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The thesis analyzes how Jewish historians presented the Ottoman Empire and its Jewish subjects during the long time span between the end of the fifteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century. In the first part of the thesis, the key characteristics of the Jewish attitude towards history and history writing are analyzed. Throughout the ages of pre-1820, Jews are observed to be consciously lukewarm towards history. The sealing of the Bible and the emergence of an apocalyptic/messianic world view, which are both considered to have taken place around the last centuries of B.C.E., are illustrated as two major causes behind the emergence of this particular Jewish attitude towards history. In the second part of the thesis, the historiography of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are examined with special emphasis on the period historians who explicitly wrote historical works. As the Ottoman Empire was the super power of the age, in these historical writings, a special divine role was attributed to the Empire. The consecutive part of the thesis focuses on historical writings on the Sabbatian messianic movement. As one of the important episodes of the early modern period of Jewish history, the Sabbatian movement stimulated awareness and interest in history even in the far flung communities of Diaspora and produced a new surge of history writing. The modernization of the Ottoman Empire Jewry that began after the 1840s, and adaptation of numerous already-existing social and intellectual models of the West is the subject of the final part of the thesis. Each of these western Jewish intellectual movements had their distinctive approach to history and influenced the Ottoman Jewish historians in their writings of history. However, the actual scientific and objective historical writings on the Ottoman Jewry started much later in the second half of the twentieth century and gained popularity in the 1980s with the increased world-wide interest in the Ottoman/Turkish Jewry.

This study aims to formulate and evaluate a methodology for the study of rituals in historical time periods. The methods developed in the field of Ritual Studies for the investigation of present-day, observable rituals are assessed in terms of their usefulness for studying rituals practiced in the past, and these methods are adapted to the particular needs of historical study using the pre-modern Polish custom of Wigilia, a Christmas Eve supper ritual, as a case study. This paper suggests that despite the limitations in applying Ritual Studies methodology to rituals practiced in the past, these methods are useful for helping to construct a generalized reconstruction of historical rituals and in using that reconstruction to understand dimensions of popular religion in historical time periods. In looking specifically at Wigilia, this study argues that the customs associated with this ritual are perceived by participants to have effective utility in their everyday lives.

Deep ecology is a relatively new branch of study which combines different fields of knowledge such as philosophy, religion, and sociology, on the one hand, with environmental studies, on the other. The basic premise of deep ecology is the interconnectedness of all life and consequently, a concern for the ecological well-being of our planet, which is increasingly threatened by the impact of modern human lifestyles. Recently, there has been a lot of recent attention given to deep ecology movements in Asia. However, these studies often lack the interdisciplinary background in science necessary to assess a real ecological impact. This study is based on a series of case studies was conducted in India, Mongolia, and Thailand across a variety of faiths and locations. By investigating specific cases across cultures and religions and drawing comparisons between the impacts of minority religions and majority religions, the true environmental potential and value of deep ecology movements is analyzed.

The survival of the human race and all life on planet earth is endangered by the technological advancements of modern civilization such as weapons of mass destruction and the global climate crisis. In the 1960s and 1970s movements began in the academic field of psychology that radically opposed the paradigm believed to have created this dire situation. Tranpersonal Psychology is an integrated field that approaches the future of humanity with hope as it explores the highest evolutionary potentials of our race as conveyed by comparative religious scholarship, psychological literature, scientific investigations, psychosomatic analysis, and case studies. The problem identified in the old paradigm is a disconnected duality of the reductive model that promotes separation, fear, and conflict. Universal unconditional love (agape) is the proposed trait that when implemented into the new paradigm of integration will dissolve the duality into the unity of a spiritual and physical evolution of humanity. The research herein suggests not only a continuity to this proposition that can be found amongst the worlds religious and spiritual traditions, but also a physiological exploration into a scientific understanding of extraordinary levels of human functionality. The suggested physiological transformation of the human body, as understood in the Taoist tradition through studies with a Tai Chi Chuan master, renders an individual invincible to any survival threat. The agape trait in conjunction with the transpersonal movement promotes attitudes of selflessness, compassion, and empathy in order to facilitate an initiative to insure collective survival. Universal unconditional love aligns the collective survival interests with the individual survival interests, and may present an opportunity for humanity to evolve spiritually and physically beyond the threats of our modern day.

In 2005, 58,000 adults and children died in Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa from AIDS-related illnesses (UNAIDS 2005). Helene Gayle, president and CEO of CARE USA and the co-chair of the Global HIV Prevention Working Group, has been quoted by UNAIDS as saying: We have a critical window of opportunity over the next 10 years to dramatically slow the rate of new infections, and ultimately reverse the epidemic in the MENA region (UNAIDS 2007a). The purpose of this project is to examine a relatively understudied factor of HIV/AIDS transmission in the region, low levels of condom use. This study aims to determine if there is a relationship between the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in the Muslim-majority countries of the Middle East and North Africa and the low prevalence of condom usage across the region. It is this studys hypothesis that the majority of the infections in the region are being transmitted through sexual contact either heterosexual or men having sex with men -- and therefore, the prevalence rate of condom use bears particular weight on how people are becoming infected. It is the goal of this study to serve as a stepping stone towards further investigations into other underlying aspects of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. If this study is successful in linking a low frequency of condom use to the spread of HIV/AIDS, critical insight will be provided into an additional element that needs to be addressed in order to increase the effectiveness of prevention and educational measures. Several different public use data sets will be used to show the relationship between HIV/AIDS prevalence, condom use, and religiosity through the creation of linear regression models. The regression models for this study were in the expected directions to support the hypothesis; however they are not statistically significant at the p < 0.05 level of significance. Due to the limited availability of data for religiosity, religion was used for comparative purposes. There does not appear to be a significant relationship between religiosity/religion and condom use or between condom use and HIV/AIDS prevalence. While the initial hypothesis of this study stated that it is religiosity, not religion, which was the fundamental social cause of HIV/AIDS in this region, it seems that neither measure of Islam yield statistically significant results. Therefore, strong confirmation of the theoretical model is not possible at this time, but there is evidence to support that the model is correct, just not statistically significant. The results tend to be in the direction expected, and there are strong qualitative reasons that religion, especially religiosity, is important, even if it cannot be statistically demonstrated in this study. Qualitatively the model still makes a strong argument. It has been previously argued that religion in general is a protective factor against HIV/AIDS, but this does not seem to be the case for Islam. This study indicates that

This thesis argues that in crafting a nuanced stance on 2008 Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama's "pro-choice" position, and by bringing to attention other key issues in his platform which coincided with important ethical concerns of Catholic thought, Pittsburgh Catholics for Obama (PCO) made various interventions into a public sphere where positions of progressive Catholics had not been prominently featured during the last decade. In order to understand the phenomenon of PCO both within and beyond its immediate political contexts, this project pursues three frames of inquiry which correspond to the thesis chapters. The first chapter situates PCO within the context of the theoretical issues raised by the debates that have ensued in the last thirty years on the question of religion and the public sphere, and secularism. The second offers a socio-historical perspective that places PCO within the post-Vatican II history of American Catholic political participation, thought and activism. Finally, the third chapter undertakes an ethnographic account of PCO's activism in order to provide a description and analysis of the group's engagement with the public sphere. The thesis shows that PCO positioned itself at the edge between a separatist Catholic culture and a political culture of the "common good" that seeks alliances and compromises with other political and cultural groups with whom it can share Catholic-informed but not restrictive principles of Catholic social teaching. By bringing together refined methods of grassroots activism in combination with the crafting of thoughtful public arguments that amplify particular tenants of Catholic social teaching, PCO carved out a space in the public sphere where its members could support a "pro-choice" presidential candidate while remaining loyal to Catholic ethical traditions. This thesis contributes to present-day scholarly discussions on the tension between exclusivist secularism and public religions in American political discourse. It analyzes the changing reality of the recent political positions of American Catholics from "single-issue voting" (abortion) to a search for common ground. Furthermore, it contributes to the study of the conflicted relationship between religion and politics as it has taken place in the American public sphere during last decade.

Historically, the philosophical literature on the ontological argument has primarily been concerned with the assessment of the argument in terms of its validity or lack thereof. Rarely have the logical foundations of validity itself been investigated in their relation to the argument. My thesis seeks to remedy this omission by investigating the correlation between changing conceptions of logic and ontological argumentation. To do so, I discuss the conceptions of logic employed by three of the most notable modern expositors of the ontological argument: Leibniz, Kant and Frege. I characterize their conceptions of logic in terms of formality and modality and subsequently relate these characterizations to their respective critiques of the ontological argument, establishing that an important correlation exists between ones conception of logic and ones assessment of ontological argumentation. In conclusion, I argue for the importance of understanding ontological argumentation not only in terms of its validity within a given conception of logic, but also in terms of the validity of the conception of logic itself.

The Polish National Catholic Church (PNCC) traces its origin to the establishment of Saint Stanislaus, Bishop and Martyr Parish, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1897, under the leadership of the Rev. Francis Hodur. It is the only surviving institution to emerge from Independentism (a religious movement among immigrant Catholics in the United States and Canada around the turn of the twentieth century who moved away from the Roman Catholic Church in America and formed and joined separate, yet still self-described Catholic, religious institutions) and as such is the only extant schism of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. The founding of the PNCC and its parishes reflects widespread conflicts in immigrant communities, not only between the Irish-dominated hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States and non-Irish immigrant Roman Catholic laypeople, but also among members of individual Roman Catholic parishes. The Roman Catholic parish was a place where immigrants struggled not only with priests and bishops, but also with each other over church property ownership and their role in church governance. PNCC recruiters were able to gain converts from Roman Catholicism by appealing to their new sense of Polish nationalism, which many immigrants developed in the United States. Polish nationalist feelings also motivated many Roman Catholics to break away from Roman Catholic parishes and form independent Catholic churches, many of which later joined the PNCC. Although many Polish immigrants came to equate their Polish identity with their Catholic identity, PNCC recruiters were able to convince many Roman Catholics that the PNCC was not only a legitimate Catholic church, but also more Catholic than the Roman Catholic Church itself. The PNCC appealed to immigrants sense of nationalism and Catholicism to convince Roman Catholics and members of independent Catholic churches to join the PNCC at a time when immigrants thoughts turned from returning home to staying in the United States.