<p>On the most general, theological level this dissertation explores the origins, ensuing articulations, and intellectual implications of what has been characterized as a new Christian "political-historical consciousness" (politisch-historisches Bewusstsein)&mdashthat totalizing reconception of history and ecclesial identity that enabled early Christians to imagine themselves as simultaneously new to the world in terms of revelation and yet also ancient with respect to God's eternal plan. On the more specific and descriptive level, I propose that a key to mapping the early development of this new historical consciousness comes via detailed analysis of a single term introduced by the apostle Paul into the Christian theological lexicon, the noun <italic>mysterion</italic> and the particular understanding of history and revelation that is commonly coupled with it, an understanding I refer to in varying ways as the "once hidden, now revealed" mystery schema. It is, I claim, the historical arrangement of this once hidden/now revealed discourse, and thus the comprehensive division of time into adjacent eras of concealment and revelation, that provided Christians of the first two centuries with the intellectual architecture and concomitant discursive schema that formulated and then further legitimized some of the most original claims of Christian theology. Among these claims are, most notably, ecclesiological propositions regarding the status of the Gentiles among the people of God, hermeneutical propositions related to the revisionary Christian readings of Israel's scriptures, and christological propositions about the unified identity of the newly revealed Christ and the creator God of Israel. Insofar as such propositions were named as mysteries--which is to say, as realities newly revealed but eternally known by the God of Israel--and yet were argued independently of, if not in contradiction of, Torah and other authoritative Jewish writings (see chapters five), or on the basis of Jewish scriptures but without any obvious presence in their "plain sense" (see chapters six and seven), or by appeal to what had become a textual field of authoritative Christian writings (see chapter eight), some sort of new intellectual apparatus was needed to articulate these novel claims. The notion of an eternal mystery previously hidden but recently disclosed to the world, provided just such an apparatus. A detailed lexical analysis of "mystery" in Paul and other early Christian authors should thus provide a helpful constraint for analyzing these larger and less tangible subjects of early Christian thinking about divine revelation and the structure of history. </p><p> To be clear, in training my attention on the word and the "once hidden, now revealed" discourse, I am not presuming some sort of idealized concept-in-word equation (or, in this case, a discourse-in-word equation), the error of nomenclaturism as Saussure termed it. Nor am I suggesting that <italic>mysterion</italic> had any sort of fixed meaning, much less a totality of meanings to be smuggled into every occurrence. The linguistic axioms that words and things share no inviolable, one-to-one correspondence, and that sentences (or more complex syntactical strucutres), not individual lexemes, are to be regarded as the fundamental units determining meaning should by now be truisms. My focus on <italic>mysterion</italic> is simply motivated, first, by the observation that when this signifier is used by early Christian authors it most frequently refers to some theological or hermeneutical claim that was previously hidden but is now currently disclosed and thus, second, by the practicality of treating this word as a limiting heuristic for analyzing the more nebulous hidden/revealed discursive formation. This is not to confuse the word for the discourse. Rather it is to use this particular word, which so often appears to be a near technical term for the discourse, as an entry point into it.</p> / Dissertation

<p>According to the Syriac <italic>Acts of the Persian Martyrs</italic>, the Sasanian king Shapur II began persecuting Christians in Persia soon after Constantine's death in 337 CE. Previous studies of the <italic>Acts</italic> (and related material) set Shapur's persecution within the context of Constantine's support for Christianity in the Roman Empire. Religious allegiances are said to have been further amplified during the Roman-Persian war over Rome's Mesopotamian provinces that followed Constantine's death. According to most interpretations, by the mid-fourth century <italic>Christianitas</italic> had become coextensive with <italic>Romanitas</italic>: Persian Christians were persecuted because they worshipped Caesar's god and, thereby, allied themselves with Rome. </p><p>By contrast, this dissertation reconsiders Christian historical narratives, the rhetorical and identity-shaping nature of the martyrological genre, and assumptions about the clear divisions of religious groups in late antiquity. Although the notion of Christianity as a "Roman" religion can be found in some of the historiography of persecution in Persia, our knowledge about Christians in fourth-century Persia is a harmonized event history woven from a tapestry of vague and conflicting sources that often exhibit later religious, political, and hagiographical agendas. </p><p> </p><p>To demonstrate how Shapur's persecution came to be interpreted as the result of religious changes within the Roman Empire, the dissertation first reconsiders how Constantine is imagined as a patron of the Christians of Persia in Syriac and Greek sources. The second part looks at the ways by which constructed imperial ideals territorialized "religion" in the post-Constantinian era. Finally, the third part presents the first English translations of the <italic>Martyrdom and History of Simeon bar Sabba'e</italic>, a fourth-century Persian bishop whose martyr acts are central to the historiography of the period.</p> / Dissertation

<p>The New Testament contains two important and potentially conflicting understandings of resurrection. One integrates resurrection into salvation, suggesting that it is restricted to the righteous; this view is found most prominently in the Pauline epistles. The other understands resurrection as a prerequisite for eschatological judgment and therefore explicitly extends it to all; this view is found most prominently in the book of Revelation. In the former, moral transformation is part of the process that results in resurrection; in the latter, moral transformation only affects what comes after resurrection, not the event of resurrection itself. The New Testament itself provides no account of how to hold together these understandings of resurrection and moral transformation.</p><p>This dissertation is an investigation of the ways in which second- and third-century Christian authors creatively struggled to bring together these two understandings. I select key authors who are not only important in the history of early Christian discussions of resurrection but who also make extensive use of the Pauline epistles. For each author, I investigate not only how they develop or resist the Pauline connection between resurrection and moral transformation but also how they relate that connection to the doctrine of the resurrection of all to face judgment found in Revelation (if they do at all).</p><p>The results are remarkably diverse. Irenaeus develops the Pauline connection between resurrection and moral transformation through the Spirit of God but fails to account for the resurrection of those who do not receive that Spirit in this life (although affirming that resurrection nonetheless). Tertullian begins from the model that takes resurrection to be fundamentally a prerequisite for judgment and struggles to account for Paul's connections between resurrection and salvation. Two Valentinian texts, the Treatise on the Resurrection and the Gospel of Philip, adopt the Pauline model to the exclusion of the resurrection of the wicked. Origen connects resurrection to moral transformation in yet another way, making it an event that pedagogically reflects the moral transformation of all rational creatures--whether for the better or worse. For Methodius of Olympus, the resurrection of the body produces the moral transformation that is the eradication of the entrenched inclination to sin, but the moral transformation in this life that is the resistance of the promptings of that entrenched inclination produces reward after the resurrection. In each case, strategies for holding together the two views found in the New Testament reveal the fundamental theological commitments underlying the author's overall understanding of resurrection.</p> / Dissertation

<p>The Senses of Fundamentalism: A Material History of Sensing Bodies in Early Twentieth-Century American Fundamentalism offers a new historical narrative about the rise of fundamentalism. I argue that sensing bodies laid the foundation of fundamentalism. New kinds of Christian sensory practices around the turn of the twentieth century established the shared frames of reference that allowed a broad fundamentalist coalition to emerge. Fundamentalists felt their faith in their guts. </p><p>Each chapter of this work explores the role of one of the senses in fundamentalist life: sight, hearing, touch, and the spiritual senses. Using visual and material evidence, I explore how fundamentalists trained their eyes to see truth from dispensationalist charts, how they taught their ears to hear the voice of God on radios and phonograph records, how they regulated and controlled contact between gendered bodies through clothing, and how they honed their bodies to sense spiritual presences. </p><p>Using the methods of visual and material culture studies of religion, I examine the how specific sensory practices structured the everyday realities of fundamentalist life. I examine the specifics of how sensation operated in fundamentalist religious practice. Current studies of fundamentalism tend to treat the movement as primarily concerned with intellectual matters. My material and visual history of fundamentalism intervenes in the historiography to show that efforts to describe fundamentalism as an intellectual movement have excluded important bodies of data. By studying ideas and doctrines, scholars have too long presumed that fundamentalists forbade material forms of religious devotion or disregarded bodies altogether. My work materializes the study of early fundamentalism, exploring how material objects and sensory practices undergird traditional concepts like “belief,” “theology,” or “literalism.” This project recovers sensing bodies as the cornerstone of fundamentalism.</p> / Dissertation

<p>This dissertation challenges depictions of witchcraft as a sensational or disruptive phenomenon, presenting witch beliefs instead as organically woven into everyday community life, religious beliefs, and village culture. It argues that witch beliefs were adaptive, normal, and rational in regions that never suffered convulsive witch persecutions. Furthermore, this dissertation, the first to work systematically through Spanish secular court witch trials, upends scholars’ views about the dominance of the Spanish Inquisition in witchcraft prosecutions. Through a serial study of secular court records, this dissertation reveals that the local court of Navarra poached dozens of witch trials from the Spanish Inquisition, and independently prosecuted over one hundred accused witches over one hundred-and-fifty years. These overlooked local sources document witch beliefs in far greater detail than Inquisition records and allow the first reconstruction of village-level witch beliefs in Spain. Drawing from historical, anthropological, and literary methods, this dissertation employs a transdisciplinary approach to examine the reports from villagers, parish priests, and jurists, produced under the specific local and older accusatorial judicial procedure. Free of the Inquisitorial filter that has dominated previous studies of Spanish witchcraft, these sources reveal the way villagers—not Inquisitors—conceived of, created, feared, and survived in a world with witches and sorceresses.</p><p>Using these local sources, this dissertation illuminates the complex social webs of witchcraft accusations, the pathways of village gossip, and the inner logic of witch beliefs. It reveals the central role of Catholic performativity and the grave consequences of being marked as a mala cristiana, the importance of fama and kin ties, and reveals the rationality of the curious and pervasive presence of the common toad (Bufo bufo) in Navarra’s witch trials. By moving away from the prevalent focus given to the more spectacular witch panics and trials, this work demonstrates the value of local trial records. This dissertation argues that far from irrational or absurd, witchcraft beliefs in early modern Navarra were internally coherent and intellectually informed by an amalgamation of religious, social, and legal forces.</p> / Dissertation

<p>How did rock and roll, the best music for worshipping the devil, become the finest music for worshipping God? This study narrates the import of rock music into church sanctuaries across America via the rise of contemporary worship music (CWM). While white evangelicals derided rock n' roll as the "devil's music" in the 1950s, it slowly made its way into their churches and beyond over the next fifty years, emerging as a multi-million dollar industry by the twenty-first century.</p><p>This study is a cultural history of CWM, chronicling the rise of rock music in the worship life of American Christians. Pulling from several different primary and secondary sources, I argue that three main motivations fueled the rise of CWM in America: the desire to reach the lost, to commune in emotional intimacy with God, and to grow the flock. These three motivations evolved among different actors and movements at different times. In the 1970s, the Jesus People movement anchored in Southern California, adopted the music of the counterculture to attract hippies to church. In the early 1980s, the Vineyard Fellowship combined rock forms with lyrics that spoke of God in the second person in order to facilitate intimate worship with the divine. In the late 1980s, the church growth movement embraced CWM as a tool to attract disaffected baby boomers back to church. By the 1990s, these three motivations had begun to energize an entire industry built around the merger between rock and worship.</p> / Dissertation

<p>What do Buddhist monks really know about Buddhism? How do they imagine their religion, and more importantly, how does their understanding of their tradition differ from the one found in our typical introduction to Buddhism textbooks? In order to address these fundamental questions, this dissertation concentrates on the educational programs and curricular canons of Korean Buddhism. It aims to find out which part of their enormous canonical and non-canonical literature do Korean Buddhist professionals choose to focus on as the required curriculum in their training (and what do they leave out), why is it chosen and by whom, and how does this specific education shape their understanding of their own religion and their roles within it. It tracks down the 20th-century invention of the so-called `traditional' Korean monastic curriculum and delineates the current 21st-century curricular reforms and the heated debates surrounding them. Ultimately, it illustrates how instead of Buddhist academics learning from the Buddhists about Buddhism, it is actually often the Buddhists in their monasteries who end up simulating the educational agendas of Buddhist studies.</p><p> Research for this work involved diverse methodologies. Multiple-sited ethnographic fieldwork in monasteries was supplemented by archival digging in the Chogye Order's headquarters in Seoul and textual analysis of historical records, Buddhist media reports, and online blogs. I have visited the current official 17 monastic seminaries in Korea, as well as many of the new specialized monastic graduate institutes and lay schools, interviewed teachers and students on site, and inspected classrooms and schedules. During winter 2013-4 I have conducted a full-scale participant observation attending the Buddhist lay school of Hwagyesa, during which I engaged some of my classmates with in-depth interviews, and distributed a written attitude survey among the class.</p> / Dissertation

Master of Arts / Department of History / Robert D. Linder / After years of selecting, editing, omitting, reducing and correcting what would become printed as over fourteen thousand pages of devotional literature for a young Methodist movement in the wake of the English Evangelical Revival, John Wesley pronounced his A Christian library: consisting of extracts from, and abridgments of, the choicest Pieces of practical divinity which have been published in the English tongue in fifty volumes (1749-1755) an underappreciated treasure and an overtaxing expenditure. Taking their lead from Wesley’s comments, scholars and historians of Wesley studies and Methodism have neglected to take a closer look at the ways the library may have been successful. This study argues that despite being initially a marketing disappointment and an expensive liability, John Wesley’s Christian library was influential in helping to shape the spiritual lives of “serious readers” within Methodism, particularly from 1752-1778. In the preface to the Christian library, Wesley revealed his standard for measuring the influence of the Library. However, despite offering a premature and partial assessment of the library in his journal entry at the end of 1752, providing some public responses to criticisms of the library in 1760 and again in the early 1770s, and writing some personal letters that recommended the library to others in the 1780s, Wesley did not publish an evaluation of what he believed the Christian library had accomplished during his life. Thus, based on the collaborative evidence gathered from the personal accounts of early Methodist preachers and the final address of Francis Asbury to American Methodists, this study makes the case that Wesley’s Christian library had a substantial positive influence on Methodism.

This study focuses on the difficult Sami heritage which is exhibited within local history museums in northern Sweden. The study incorporates theories from cultural science and sociology but it is written within religious history as a philological and text-oriented discipline where discourses and social constructions of the Sami heritage and worldviews are in focus. The overall aim of this study is to increase the understanding of the difficult Sami heritage. This means that the analysis focuses on perspectives and discourses within local museums and Sami organisations.   The first research question revolves around the significances and meanings of the difficult Sami heritage: What phenomena (artefacts) and dimensions (immaterial culture) of the difficult past in Sapmi are highlighted? The second research question revolves around the power to represent the Sami heritage: How is the difficult Sami heritage represented? The third research question revolves around perspectives within museum practices: What approaches are the museum practice based upon?   This study focuses on four museums in northern Sweden; Ajtte museum, Samgården, Norrbottens museums and Hägnan museum. They are all local history museums which exhibit the past within a specific region from a rather broad or holistic historical perspective. The student visited each museum and observed the exhibitions then. She read texts, analysed artefacts and watched movies. Facts and interpretations were documented with a pen and the most important phenomena authenticated with a camera.   The difficult phenomena and dimensions within the museums were structured in three groups: living conditions, dark artefacts and colonization. The group living condition refers to poor people, risks, cold climate, hard work, illnesses and social classes. Dark artefacts refer to very old graves and drums which have been lost to the external society. Colonization refers to representations of Sápmi, uses of lands and resources, wounds, lack of local participation within decision-making processes, conflicts and women´s rights.   The analysis of representations highlights reflections about the meanings of the difficult and how subjective this is. Many dimensions within the Sami culture which have appeared as difficult from a colonialist perspective may be bright from an insider perspective. The museum practices follow discourses but there are few expressions within the museums which are associated with ethnocentrism. The external society is not presented as something higher, better or more valuable, but it is obvious that the government did hurt the region in the past.   The museums which were included in this study, based practices on a local separatist/patriotic approach since the unique Sami culture was in focus. It was portrayed as something which stays in contrast to the overall society. The Sami culture was associated with positive characteristics such as traditional, peaceful, original and authentic. The peace and international understanding approach was also embedded since exhibitions were based on ideas expressed within The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) about the rights indigenous people have. The study also concludes that these museums rather based the practice on patriotic thinking, than a cosmopolitan. The museums made use of a bottom-up approach into a varying extent.  When the local perceptions were in focus are the following phenomena highlighted: the inner compass (director with wisdom), wounds of colonization, local worldviews and interaction with nature and animals.

Le lignage rNgog était un lignage religieux héréditaire qui s’est épanoui au Tibet entre le XIe et le XVe siècle et a participé à l’efflorescence de plusieurs transmissions tantriques toujours vivantes dans le bouddhisme tibétain contemporain. Cette thèse est l’histoire du lignage religieux rNgog pa bKa’ brgyud qui puise ses sources dans le Xe siècle indien, s’est acculturé au Tibet grâce aux efforts du traducteur Mar pa Chos kyi blo gros (1000 ?-1081 ?) et a traversé le second millénaire. C’est aussi l’histoire du lignage familial rNgog, depuis ses origines mythiques jusqu’à sa plénitude au XIIe siècle et son extinction silencieuse dans le tumulte des transformations politiques du XVIIe siècle tibétain. Cette étude s’appuie sur deux récits composés au sein du lignage rNgog et qui se trouvent au carrefour de l’hagiographie, de la généalogie et des recueils d’enseignements reçus. Elle est encadrée par deux volumineuses collections d’exégèses et de rituels tantriques. La première, le Trésor des Mantras bKa’ brgyud, a été compilée au XIXe siècle dans le but de sauvegarder et de faciliter la transmission des traditions Mar rngog. La seconde, le Compilation des Cycles rNgog, a été publié il y a une dizaine d’années mais contient des matériaux anciens composés par les rNgog et leurs disciples. L’ambition de cette étude est de comprendre l’histoire de ces textes et, plus largement, celle des rNgog et leur position dans le champ religieux du Tibet Central jusqu’au XVIIe siècle. Dans cette optique, plusieurs approches, dont la critique des sources et l’analyse textuelle et socio-historique, sont adoptées. / The rNgog lineage was a religious hereditary lineage that flourished in Tibet from the 11th to the 15th century and participated in the efflorescence of several tantric transmissions that remain alive in contemporary Tibetan Buddhism. This dissertation is the history of the rNgog pa bka’ brgyud religious lineage that takes root in 10th-century India, was acculturated in Tibet through the efforts of the translator Mar pa Chos kyi blo gros (1000?-1081?) and spans the second millennium. It is also the history of the rNgog hereditary lineage, from its mythic origins, to its blossoming in the 12th century and its silent dispersion in the political transformations of 17th-century Central Tibet. Its core is a pair of twenty-five-folio narratives composed within the rNgog lineage that are at the crossroads of hagiography, genealogy and records of teachings received. Its framework are two large collections of tantric exegesis and rituals. The first, the Treasury of bKa’ brgyud Mantras, was compiled in the 19th century in order to safeguard the Mar rngog traditions and facilitate their transmission. The second one, the Compilation of rNgog Cycles, was published ten years ago but contains ancient material composed by the rNgog and their disciples. The aim of this study is to understand the history of these texts and, more broadly, the history of the rNgog and their position in the religious field of Central Tibet until the 17th century. For this, several approaches are adopted, including source criticism, textual and socio-historical analysis.