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Human salvation is amongst the most important topic within all religions and schools of thought including Islam. To provide means for attainment of salvation religions delivered their teachings through scriptures and role models. Role models are not only believed to be chosen by God but they are also considered as the chosen people among their community who later follow them. When we compare the lives of such people what becomes evident is a pattern in their progression through which they advanced towards fulfilling God's purpose for the creation. As this pattern is called a journey towards perfection (kamāl), the journeyer undergoes changes within their inner nature and personality. These changes occur within the limits of the finitude one is born into, and results in development of different attributes. As the individual advances in their spiritual progression, they eventually attain the station which is the point of the Perfect Man and are considered as the Perfect Individual (Al-Insān Al-Kāmil) and the Deputy of God (Walīyatu Allā). This point of attainment of being an Al-Insān Al-Kāmil and Walīyat Allāh is tied in with the responsibility (Risalah) to guide humanity within their private journey. This Risalah can be universal similar to those of Muḥammad, Jesus (Peace be Upon on Them) or limited to one person. This thesis will argue that Zaynab, also, qualifies as Al-Insān Al-Kāmil and Walīyat Allāh according to the dominant theories on the concept of kamāl and the deep analysis of her journey towards perfection. Study of Zaynab's attributes supports the claim about her kamāl, but she is not considered as infallible as are some of the other models. Although infallibility (pure from sins and errors) is not introduced as the requirement for kamāl by religions, yet one might wonder on the infallibility of role models specially in Islam. Thus, Zaynab remains the only figure of early Islam who bridges between Islam and other religions on the concept of kamāl by eliminating the element of infallibility as one who is considered as Walīyatu Allā. Thus, her life pattern demonstrates a journey towards kamāl attainable for everyone. Although there is one narration which refers to her as Walīyatu Allā, but there are no available sources that analyze her journey towards becoming Walīyatu Allā and reflects its importance in fulfilling her Risalah. Zaynab is being emphasized throughout history as a strong figure who carried out the role of her brother Imām Al-Ḥusayn after the battle of Karbalā and defended the true teachings of Islam and its valuable rules. Her importance lies also as the one who delivers eloquent speeches and saves the life of Imam Zayn Al-`Abedin. While she is known as one who "has to teach the way of Al-Ḥusayn, in the manner of `Alī" the importance of how she became Zaynab, the kamāl has been neglected throughout the centuries. Therefore, in this thesis I will study the pattern of her life with respect to her progression in the context of the attributes of Al-Insān Al-Kāmil and Walīyat Allāh to demonstrate the significant elements which made her a paradigmatic kamāl. / Religion

This dissertation contributes to the study of American Christianity by tracing the apocalyptic thought of New England evangelical Calvinism from Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) to Lyman Beecher (1775-1863). Covering the period of the First Great Awakening in the eighteenth century to the dawn of the Second Great Awakening in the nineteenth century, the study identifies Edwards as the progenitor of a distinctive tradition of Calvinist apocalyptic thought. Edwardsean historical-redemptive apocalypticism highlights the “work of redemption” as the unfolding spiritual drama of conversion enacted in various historical stages. Its three-fold emphasis is on revivalism, the afflictive nature of church history, and the cosmic dimensions of an overarching redemptive narrative culminating in Christ’s Second Coming. Edwards’s immediate disciples, Joseph Bellamy (1719-1790) and Samuel Hopkins (1721-1803), reinterpreted their mentor’s insights to create an Edwardsean school of New England “New Divinity” thought. Beneath the veneer of New Divinity theology was a strong undercurrent of Edwardsean apocalypticism, which the second generation Edwardseans adapted to reflect the young nation’s call to social action. The revivals of the Second Great Awakening were driven in large part by the millennial spirit of this New Divinity apocalyptic tradition. Due to rapid societal changes at the turn of the century, Edwardseans of the third generation led the efforts in institutionalizing religious and moral reform activities. Along with this Protestant “kingdom building” came a shift in Edwardsean eschatological priorities. It moved away from the central Edwardsean motif of conversion/redemption to moralism—from a theology centered upon otherworldly apocalypticism toward a greater focus on societal reform. This transition from subsuming the grand narrative of redemption under the overall rubric of God’s sovereignty to one that viewed the millennium in relation to humanistic moral reform was led by Lyman Beecher (1775-1863), who serves as the representative of the “millennial turn” in Edwardsean apocalypticism during the Second Great Awakening. An overview of Edwardsean apocalyptic thought between the two Great Awakenings provides historians an important window to connect and interpret the development of New England Calvinist eschatology that few have explored in depth. These ideas continue to enlighten our understanding of modern-day iterations of evangelical eschatology.

This dissertation examines the contributions of Quakers, specifically from the liberal tradition of the Religious Society of Friends, to the advancement of lesbian, gay, and bisexual rights in the United States between 1946-1973. In this period, Quakers established the first social service organization for gay people in the United States, wrote the first public and positive evaluation of homosexuality from a religious perspective, and composed the first public statement in support of bisexuality from a religious assembly. A critical study of Quaker pamphlets, periodicals, lectures, business minutes, and personal papers from this era reveals that Quaker support of gay liberation was exercised through experiments in criminal justice reform, challenges to Christian moral codes, and advocacy for change within the Religious Society of Friends. The findings presented in this project seek to broaden our understanding of gay rights history by showing that Quakers played a pivotal role in the emergence and development of the gay rights movement in the United States. / Religion

This thesis explores best practices in teaching religious history in public schools using primary sources. Lesson plans on specific sites and themes within the history of religious freedom in Philadelphia contextualize and celebrate the religious diversity that the city has known since its inception. By understanding how this diversity developed over time and through obstacles, students will be more willing and motivated to do their individual part to maintain and protect religious liberty. This goal is emphasized through the use of primary sources, which bring gravity, accessibility, and engagement to a topic that might otherwise be considered controversial, distant, or unnecessary. / History

<p>This study examines the representation of "conscience" in English literature, theology, and political theory from the late fourteenth century to the late seventeenth. In doing so it links up some prominent conceptual history of the term, from Aquinas to Hobbes, with its imaginative life in English narrative. In particular, beginning with William Langland's <italic>Piers Plowman</italic> and moving through texts in the "<italic>Piers Plowman</italic> tradition" and on to John Bunyan's allegories and polemics, I explore what I call the "satiric" dimensions of conscience in an allegorical tradition that spans a long and varied period of reform in England, medieval and early modern. As I argue, conscience in this tradition is linked up with the jolts of irony as with the solidarities of mutual recognition. Indeed, the ironies of conscience depend precisely on settled dispositions, shared practices, common moral sources and intellectual traditions, and relationships across time. As such, far from simply being a form of individualist self-assurance, conscience presupposes and advocates a social body, a vision of communal life. Accordingly, this study tracks continuities and transformations in the imagined communities in which the judgment that is conscience is articulated, and so too in the capacities of prominent medieval literary forms to go on speaking for others in the face of dramatic cultural upheaval.</p><p>After an introductory essay that examines the relationship between conscience, irony, and literary form, I set out in chapter one with a study of Langland's <italic>Piers Plowman</italic> (ca. 1388 in its final version), an ambitious, highly dialectical poem that gives a figure called Conscience a central role in its account of church and society in late medieval England. While Langland draws deeply on scholastic accounts of <italic>conscientia</italic>--an act of practical reason, as Aquinas says, that is binding as your best judgment and yet vexing in its capacity for error and need for formation in the virtues--he dramatizes error in terms of imagined practice, pressing the limits of theory. A long, recursive meditation on how one's socially embodied life constitutes distinctive forms of both blindness and vision, Langland's poem searches out the forms of recognition and mutuality that he takes a truth-seeking irony of conscience to require in his contemporary moment. My reading sets the figure of Conscience in <italic>Piers Plowman</italic> alongside the figure of Holy Church to explore some of these themes, and so also to address why the beginning of Langland's poem matters for its ending. In chapter two I turn to an anonymous early fifteenth-century poem of political complaint called <italic>Mum and the Sothsegger</italic> (ca. 1409) that was written in response to new legislation introducing capital punishment for heresy in England. In Mum I show how an early "<italic>Piers Plowman</italic> tradition" gets taken up into a rhetoric of royal counsel and so subtly, but decisively, revises aspects of Langland's political and ecclesial vision. In a final chapter moving across several of John Bunyan's works from the 1670s and 1680s, I show how Bunyan conceptualizes coercion in terms of the state and the market, and so defends a "liberty" of conscience that resists both Hobbesian assimilations of moral judgment to the legal structures of territorial sovereignty and an emergent market nominalism, in which exchange value trumps all moral reflection. In part two of Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan draws surprisingly on medieval sources to display the forms of mutuality that he thinks are required to resist "consent" to such unjust forms of coercion.</p> / Dissertation

This thesis traces the establishment and development of a functioning reformed church in the parishes of Fife after the official Reformation of 1560. Based principally on archival sources, especially the records of the kirk sessions which governed the church at parish level, it examines how ecclesiastical institutions developed and interacted with laypeople, and evaluates the progress made in the challenging task of inculcating Protestant values and identity in Fife’s parishioners. The first section examines the development of the reformed church in three chapters on the parish ministry, church discipline, and reformed worship respectively. The progress made in providing parish ministers and establishing kirk sessions was hesitant, and it took several decades before the church’s institutions were functioning healthily across Fife. This gradual process of reformation was not what the original reformers wanted, but it may have in fact eased the transition to the more firmly Protestant parish culture that emerged around the turn of the century. The second section looks more thematically at three key aspects of the church, focusing mainly on this latter period. The fourth chapter analyses the ministry as a profession, while the fifth chapter goes on to discuss the efforts made to instruct the laity in more detailed Protestant understandings from the 1590s onwards. The sixth and final chapter returns to the subject of discipline, describing the main targets of the disciplinary regime and evaluating the effectiveness of discipline. The church that emerged in the seventeenth century was relatively healthy, staffed by a stable and well-educated ministry, and was starting to make much stronger efforts to educate and discipline the laypeople of Fife. The thesis concludes that while the Scottish Reformation still emerges as an ultimately successful transformation, the path to religious change was more complicated than has been appreciated by historians.

<p>This study examines the use of the Tanakh (the Jewish canon of the Bible) in the gospels of Mark and Matthew. At its core is a comparison of Tanakh references in these gospels which focuses on two central questions: Does Matthew raise the prominence of the Tanakh in his gospel? Is there a correlation between Matthean adaptations of Markan references and a the strength of his Jewish identity? </p><p>First and foremost, this investigation focuses on Mark, Matthew and the books that comprise the Tanakh in Greek (LXX) and Hebrew (MT). The gospels are surveyed according to NA28, the LXX according to the Gottingen Septuagint series, and the MT according to BHS. Additionally, all major variants of these three texts are considered. </p><p>The first methodological step in this comparison is the categorization of the 104 Tanakh references in Mark into three groups - explicit, implicit, and subtle references - with one chapter devoted to each. In each chapter, I open by pointing out the main focus of the Markan references. On a verse-by-verse basis, I then determine whether each Markan reference relies on the LXX or the MT, and if its Matthean version makes the Tanakh presence more or less prominent. Each chapter concludes with a concise summary of these individual comparisons. </p><p>A fourth chapter provides a discussion of the four Matthean omissions of the first verse of the Shema (Deut 6:4), an overview of scholarly understandings of these omissions, and my explanation for their elimination. </p><p>The main findings of this study are: 1) Matthew tends to make explicit Tanakh references more prominent in his gospel. This trend is present, albeit less evident, in the implicit references, and it is reversed in the subtle references. 2) Both Mark and Matthew were probably able to independently translate from the Hebrew text of the Tanakh. 3) The phrase “God is One,” which appears four times in Mark, is entirely eliminated from Matthew. 4) The primary effect of Matthean modifications of Markan references is the elevation of Jesus’ image rather than Law observance.</p><p>Thus, the primary conclusions of this study are: 1) that the Tanakh presence is enhanced in Matthew. 2) However, the evidence does not support the notion that this pattern stems from a Matthean Judazation of Mark but, rather, from an attempt to underscore the divine identity of Jesus.</p> / Dissertation

Thesis advisor: James M. O'Toole / This dissertation examines the religious environment in nineteenth-century Massachusetts created by church disestablishment and a theological schism. Congregationalists, bound to God and to one another with a sacred covenant, were the traditional beneficiaries of the state's constitutional requirement that towns raise tax revenue for "the support and maintenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, religion, and morality." The nation's last church establishment system was not removed until a statewide referendum in 1833, but, in practice, it had eroded earlier as Congregational churches encountered internal and external religious dissent. The mechanics of the establishment system had often been used by residents, including those liberal church members who eventually adopted the name Unitarians, to obstruct orthodox Congregationalists from operating more than 100 local churches in Massachusetts. These changes compelled Congregationalists to voluntarily support their churches prior to formal disestablishment, effectively ending the establishment system town-by-town and removing those churches from the center of town life. The lived religious experiences dramatically changed. Laymen took advantage of Congregationalism's inherently decentralized structure and gained control of their local churches. They sought to maintain the purity of their individual covenants by expelling absent members and those espousing theological heresies. In the process, local ministers were marginalized and dismissed with increasing frequency. Tensions arose between many in the clergy elite, who advocated for denominational consistency, and the laymen, who defended the autonomy of their local church. The story of antebellum Congregationalism in Massachusetts, rather than being part of an emerging national denominationalism, was actually one of an inward turn, a type of atomization of the religious denomination. The uncoordinated actions on the local level helped prompt the first national gathering of Congregationalists in more than two centuries, but suggestions for the adoption of explicitly "Congregational" elements by local churches were rejected by the laity. Congregationalism emerged from the Civil War with these antebellum changes made permanent and entrenched as a parochial, laity-driven denomination. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

Thesis advisor: Cynthia L. Lyerly / This dissertation uses the Keithian Schism, a split within the Society of Friends in the last decade of the seventeenth century led by George Keith, to integrate and thus better explore several aspects of Quakerism, the public sphere, and early Enlightenment fears of religious heterodoxy. Quaker history has often narrowly focused on those aspects of Quakerism that set it apart from English society as a whole. The Schism, I first seek to show, reveals how very early modern the Quakers were in their handling of honor culture, public dispute, identity, and political authority. At the same time, these common elements of Quakerism and early modern society are examined within the specific needs of the Society. Starting in the 1670s, the Society of Friends pursued a project of theological reform, and political lobbying in order to achieve legal toleration of their sect. Central to this effort was their ability to control how it was represented by opponents and members alike. Keith was involved with this project, at the levels of creating a less heterodox theological façade for the doctrine of the Inner Light and of using his more educated demeanor to cultivate elite allies (such as the Cambridge professor Dr. Henry More and his student, Anne Conway). Keith's adoption of a Renaissance system of ideas known as the "Ancient Theology" led him toward a more traditional formulation of the nature of Christ that helped provoke the Schism (without determining it). Influenced by English "revisionist" historians, however, I then focus on the narrative of the Schism, first within Pennsilvania and then London, to show that the Schism was also very much about personal honor, corporate identities, and reputation. Finally, the dissertation turns to the period after Keith's expulsion from the Society to reveal two often neglected aspect of the Schism: the role of non-Quakers and of the public sphere produced by the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695. These events reveal first the interest of a broader public in what is usually understood as an event solely within Quaker or colonial Pennsylvanian history. Likewise the entry into the press of numerous former Quakers, Dissenters, Anglicans and printers seeking to use the Schism to their own religious or commercial advantage elaborates recent historical literature concerning the perceived dangers of the public sphere. I set a portion of this Keithian literature, which consisted of a High Anglican attack on Quakerism as Deistic, within the contemporaneous Socinian Crisis and the rise of "societies for the reformation of manners," such as the Anglican S.P.G. and S.P.C.K., which were fundamentally anti-Quaker in their focus, both in England and the colonies. Ultimately, the ability of the Society to utilize it highly organized meeting structure to control its representation in the public sphere demonstrates the manner in which the public sphere of 1690s England was simultaneous dangerous and essential to the Quaker effort to achieve a toleration that extended beyond the merely legal. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.