, Reductions / Includes bibliographical references. / Jonathan Grant, Professor Directing Thesis; Jennifer Koslow, Committee Member; Rafe Blaufarb, Committee Member.

This study examines clergy in colonial New England and how they depicted dead bodies in their funeral sermons. Whether it was second generation Puritan ministers like William Hubbard and Samuel Willard, or third generation ministers like Benjamin Colman and Benjamin Wadsworth, ministers imagined their resting subjects as a "pillar," "shield," "withering grass," or "vapor." I argue their language of the body, such as the use of specific terms within certain contexts, reflected social and religious trends in New England, from its Puritan origins to its welcoming of moderate Christianity in the eighteenth-century. Chapter Two observes Puritan funeral sermons and their relation to King Philip's War and second generation perception of natural depravity. Chapter Three discusses funeral sermons and their reflection of the third generation's shift toward English intellectualism and religious optimism. In conclusion, I argue funeral sermons and their generational developments spoke to more than specific superlatives of the dead. With the body of the dead as their canvas, New England ministers illustrated prevailing mentalities about religious and cultural thought. They spoke to how authority was mediated and to what extent human nature could be trusted. New England clergy entered into public discourse about the inherent abilities, or disabilities, their congregations were defined by. Through their imaginative definitions of dead bodies, they ventured to define survivors and their place in the Church. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Religion in partial fulfillment of the Master of Arts. / Spring Semester 2017. / April 10, 2017. / Body, Funeral, New England, Puritan, Sermon / Includes bibliographical references. / Amanda Porterfield, Professor Directing Thesis; John Corrigan, Committee Member; Michael McVicar, Committee Member; Jamil Drake, Committee Member.

This dissertation explores what is religious about transhumanism, a cultural and intellectual movement that seeks to transcend the limits of the human condition by means of new science and technology. Specifically, I examine how transhumanism is situated within the context of American religious history, especially with respect to postwar new religious movements. Previous studies have focused almost exclusively on the Judeo-Christian apocalypticism of transhumanism, but in this study I consider the religious nature of the embodied, "real" world orientation of transhumanism. That is, what is religious (and American) about realizing the promises of religion in the here-and-now and by natural and scientific means alone? Using historical methods, including, intellectual, institutional, and microhistorical approaches, I trace transhumanism back to several religious contexts, namely, the modern skeptical movement, secular humanism, and most broadly, American Spinozism. This project is also comparative. Each chapter examines transhumanism within its religio-historical context as well as transhumanism’s interactions and relationships with other new religious and cultural movements, including, the Human Potential Movement, Scientology, the paranormal, posthumanism, New Atheism, Mormonism, and others. Contrary to popular belief, transhumanism is deeply entrenched in the history American religions. By illuminating an understudied network of postwar religious movements, of which transhumanism is part, this project contributes to the fields of American religious history and new religions studies. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Religion in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester 2018. / July 23, 2018. / Includes bibliographical references. / John Corrigan, Professor Directing Dissertation; Michael Ruse, University Representative; Michael McVicar, Committee Member; Jamil Drake, Committee Member.

“Savage Saints” historiographically reconfigures “Muscular Christianity.” It studies the close and positive relations of martial arts and combat sports to Muscular Christianity, and it argues the central importance of the concept of “human nature” to Muscular Christian theology and practice. Many have shown that the Muscular Christian movement took shape as a critical reaction against the perceived unhealthy and enfeebling ways of American culture. Decrying the physical stagnation of indoor life prompted by urban environs, the poor dietary customs of American foodways, and the general lack of play among both children and adults, the movement solidified as a large-scale Protestant “commitment to health and manliness.” My work refines this understanding of Muscular Christianity. Muscular Christianity was a response to various rumored cultural “crises”—particularly regarding health and manly vigor. More fundamentally, Muscular Christianity was (and continues to be) a rejoinder to America’s supposed divergence from Creation’s Purpose and Nature’s Laws. Muscular Christianity, then, was a natural theology that sought to correct unnatural modern ills by discerning and following a designed human plan. And the human design that Muscular Christians revealed was a violent one, wherein fighting was integral to “human nature”—an instinct placed within us that was both original and good. Fighting was uniquely foundational for Muscular Christians. Cast as a natural act prior to and outside of an unnatural American civilization, fighting occupied a privileged place in Muscular Christian theory and praxis. Opposite the perceived “overcivilizing” trends of the nation—i.e. the culturally inflicted threats to health and manly vigor—fighting showcased “human nature” and God’s Creation in its purest form. Languid, impotent, and chronically ill Americans, so it went, had neglected the value of rough-and-tumble action. Combat sports and martial arts gave wayward Americans a rare glimpse into what was and what should be. Finding the Divine in the bellicose, Muscular Christians looked to the fighting arts as a socially curative and individually salvific countermeasure to American “overcivilization.” Filling a historiographic void, then, “Savage Saints” accounts for the Muscular Christian attraction to and use of combat sports and martial arts in the 20th-century United States. Muscular Christians readily advocated and took up Japanese jiu-jitsu at the turn of the century, boxing during and immediately after the First World War, judo, karate, and other eastern martial arts in the second half of the century, and mixed martial arts (MMA) from the 1990s to the present day. If sports and a newly emboldened physical culture defined Muscular Christianity’s restorative and revisionist program, fighting was clearly an essential component. In the overall saga of Muscular Christianity and fighting, “human nature” was the primary protagonist and the praiseworthy hero. Pugnacious human nature was the God-given guide inside us. Physical aggression was the natural instinct created within. Employing the exemplary practices of martial arts and combat sports, Muscular Christians vested “bare life”—a life outside and before American civility—with a masculinized sense of primal bellicosity and theological meaning. As God created it—and as evident through fighting—human nature was virile and potentially savage. The Nature that American culture forgot was the Nature that Muscular Christianity sought to remember. Fisticuff knowledge was not lost to all, however. Muscular Christians often looked to culturally untainted youths, and more naturally attuned foreigners for ideas for living rightwise. Physically aggressive children and combat proficient eastern cultures were valued as those less subject to the detrimental effects of American overcivilization. Looking to children, eastern cultures, or within themselves, Muscular Christians fabricated a forceful instinct—the Word in the flesh. Americans, so it went, simply had to remember who they were—aggressive and physical—as they were made. By enabling special access to “human nature” through fighting, Muscular Christianity popularized masculinized notions of persons as originally, purposefully, and virtuously atavistic. With fighting as an instrumental practice, and with the quarrelsome Word as an inner guide, Muscular Christians constructed persons as godly barbaric selves, as savage saints. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Religion in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester 2017. / May 1, 2017. / boxing, evangelicalism, gender, martial arts, masculinity, United States / Includes bibliographical references. / John Corrigan, Professor Directing Dissertation; Joshua Newman, University Representative; Amanda Porterfield, Committee Member; Michael McVicar, Committee Member.

Though previous scholarship has placed emphasis on the anti-familial rhetoric employed by ancient Christians, Christian discourse on motherhood was actually quite mixed. I demonstrate this point by examining specific representations of motherhood in fourth-century Latin sources. In the first and last chapters, I look at the use of motherhood in figurative language, especially as it was used to understand the nature of God and the character of women's asceticism. Though one might expect some Christians to have excluded motherhood from their frame of reference, even the most strident proponents of asceticism used motherhood to "think with," suggesting the appropriation of motherhood as a Christian means for signification. Other chapters address representations of specific mothers, including Helena, the mother of the emperor Constantine; Monica, the mother of Augustine; and Melania the Elder and Paula, two aristocratic mothers devoted to asceticism. In each instance, Christians offered qualified praise – and, sometimes, qualified criticism – of motherhood as a vocation for Christian women. The result of this study is a more nuanced understanding of Christian motherhood in the fourth century, one that shifts the focus from the repudiation of reproduction and the evils of parenthood to a greater emphasis on the ambiguity of the family. Finally, this provides important insights into the negotiation of the ascendance of asceticism and the melding of Roman and Christian values. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Religion in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2017. / April 5, 2017. / Christianity & the family, late ancient Christianity, motherhood / Includes bibliographical references. / Nicole Kelley, Professor Directing Dissertation; Laurel Fulkerson, University Representative; Matthew Goff, Committee Member; David Levenson, Committee Member.

This dissertation consists of two parts. The first part is a compiled Syriac text and English translation of a fourth-century document from Edessa known as the History of John, which appears in the appendix of this project. This original Syriac narrative traces the acts of the apostle John the son of Zebedee in the city of Ephesus. I have combined all extant Syriac witnesses and have updated the old English translation from the nineteenth century. The second part—which is the main body of this project—consists of the first detailed analysis of the text since its publication in 1871. I argue that the narrative originated in fourth-century Edessa and is a product of a Nicene Christian community in a struggle with other religious traditions in the city. Using Bruce Lincoln’s theories of myth, I argue that the History of John should be understood as an ideological narrative that attempted to establish the primacy and authority of Nicene Christianity as the only true religion at Edessa. In particular, the narrative targets groups like Manichaeans and the cult of Atargatis in establishing the dominance of Nicene Christianity over these groups and their traditions. The authors of the History of John sanctified early traditions about the apostle and invented a new history for Edessa, situating themselves and the Nicene community at the center. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Religion in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester 2018. / June 22, 2018. / Christian Apocrypha, Edessa, Fourth Century, History of John, Syriac / Includes bibliographical references. / Nicole Kelley, Professor Directing Dissertation; Svetla Slaveva-Griffin, University Representative; David Levenson, Committee Member; Matthew Goff, Committee Member.

Robert Douglas was a Church of Christ missionary to Libya, Egypt, and Lebanon during the 1960s. Traveling during this period introduced Douglas to the reality of post-colonial context of the countries. He and his family lived as foreigners and missionaries in these countries, interacting with the American oil industry in Libya, Egyptian and Arab nationalism, and the impact of the Cold War on the Arab World. Although Douglas did not notice the Cold War around him, it impacted his time there in important ways. In all his travels, the United States and the Soviet Union struggled to gain influence over the young countries in which he resided. His religiosity encouraged him to travel to these countries under false pretenses. In Libya he could come in as a preacher to the American and British oil workers in Benghazi, but desired to be a missionary, while in Egypt he and his family came in as tourists and had to renew these visas but created a steady congregation of converts through missionary efforts. Both actions were illegal, due to laws in Libya and Egypt, and these laws led to the retraction of he and his family’s visas. He made his way to Lebanon where he constructed a missions’ school for recent converts. The Six Days’ War led to his leaving Lebanon and returning to the United States. Upon his return, he attended Fuller Seminary and the University of Southern California and became regarded as an expert in Muslim-aimed evangelism among Protestant evangelicals. His career challenges standard missionary narratives through his independent missionary activities, highlights American understandings and misconceptions of Islam, and the reality of the Cold War in the Middle East. All of this makes his journey into a historical narrative to challenge and address the larger macrohistories for American Christian missionaries abroad. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science. / Spring Semester 2019. / April 12, 2019. / Christianity, Cold War, Islam, Missionary, Modernity, Nationalism / Includes bibliographical references. / Will Hanley, Professor Directing Thesis; Nilay Ozok Gundogan, Committee Member; Catherine Elisabeth McClive, Committee Member.

The late fourth-century work often called Pseudo-Hegesippus, or De Excidio Hierosolymitano (On the Destruction of Jerusalem), is a rendition of Jewish history from the second century BCE to 70/74 CE. It ends with the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 and a brief mention of the Jewish mass-suicide atop Masada in 74. In effect, it is a Christian attempt to write the Jews out of history. Within this literary enterprise, the work enlists biblical traditions and classical rhetorical habits and motifs to construct an aesthetically- and ideologically-compelling history. Though based upon Flavius Josephus' Jewish War in large part, this work is a Christian history written for particular discursive purposes; namely, to explain why Jerusalem's and the Temple's destruction in 70 CE marked the effective historical endpoint of the Jews. This dissertation illustrates and explores the character of this text through what is arguably its most interesting and important chapter: Book 5, Chapter 2. It shows how the author creatively interweaves biblical references to key characters and episodes to construct an anti-Jewish rhetoric. It argues that this text must be understood in the light of the classical tradition. The Greek and Roman authors of classical antiquity established a tradition that prescribed particular ways of articulating the past and the people that populated it. Pseudo-Hegesippus draws heavily upon these traditions. This dissertation illustrates this in detail, and explores the particular rhetorical contours of De Excidio as a text involved in constructing a past-tense Jewish identity for a fourth-century Christian audience. In so doing, it exposes an important and understudied source for our knowledge of fourth-century Jewish-Christian relations; it reveals a new angle on nascent Christian historiography in its formative period; and it shows to what extent Greco-Roman literature can function as important framing comparanda for reading Christian literature from late antiquity. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Religion in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester 2018. / October 26, 2018. / Biblical Reception, Classics, De Excidio, Early Christianity, Josephus, Pseudo-Hegesippus / Includes bibliographical references. / David B. Levenson, Professor Co-Directing Dissertation; Nicole Kelley, Professor Co-Directing Dissertation; Svetla Slaveva-Griffin, University Representative; Matthew Goff, Committee Member.

This dissertation stems from an ethnographic experience, i.e., a course on the Six Healing Sounds of Qigong taught by Dr Yu Zhang, which I and other students attended in 1991 in Los Angeles, California. The course led to the following questions: What is qigong? What are the Six Healing sounds? Are the claims of this healing tradition to ancient origins accurate? These questions led to the following conclusions: Qigong is indeed a practice of ancient origins, albeit one that comes from different streams of Daoist and medical practices. Its name is a recent design by the Chinese government in the early 1950's, with the ulterior goal of creating an effective, low cost health care system rooted in Chinese culture. Apart from the answers provided above, I argue that qigong is a body technology that uses slow, gentle exercises, visualizations and standing and sitting meditations to elicit a state of reverie, a liminal or altered state of consciousness that is conducive to bodily, mental and spiritual experiences and transformation. / A Dissertation submitted to the Program in Interdisciplinary Humanities in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2015. / April 29, 2015. / Chi Kung, Daoism, Daoyin, Liminality, Qigong, Traditional Chinese Medicine / Includes bibliographical references. / Benjamin D. Koen, Professor Co-Directing Dissertation; Kathleen Erndl, Professor Co-Directing Dissertation; David Johnson, University Representative; Svetla Slaveva-Griffin, Committee Member; Martin Kavka, Committee Member.

This study examines the development of apocalypticism in Mormon culture from the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Specifically, it argues that a major shift in apocalyptic thought in the twentieth century was essential for the Americanization of Mormons during the period of transition (1890-1930). The early Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints possessed a radical eschatology, emphasizing dualism and the imminence of the apocalypse. Following the murder of their prophet, Joseph Smith, Mormons came to see themselves as a distinctive people from other Euro-Americans, which they referred to as Gentiles. They expected the soon collapse of the American government as a result of their culpability in Smith's death, as well as other examples of persecution. Throughout the nineteenth century, the relationship between Mormonism and their fellow Americans was defined by this millenarian logic. It was only after Utah was received as a state in the Union that Mormons began to embrace a more moderate millenarian thought. In addition to historicizing the subject of apocalypticism in Mormonism, this study examines how the regulation of apocalyptic prophecy ultimately resulted in a new understanding of how lay Mormons should properly experience and narrate the experience of their faith. Throughout the nineteenth century, it was popular for Mormons to narrate visions, dreams, and prophecies, often including narratives of the apocalypse. During the period of transition, the Church hierarchy did not directly refute previous understandings of millenarian thought. Instead, they opposed popular vernacular prophecies, which continued to promote a nineteenth-century Mormon worldview. By regulating these prophecies and marginalizing those who shared them, Church leaders articulated new rules for the sharing of charismata. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Religion in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2015. / December 5, 2014. / Eschatology, Mormonism, Vernacular Religion / Includes bibliographical references. / John Corrigan, Professor Directing Dissertation; Trevor Luke, University Representative; Amanda Porterfield, Committee Member; Michael McVicar, Committee Member.