No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

<p>This dissertation examines the development of Huguenot confessional identity and political strategy under the Edict of Nantes through sermons. Here, sermons serve as a vital medium of ideological exchange, shaping and reflecting the mental world of France's Protestant population, while acting as a source of dialogue between Huguenot ministers, their parishioners and readers, and the crown. As a result, this study demonstrates the cultural tools that influenced how the Huguenot population made sense of their position in France in the seventeenth century, and it shows that, while Huguenots lost much of their effective political power after 1629, their ministers were active in the decades after through informal but telling channels, instructing their parishioners about proper civic and political belief, and positing for their various audiences a view of the French polity – and of its absolutist monarchy – that included a legitimate place for the Huguenot population.</p> <p>The introduction and the first chapter provide the historical and historiographical background, while also offering a detailed explanation of the training and vocation of Huguenot ministers, shedding light on their sermons and their social and professional networks. Chapters two and three provide the heart of the argument, exploring the elements of the sermons that emphasized, first, the necessity of religious particularism for Huguenots within France and, second, their abiding devotion to the crown. Together, these dual elements of Huguenot identity meant that they were negotiating their own vision for the kingdom and their place within it. The final three chapters examine the prevalence and significance of the Huguenot dual identity in diverse sermon themes, while also showing its legacy beyond the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.</p> <p>This dissertation provides an important contribution to Reformation and French historiography, while also complicating notions about religious identity and the development of absolutist thought by demonstrating a confessionally-distinct political activism that is not often recognized. It also reveals the interwoven nature of religion and politics in the Reformation era, here as it is manifested in sermons.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The topic of Tillich and Judaism has received relatively little scholarly treatment. This is despite the importance of Jews and Judaism for Tillich, which is established by numerous biographical details, including the reason for his opposition to the Nazi government and ensuing emigration to the United States in 1933 (Introduction and Chapter 1). Tillich’s ecumenical activities are acknowledged, but Tillich’s dialectical theological method is analyzed to determine how it could have justified his pro-Jewish stance. This refers to his consistent attacks on anti-Semitism, and after World War II, numerous lectures on the structural similarities between Judaism and Christianity, not to mention lifetime relationships with secular and religious Jews (Chapters 1 and 2). Tillich has a dialectical understanding of reality, influenced by F. W. J. Schelling, and this influences every major aspect of his theology. Select primary sources are analyzed to assess the evolution of Tillich’s idea of Judaism through his dialectical, theological and inclusive history of religion (Chapters 3 through 6). ‘Jewish prophetism’, highlighting the critical and existential dimensions of Judaism, emerged as the most characteristic expression, significantly, after World War I, as Tillich rejected the religious nationalism of his early adulthood. After World War II and the Holocaust, Tillich’s ‘dialectic of the Holy’ expressed the fullness of the divine reality as the permanent polar tension between the priestly/mystical/vertical/’Is’, and the prophetic/critical/horizontal/’Ought’. This polar tension is found in his ontology, Christology, and history of religion. The importance of Jewish prophetism, rooted in historic Judaism, would have made it difficult for Tillich to eliminate the Jewish roots of Christianity, compared to the so-called ‘German Christians’ prevalent in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Chapter 7 concludes with a criticism and defence of Tillich’s method. Tillich’s idea of Judaism is inadequate for interfaith dialogue, because it fails to address the fullness of Judaism’s own self-understandings, and is limited to the prophetic aspect. However, the prophetic aspect ensures that the critical and existential aspects of any religion endure in a transformation to a more adequate expression of the divine. Tillich’s ‘religion of the concrete spirit’ not only preserves the importance of Jewish prophetism, but opens the door to dialogue with non-theistic religions, such as Buddhism.

This thesis examines the place, influence, and deployment of archaic Greek thought in Sophocles’ extant tragedies, paying close attention to the ethical and theological content of the plays as well as to their dramatic and literary fabric. I use archaic thought as an umbrella term for a constellation of ideas on the human condition and the gods which is first attested, in Greece, in Homeric epic, but has a long and variegated existence in other contexts and after the archaic period. The thesis consists of six chapters, divided in two parts. The first part provides a general conceptual framework, which is then applied in the detailed readings of Sophocles constituting the second part. The first chapter examines some of the main texts of archaic Greek thought, and offers an interpretation of it as a coherent nexus of ideas gravitating around the core notions of human vulnerability, short-sightedness, and the principle of alternation. Using the examples of Homer’s Iliad and Solon’s Elegy to the Muses, I argue that the narrative structure of archaic poetry can be used to formulate and “perform” archaic ideas. The second chapter formulates the principal argument of the thesis: that archaic thought is central to the ethical and religious content of tragedy as well as to its dramatic and literary fabric, that is, to the form of tragedy as a complex artefact designed to be performed on stage. I explore possible models for the interaction between archaic thought and literature and tragedy, from Aristotle’s Poetics to recent interpretations of tragedy as a hybrid of other literary and intellectual forms. I then examine the ways in which archaic ideas are deployed and performed in tragedy, both in passages that are explicitly archaic in content and diction, and in the complex interactions of dramatic form and intellectual content. This general discussion is illustrated with preliminary readings of four Sophoclean plays: Ajax, Oedipus Tyrannus, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus. The third chapter contextualises the approach adopted in the thesis as a whole by exploring two interpretations of Sophocles in German Idealist thought: Solger’s reading of Ajax and Hölderlin’s reading of Oedipus Tyrannus. It argues that these analyses, albeit under anachronistic conceptual categories such as “the tragic”, seize on some of the fundamental questions of archaic and tragic ethics and theology: the relationship between the human and divine spheres, and the limits of language and human understanding. In Chapters 4, 5, and 6, I offer detailed readings of Trachiniae, Antigone, and Electra, three plays chosen to reflect the diversity of contexts in which archaic ideas exist in Sophocles. I argue that archaic thought is central to the intellectual and dramatic fabric of all three plays, even though the deployment and emphasis of archaic patterns and ideas differs from one tragedy to the next.

No description available.