<p>This dissertation explores how the Buddhist texts carved on the cliffs of mountains served their patrons’ religious and cultural goals. During the Northern Qi period (550-577 CE), these carved Buddhist sutra texts and Buddha names were prevalent, and were carved directly onto the surfaces of numerous mountains in southwestern Shandong Province. The special focus of this study is on the Buddhist engravings at Mt. Hongding in Dongping, and at Mt. Tie in Zoucheng. Created in approximately 553-564 CE, the carvings at Mt. Hongding stand as the terminus a quo of the history of Buddhist sutras carved into the rocks of the Shandong mountains. The Buddhist carvings at Mt. Hongding served monastic goals. The monk patrons, Seng’an Daoyi, Fahong, and others created the carvings as an integral part of their Buddhist meditation practices. The carvings at Mt. Tie paint a very different picture. At Mt. Tie, a colossal Buddhist sculpture-style carving was created in 579 CE. Sponsored by several Han Chinese patrons, the carving was designed in the form of a gigantic Chinese traditional stele. This study suggests that several Han Chinese local elites proudly displayed their Han Chinese linage by using the gigantic stele form of Buddhist text carving as a means to proclaim Han Chinese cultural and artistic magnificence. To achieve these non-religious goals, they appropriated rhetorical devices often used by the Han elite, such as the stele form, written statements about the excellence of the calligraphy used, and discourse on calligraphy connoisseurship.</p> / Dissertation

À la fin du Moyen Âge, les paroisses urbaines traversèrent une période de crise, qui se traduisit par une profonde déprise, temporelle et spirituelle, des cadres paroissiaux sur les fidèles. Cette recherche entend considérer un ensemble de paroisses urbaines dans les derniers siècles du Moyen Âge afin d’observer, « de l’intérieur », les conditions, les enjeux et les conséquences de l’évolution des interactions entre les paroisses et leurs communautés paroissiales. Venise, du fait de la richesse de ses archives paroissiales, a été retenue pour mener cette enquête. Dans un premier temps de l'étude, une vue d’ensemble des cadres paroissiaux vénitiens est proposée dans une confrontation constante avec le droit canonique médiéval : les territoires, les clergés et la liturgie sont ainsi examinés. Alors que le droit canonique juxtaposait ces trois cadres, la réalité paroissiale vénitienne en souligne au contraire les interactions. On en vient ensuite à envisager les évolutions à l'œuvre, qu’il s’agisse de l’affirmation du juspatronat laïc, de l’élaboration d’une nouvelle économie paroissiale et des transformations des pratiques dévotionnelles. Enfin, la thèse s’attache à mesurer les effets de ces mutations, qui se reflétaient dans la concurrence exercée par les autres établissements religieux, concurrence qui porta à une désagrégation des droits coutumiers paroissiaux. Aussi, l’ordinaire vénitien entreprit-il à la fin du XVe siècle de réformer les paroisses et d’en unifier les coutumes, donnant ainsi naissance à une institution paroissiale vénitienne qui se maintint jusqu’à la chute de la République. / In the late Middle Ages, urban parishes went through a period of crisis, which resulted in a profound abandonment by the parochial structures of whole sections of faithfuls'life, both temporal and spiritual. The aim of this research involves the study, through the analysis of their own archives, of a collection of urban parishes in the last centuries of the Middle Ages in order to observe, "from within" conditions, issues and consequences of changing interactions between parishes and their faithful communities. Because of its vast parish records, Venice has been chosen as the particular object of this investigation. The first part provides an initial overview of the Venetian parochial structures, comparing them to medieval canon law, therefore the territories, the clergy and the liturgy are discussed. In fact, while canon law juxtaposed these three frameworks, the reality of the Venetian parochial organisations instead emphasized the existing interactions between these three levels. The second part is therefore considering the various developments : like the assertion of secular juspatronat, the rise of a new parish economy or changes in devotional practices. Finally, a third part attempts to measure the effects of these mutations, which were reflected in the competition from other religious bodies. A competition that led to disintegration of customary parochial rights. So, to solve these difficulties, the Venetian episcopate began, in the late fifteenth century, to reform its parishes and to unify their specific customs, by thus giving birth to the Venetian parochial institution that will continue until the fall of the Republic.

abstract: Among the hundreds of hymnals published in the United States during the Second Great Awakening (1790–1850), the first official hymnal of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a rare example of a hymnal compiled by a woman. The Latter-day Saints wanted a hymnal adapted to their unique beliefs and emerging identity, and Emma Smith—the wife of founding prophet Joseph Smith—was given sole charge of selecting the hymns. The hymnal is also significant because Emma Smith selected and arranged hymns from 1830–1835, years of an emerging rhetoric for the early women’s rights movement. Nevertheless, few studies attend to Smith’s agency and priorities as a compiler, being preoccupied with the contributions of W. W. Phelps, the editor, printer, and most represented poet of the hymnal. Drawing on Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s theories of agency and of feminine style as well as Kenneth Burke’s theory of form, this thesis uses close textual analysis and coding to examine the rhetorical strategies Smith employed in the hymnal’s preface and in the organization of the Sacred Hymns section. The analysis reveals the hymnal’s recurring themes as well as the ideas it circulates about sex, gender, agency, and community inclusion/exclusion. It also uncovers tension between Smith’s and Phelps’ priorities for the hymnal, particularly in how Smith and Phelps characterize those who should and should not be included with equal authority in Zion, the ideal community the Latter-day Saints sought to build. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis English 2019

Between 1858 and 1930, Victoria’s Chinese immigrants brought their homeland religions to the Canadian city of Victoria BC. They experienced a broad range of challenges as they attempted to fit into the mainstream society. This continual struggle affected their religious lives in particular as they sought to adjust in ways that helped them deal with racial discrimination. As a result, Chinese folk religions, especially those emphasizing ancestral worship, became intertwined with local Chinese associations as a way of strengthening the emotional connections between association members. Some associations broadened their membership by adding ancestral deities or worshiping the deity of sworn brotherhood in a bid to create broader connections among the Chinese men who dominated Victoria’s Chinese community. At the same time, Christians, who practiced the religion of Victoria’s mainstream society, reached out to the Chinese, at first by offering practical language training and later by establishing missions and churches that focused on the Chinese. Many Chinese immigrants welcomed English classes and the social opportunities that churches provided but resisted conversion, as the discrimination they faced in mainstream society had left them sceptical about Christianity, which was seen as closely linked to the dominant Western culture. However, Chinese attitudes towards Christianity became more favorable after the 1910s, when the patriotism of Chinese immigrants led them to support revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen and his new Chinese government, which promoted Christianity as a symbol of modernity. In general, the Chinese in Victoria were not especially enthusiastic about religion, whether Chinese folk religion or Christianity, although women were generally more interested in religion than men. Although many Chinese pragmatically sought comfort and assistance from both religions, they followed Confucian orthodoxy in focusing primarily on daily life rather than religious life. At the same time, over the decades between 1858 and 1930 both Chinese folk religion and Christianity affected the Chinese community as this community adopted a mixture of Western and Eastern cultures, including religious elements from both cultures. / Graduate / 2020-08-20

The extraordinary body of Sacred Harp music has been dubbed "the oldest continuously sung American music." Steven Marini, scholar of sacred arts, proposes that the Sacred Harp community welcomes anyone into their singings, regardless of their religious beliefs. His analysis does not take into account the emphasis placed on conversion to Christianity that is demonstrated by the lyrics and the rituals of the Sacred Harp community, however. Religion is not "a matter of personal faith" to Sacred Harp singers as Marini suggests, but a matter of a very specific set of faith commitments. The implications of these commitments for Sacred Harp singers determine their eternal destiny. An investigation into the lyrics of The Sacred Harp hymnal reveals a preoccupation with death, always with intent to point toward the individual "religious" choice of eternal death or eternal life and the desire to share that knowledge with anyone who comes in contact with this remarkable phenomenon.

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.

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.

This study examines the cult of Our Lady of Remedios from an art-historical perspective. Choosing this specific cult statue as a case study is not arbitrary: Remedios is among the oldest Marian images in the New World and was named first patroness of Mexico City in 1574, when the city council became the patron of her shrine and a confraternity was founded to better disseminate the cult. As a result, the statue was carried fifty-seven times through the streets of New Spain's capital in three hundred years (an average of one procession every five years), thus outnumbering any other religious event that was not part of the liturgical calendar. The fame of Our Lady of Remedios was closely linked to her role as Socia Belli of the Spanish army, as she was believed to have protected Hernán Cortés and his allies during the conquest of Mexico-Tenochtitlán in 1520-21. Her character as protector in times of war was enhanced in the centuries to come, when she was called to the city on every occasion when the Spanish Crown was involved in military campaigns. Her protection, however, was mainly requested in times of drought and epidemics, a reason for which her fame as protectress of the city grew intensively, and all sectors of society (Spanish, Indians, and Castas) followed her with the same fervent faith. This dissertation is a monographic study of a miraculous image that has hitherto been overlooked in the history of colonial religiosity of New Spain despite its symbolic relevance for the society of its time. It considers the sixteenth-century statue and the ways it was displayed to its devotional audiences as documents that inform us about its social role. By placing this cult image in the ritual context to which it belonged, both spatial and spiritual, this study considers the devotional gaze with which her devotees engaged her showing how devotion, aesthetics and politics were intertwined during colonial Mexico. / History of Art and Architecture

This dissertation provides an intellectual and social history of learned writing on Roman religious culture during the late Republic and early Empire. I examine the ways in which an elite learned literature, for which I propose the name "civil theology", constructed "Roman religion" as a religious system. The first part of the dissertation is an intellectual history of civil theology, especially focused on how these learned texts generated "Roman religion" as an object of knowledge. In order to elucidate how texts can authoritatively construct a religious system, I pursue a comparison between civil theology and the Mishnah, a rabbinic textual compilation. The second part of the dissertation is a social history of civil theology, concentrating on the social contexts of production and reception of the discourse. Firstly, I demonstrate how the discourse was embedded in the social relations of the profoundly competitive late Republican elite. Civil theology was not a socially marginal intellectual activity. Rather, knowledge about Roman religion provided resources for the social self-presentation of the elite. Secondly, I consider how civil theology became implicated in the new imperial socio-political order. Emperors drew on civil-theological knowledge to legitimize "religious reforms" and their personal rule; for the aristocracy, civil theology became entangled with responses to the new situation of autocracy. In a conclusion, I outline the continuing influence of civil theology and its construction of "Roman religion" in the high imperial period and late antiquity and consider how Roman civil theology can complicate the established scholarly approaches to the relationship between books and religion. / The Classics

abstract: My dissertation project, Mormons at the World's Fair: A Study of Religious and Cultural Agency and Transformation looks at a pivotal period of transition within the American religious and political national culture (1880-1907). Using Mormonism as an important focal point of national controversy and cultural change, this dissertation looks at the interconnections between Mormon transitions and the larger national transformations then under way in what historians call the "progressive" era. Prominent scholars have recognized the 1893 World's Fair as an important moment that helped initiate the "dawning" of religious pluralism in America. This national response to American religious diversity, however, is limited to a nineteenth-century historiographical framework, which made real religious pluralism in the next century more difficult. Bringing together into one narrative the story of the anti-polygamy crusades of the 1880s, the ambivalent presence (and non presence) of Mormonism at the World's Fair of 1893, and the drawn-out US Senate Hearings and ultimate victory of Mormon apostle and Senator Reed Smoot in 1907, this dissertation offers new insights into the meaning and limitations of American religious liberty, the dynamics of minority agency, as well as a deeper understanding of America's developing national identity. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Religious Studies 2012