Religion

This dissertation examines how medieval Chinese thinkers and communities from the fourth to tenth centuries understood children and conceptualized childhood in relation to Buddhist ethics and practice. Due to then-current assumptions of their inchoate, liminal, and malleable state of being, children constituted a powerful discursive tool for medieval Chinese Buddhist authors to delineate the boundaries of normative existence and define religious ideals. I demonstrate that medieval Chinese Buddhist sources present children’s religious capacities as distinct from those of adults. These beliefs about childhood arose as Chinese adherents reconciled novel concepts introduced from Buddhist traditions, such as a karmic doctrine and system of rebirth, with indigenous Chinese notions of childhood and moral development. Overall, this dissertation demonstrates how the place of children in Chinese Buddhist ethics and practice casts new light on the tensions and negotiations that arise when ethical and soteriological ideas cross cultural, linguistic, and geographic boundaries. This research broadens conversations in Chinese Buddhist studies by placing the field in dialogue with histories of childhood. I employ age as an analytical category to reevaluate a range of sources with attention to biophysically and socially constructed definitions of the child: Buddhist miracle tales and monastic hagiographies, scriptures, philosophical treatises, and liturgies, as well as ritual, medical, and legal codes. Part I traces the conceptual genealogy of the child in medieval Chinese Buddhism. I survey approaches to children and childhood in early Chinese sources and Sanskrit Buddhist texts in Chinese translation. Part II shows how children were situated within two divergent streams of thought in medieval Chinese Buddhist ethics: one in which children’s capacity to bear the results of their karma is determined by age; and the other in which children inherit the karma of their parents. By adopting an age-critical lens, I highlight how Buddhist ethical systems are culturally defined rather than universal, and in the case of medieval China followed sociocultural assumptions of physio-mental development and familial obligation. Part III examines understandings of children’s religious practice as lay adherents and future monastics. I illustrate how medieval Chinese Buddhist authors advanced different norms of Buddhist ethics and practice by evoking, subverting, and reconstituting expectations of children’s religious capacities.

In this dissertation, I analyze Muslim women’s embodiment of religious authority and their contributions to the formation of Islamic modernism in the late Ottoman Mediterranean, with a focus on colonial Egypt. By analyzing the writings of prominent but understudied women intellectuals, I show how, between 1870 and 1930, they negotiated their gendered, religious, and ethnic identities with acute awareness, developing contingent visions of the Islamic intellectual tradition. By centering women thinkers as philosophical and political subjects and tracing their connections to other global centers of Muslim life, I suggest that they were neither always oppressed, nor that late-Ottoman Islam always offered ideal solutions for them. Rather, I argue that their understandings of Islam were intertwined with their resistance to European imperialism and simultaneous engagement in a shared Muslim and yet vast and contradictory community of discourse. I argue further that, while Muslim modernists are often imagined in opposition to Muslim traditionalists, the issue at hand is not the distinction between tradition and modernity, but rather their deep entwinement—so much so that neither can be fully understood without reference to the other. As such, Islam and its reforms served to articulate both difference and universal forms of belonging, allowing the subjects of this study to selectively inhabit and contest dualistic categories along with the hierarchical structures they produced. Against this backdrop, I examine how, in the late Ottoman Mediterranean, Islamic reforms developed around an increasing concern with modernity and the Islamic tradition, and Muslim women intellectuals continued to be carriers of religious authority, upholding and reviving the centuries-old tradition of female transmission of knowledge in Islam.

“Her Country’s Children”: Black Childhood, Religion, and Slavery excavates previously underexplored archival materials to document the religious history of Black childhood from the early national period through the Civil War era. Drawing on institutional records, correspondence, diaries, oral histories, folkloric studies, newspapers, and photographs, this dissertation argues that slavery profoundly shaped the intersection of Black childhood and religion in early and antebellum America. Through an analysis of four case studies that span Pennsylvania and South Carolina, “Her Country’s Children” demonstrates that ideas of Black childhood and real Black children’s relationships with religious practices, discourses, institutions, and communities across this period were marked by the violence, logic, and repercussions of slavery. Focused on the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Part I highlights how Black and white ministers, educators, and abolitionists interpreted the spiritual exhibitions, academic performances, and labor of Black children as central actions for the end of slavery and the uplift of the African American race. Reformers of various denominational stripes created schools and orphanages specifically for Black children, which aimed to develop Black children into hard-working, morally fit Protestant adults. Part II turns to South Carolina, primarily the Lowcountry and Sea Islands regions, and argues that many enslaved and formerly enslaved Black religious communities conceived of Black childhood as a stage of spiritual refinement and as a period of heightened proximity to the nonhuman spirit realm. Enslaved and formerly enslaved elders, particularly elderly Black women, developed rituals that worked to protect children from spiritual and physical dangers, provided children with a spirit world education, and interpreted children’s physical markings and birth circumstances as religious knowledge and prescience that could be harnessed for the benefit of their communities. Across the four chapters, the dissertation reveals the critical roles that African American women have historically played in shaping the religious experiences of Black children. They have operated as caretakers, teachers, spirit world guides, and spiritual parents and often met the ire of both Black and white cultural commentators. Altogether, the analysis conducted in this project makes an interdisciplinary contribution by underscoring the significance of Black girls and boys—as symbolic figures and historical actors—to early and antebellum African American religious history.

This dissertation is about Josephus’s portrayal of civil war in his Roman context. The introduction discusses Josephus’s place in Roman literary society, as well as his use of Jewish texts. The first chapter explores two speeches in Josephus’s Jewish War, and how these speeches exemplify Josephus’s awareness of and engagement with Roman, Jewish, and Hellenistic literary themes. In these speeches, Josephus speaks of how the Zealots’ acts of violence precluded them from Temple worship, and how they could avoid disaster by voluntarily repenting and submitting to the Romans. These themes have resonances in Josephus’s various cultural contexts. This chapter also outlines specific dimensions of impurity in Greek and Roman literature that are relevant to Josephus’s literary context. The second chapter is the first of three chapters that compare passages in Josephus’s works to the writings of specific Latin authors. This chapter juxtaposes passages from Josephus’s Jewish War with scenes from Lucan’s Pharsalia. Josephus’s portrayal of the high priest Ananus bears remarkable similarities to Lucan’s representation of Cato in dialogue with Brutus, and both figures are central to depictions of civil war and cultural destruction.
The third chapter treats of intrafamilial violence in Josephus’s Antiquities and Statius’s Thebaid. Both authors tell of how intrafamilial violence can create intergenerational patterns that can later doom a populace. Additionally, both texts describe how fratricide in a ruling family can lead to cultural instability and then foreign conquest.
The fourth chapter explores two themes in Tacitus’s Annals and Histories and Josephus’s Jewish War and Antiquities. First, Tacitus’s depiction of Vespasian’s victory in a civil war supports Josephus’s descriptions of Vespasian’s leadership qualities. Second, Tacitus’s account of two mutinies adds some dimension to Josephus’s retelling of Korach’s rebellion against Moses.
Scholars have debated the extent of Josephus’s integration into Roman literary culture. More recent scholarship has regarded Josephus as a Roman historian. This dissertation adds detail to a picture of Josephus as a Roman writer, and contributes to an understanding of Josephus’s place in Rome as he was coming to terms with the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple.

Suicide is widely condemned in Islamic law and doctrine. As a type of homicide, suicide was both a major sin and a crime, subject to punishment in this world and assured of it in the next. Despite this, there is a lot of evidence that suicides still occurred, even among religious scholars. People in the medieval Arab-Islamic world killed themselves for many reasons: illness, old age, torture, debt, fear of losing face, and more.Despite the vast secondary literature on martyrdom and terrorism in the contemporary Middle East, the premodern history of suicide in the Islamic world is surprisingly understudied. The classic study on the topic was published nearly eighty years ago, and little has been done since. This dissertation provides a comprehensive study of self-killing (qatala nafsahu), both in theory and in practice, in the medieval Arab-Islamic world, c. 600-1400. Using literary sources alongside normative texts, I present the medieval Arabic material on suicide arranged by genre: suicide in Qurʾānic exegesis, suicide in legal texts, suicide in classical Arabic love stories, suicide in historical sources, and the special case of female suicide in historical sources. Throughout the first two chapters I demonstrate that there is no one locus where the Islamic discussion of suicide is centered. These chapters focus on the simple point that Islam is against suicide, despite the fact that Muslim jurists and even the religious scholars do not present their prohibition in a concerted way. The last three chapters show a disconnect between the historiographic and imaginative depictions of suicide on one hand, and the official Islamic attitude towards suicide on the other. I examine hundreds of reports of suicide collected from the Arab-Islamic historical literature and show that in the general run Islamic values are rarely mentioned in the “real” cases of suicide in the historical sources. In fictitious love stories and accounts of female suicide, values incompatible with Islam tend to predominate the narratives. This research demonstrates that outside the strictly religious domain, both literary fantasy and records of real life in Muslim societies either ignore the religious prohibition of suicide or actively subvert it.

This dissertation considers the question “What is (religious) violence?” from a new angle, as aset of ritual practices involving writing, hearing, and reading about violence that position marginalized community members as potential agents of militant power. Adapting approaches from sociology and ritual studies, this project argues that ritual violence is a potent site for forming communal self-concept, especially when acts of violence are anticipated, even embodied, in an oral collective reading context. This discussion focuses on two case studies from the first centuries BCE and CE: the War Scroll (1QM), a military manual from the community that produced the Qumran Scrolls, and the book of Revelation, an apocalypse produced within the early Christ movement. Both communities responded to Roman domination with literary anticipations of eschatological war and triumph over Israel’s enemies. The violence of the manual and the apocalypse—with their cultic uniforms for battle, embedded communal prayers, and rituals of writing—belong to an ancient literary landscape where, as John Austin put it, words do things. This dissertation explores how literary communal rituals could shape the selfperception of the listening audience and invite its participation in violent speech acts understood to have ritual potency. This approach reframes our understanding of textual rituals and literary violence, challenging interpretations that separate acts of violence from textual violence. By putting the book of Revelation in conversation with the War Scroll, this analysis refutes nonviolent readings of Revelation as a mandate for passive victimhood. Ultimately, it proposes that the War Scroll and Revelation do not just describe ritual practices; they are a kind of ritual practice, sites of realization that offer opportunities for sanctification and transformation in the present and a means by which seemingly powerless sectarian communities can participate in defeating their enemies.

My dissertation examines two queer activist organizations in northern India and analyzes the ways they deploy the languages of secularism in order to understand the activists’ relationship to secularism and Hindu nationalism. The two organizations are Awadh Queer Pride (AQP), which is non-religiously affiliated and based out of Lucknow, and The Queer Muslim Project (TQMP), which is based out of Delhi. In using the term “languages of secularism” I move away from a state-focused approach to secularism studies to instead ask how the tropes and discourses surrounding secularism, like a notion of tolerance based in an underlying claim to common humanity or the insistence that religious differences are simultaneously trivial and immutable, figure in the work of queer activists. Central to my use of the term is the acknowledgment that these tropes and discourses are inconsistent and even at times contradictory. Comparing the two groups’ usage of the languages of secularism helps uncover the ways that secularism impacts both religious and non-religiously affiliated groups and illuminates how the tropes surrounding secularism impact activists’ relationship to religion. Furthermore, I situate both organizations within the context of rising Hindu nationalism in India and global economic pressures. While both groups draw on languages of secularism in their activism to combat Hindu nationalism, invoking secularism poses different risks given their differing relationships to religion. In exploring the varied ways that both groups make use of sometimes contradictory languages of secularism, I ask three interrelated questions: 1) how do queer activists in northern India use languages of secularism? 2) how might we define the different languages of secularism and their effects? 3) how are languages of secularism imbricated in and resistant to Hindu nationalism? I draw on court cases, newspaper articles, speeches, ethnographic work, and analysis of the groups’ social media posts to answer these questions.

This dissertation argues for the existence of a corpus of rabbinic texts that dates to the early Islamic period. This corpus needs to be argued for because it comprises texts heretofore considered marginal and eclectic. These texts, written in Mishnaic Hebrew and featuring only the names of sages who appear in Tannaitic texts, imitate the Mishnah. The dissertation demonstrates their belated date of composition by showing the texts’ engagement with major literary, political, and cultural discourses of the early Islamic world. I call these texts “New Mishnah.” The dissertation’s goal is not only to prove New Mishnah’s existence, but to show New Mishnah’s great value as a category for scholars interested in Jewish history of the early Islamic era. This period is normally considered a “dark age” for which there are few sources. But the purported opacity of this period is a problem of our own making. There are plenty of New Mishnah texts that could illuminate this era—but scholars have consistently relegated them to the periphery. Centering New Mishnah grants us access to a rich source of information about rabbinic Jews of the 7th to 9th centuries hiding in plain sight. The dissertation’s introduction positions New Mishnah as the culmination of a long tradition of Jewish pseudepigraphy. What makes New Mishnah different is that the early Islamic period witnessed the emergence of a discourse of literary authenticity among both Jews and Muslims, subjecting New Mishnah and its unverified provenance to scrutiny. The first chapter examines New Mishnah texts of Palestinian origin that prescribe kosher slaughter practices and distancing measures from menstruating women. The chapter makes the case that it was not only the content of these New Mishnah texts that elicited Iraqi objections, but the very genre of New Mishnah. The second chapter explores a group of New Mishnah texts that offer prescriptions for writing ritually fit Torah scrolls. I argue that the engagement with the materiality of the scroll was motivated by the increasing popularity of the codex in the early Islamic centuries. New Mishnah transforms the scroll from a technology of writing to a ritual artifact. Chapters three, four, five, and six actualize the promise of New Mishnah as a source for writing the history of the Jews under early Islam. Chapter three argues that a monumental synagogue inscription from Reḥov constitutes an example of epigraphic New Mishnah. This mosaic inscription was a Jewish attempt to co-opt the Islamic practice of placing inscriptions across Palestine that advertise the land as Muslim territory. Chapter four analyzes New Mishnah texts that treat Samaritans, a group that in the early Islamic era was increasingly perceived as a corporate entity that could not be subsumed under either the category of “Jew” or “gentile.” The New Mishnah texts that deal with Samaritans portray them as a discrete confession, or a dhimmī—a religious minority in the Islamic empire. Treatment of Samaritans in New Mishnah texts highlights the emergent dhimmī status of both Samaritans and rabbinic Jews. Chapters five and six also study the development of dhimmī discourse. Conversion to Islam represented a serious threat to all dhimmī populations. Chapter five shows that New Mishnah texts confront the looming specter of apostasy to Islam by positioning conversion to Judaism as a preferable alternative. Chapter six argues that a group of New Mishnah texts known as Ma’asim are best understood as Jewish civil law formulated in the wake of the collapse of the Byzantine and Sasanian legal regimes. The Ma’asim are comparable to legal frameworks enacted by other dhimmī communities following the Islamic conquests. The final two chapters probe the transmission of New Mishnah texts. Chapter seven considers the medieval manuscripts in which New Mishnah texts are preserved, and finds that many works of New Mishnah were transmitted alongside each other in the same manuscripts. Chapter eight traces the trajectory of a New Mishnah text that made it into the canon: Avot VI, which was recited and copied alongside the canonical Tractate Avot beginning in the early Islamic era. The conclusion argues that New Mishnah exerted considerable influence, heretofore unacknowledged, on major literary achievements of the Jewish Middle Ages. Both Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah and the Zohar bear the imprint of New Mishnah’s compositional strategies. New Mishnah is thus far from a marginal and forgotten moment of rabbinic literary production, but an enduring force of Jewish creativity.

Anger and the actions it is thought to motivate have gotten a bad rap in diverse philosophical and religious traditions, in popular culture, and in everyday life. While many agree that anger at grievous wrongs is justified insofar as anger rightly bears witness to injustice, much is contested about the nature and value of anger. Theorists and ethicists disagree about whether anger conceptually includes a retributive element and what good there is in the desire for and pursuit of payback. There are concerns about how to balance the injured and angry person’s claims for redress with concern for the social good, whether anger accurately tracks its targets, and whether other affects might do a better job bearing witness to injustice and motivating just social change.“The Beauty of Anger: Anger as Acknowledgment of Injustice” joins polyphonic voices in the philosophical and feminist ethical literature in accenting the value of anger, especially in contexts of oppression surrounding race and gender injustice. The dissertation first synthesizes common philosophical accounts of anger’s retributive element, ultimately offering that one way the desire for a wrongdoer’s suffering appeals to an angry victim is that the angry person desires the intimacy that arises when the wrongdoer suffers in the way the victim suffers. Second, it explores what is gained from an angry response to injustice or wrongdoing that is not captured simply by having the moral facts of the matter. The dissertation suggests that acknowledgment or appreciation of injustice is tightly bound to angry responses to injustice. Third, the dissertation aims to locate the value in an oft-maligned, hostile variety of anger and under what conditions such anger, when leveraged toward revolutionary justice, might be permissible. Finally, I explore how rituals of anger in protests and movements for justice social change can reconnect protesting persons to the anger they are often socialized to suppress.

This dissertation examines the practice of “popular preaching” (sujiang 俗講) performed by itinerant monks to disseminate Buddhist doctrines among lay people in seventh- to tenth-century China. In contrast to existing studies on the propagation of Buddhism through the lenses of translation and commentary, this study highlights the crucial role of preaching in familiarizing the laity with Buddhist concepts in their everyday lives. This study mainly analyzes approximately thirty manuscripts of “sutra lecture texts” (jiangjing wen 講經文) found in a Dunhuang Mogao Cave in the early twentieth century. The materials are important because they reveal that most people encountered Buddhist teachings not through reading texts but by listening to sermons. In addition, this dissertation offers a more nuanced understanding of popular preaching by drawing on textual and historical data from a diverse array of complementary sources, including scriptures, commentaries, travelogues, and ritual manuscripts. This study delves into the literary, ritual, social, material, and performative contexts of popular sutra lectures in medieval Chinese Buddhism. The dissertation argues that Buddhist preachers employed a variety of literary and homiletic techniques—such as quotation, repetition, dialogue, dramatization, jokes, and role-playing—to create vernacularized, performative, and functional canons tailored to the lay audience’s needs. These preachers skillfully integrated existing scriptures and monastic commentaries with their oral exegeses, embedded their sermons within broader ritual contexts, recrafted and disseminated their lecture scripts, and adapted their messages to meet local demands. This dissertation contends that sutra lectures were undertaken as fundamental practices by lay practitioners on the path to soteriological enlightenment, often in tandem with other supplementary rituals, such as repentance, worship, and prayer. The codicological and paratextual features of the manuscripts further suggest the collective use and compilation of lecture scripts among medieval preachers. Popular preaching in medieval China served multiple functions, from education and entertainment to salvation. This dissertation enhances our understanding of how sutra lectures shaped and mirrored the dynamic interplay between doctrine and practice, written texts and oral performance, and the interactions between monastic and lay practitioners. By exploring these fluid dimensions, the study provides new perspectives on the relationship between orality and manuscript cultures, the performative nature of texts, and the lived experience of preachers and audiences. Moreover, it expands our understanding of scriptural traditions in medieval China, particularly the canon formation and adaptation in real-world settings.

In the opening decades of the 19th century, the philosopher and theologian F.D.E. Schleiermacher stood at the head of an ultimately unsuccessful reform movement that sought to effect political transformation in Prussian society by focusing on the unification and democratization of the church. This dissertation supplements existing historical and biographical accounts of Schleiermacher’s role in the Prussian Reform Movement by situating central concepts in his political philosophy alongside the arguments of some of his near contemporaries, especially Kant and Fichte. Schleiermacher’s advocacy for a Presbyterian form of church government reflects a commitment to the ongoing relevance of post-Reformation ecclesiology for modern politics and undergirds his non-liberal account of the separation of church and state. His insistence on the positive and communal grounding of individual rights leads him to criticize liberal rights-discourse for inadequately appreciating the unique individuality of individuals and to develop a unique non-statist account of collective property sensitive to new political-economic arguments about the significance of the division of labor. When situated against the backdrop of post-Revolutionary democratic thought, Schleiermacher’s continued commitment to a hereditary monarchy can be recognized as the product of a creative revisionist account of republican liberty grounded in a non-constitutionalist interpretation of the significance of the separation of powers for representative democracy that privileges the right of petition over the right to elect the chief executive. The centrality of the concept of the nation in Schleiermacher’s account of state-formation is situated within a non-conventional account of race as a social-construction that allows for the relativization of the current bounds of nationhood. The way in which categories of identity and political economy intersect in Schleiermacher’s vision of state-formation also allows him to envisage a creative way of overcoming inequality in modern states that he posits as necessarily “aristocratic” and transitional in character. In a context where the basic structures of liberal democracy are under increased pressure, Schleiermacher’s political theological vision undermines fundamental assumptions about the concept of sovereignty in the modern state and provides a glimpse into the unrealized possibility of a non-liberal democratic future.

This dissertation examines a network of authors, ministers, and professors in the 1970s and 1980s who, as veterans of institutions self-identified as evangelical, worked to persuade Christians in the United States that gay and lesbian Christians should be affirmed as equal members of their churches. Leaders in this network made characteristically evangelical appeals to “the Gospel,” the Bible, sexual ethics, gender norms, racial logics, and more. Prominent evangelical gay activists during this period included Troy Perry, founder of the largely LGBTQ Metropolitan Community Churches; Ralph Blair, founder of Evangelicals Concerned, a religious organization engaged in gay advocacy; and Letha Dawson Scanzoni and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, leaders of the evangelical feminist movement and co-authors of the book Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? Another Christian View (1978). Though small in numbers, this network had an outsized impact. In the late 1970s, some journalists and scholars of religion wondered how “the so-called ‘gay evangelicals’” might shape the future of evangelicalism. Meanwhile, powerful antigay evangelicals labored to deny and distort the substantial resemblances they shared with this network. In time, their denials and distortions not only buried the history of evangelical gay activism but rendered the term itself illegible. This dissertation both recovers that history and analyzes the historical construction of that illegibility. Making interventions in scholarship on religion, sexuality, and politics in the twentieth-century United States, Born Again Queer demonstrates, against both scholarly and popular accounts, that evangelical discourse on homosexuality in this period was contested, variable, and vulnerable.

Given and Not Made: Thinking Jewish with Hannah Arendt takes its departure from one of the most enduring episodes in twentieth century Jewish intellectual history: the exchange of letters between Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem in the wake of the former’s publication of Eichmann and Jerusalem. In the exchange, Arendt parries the accusation of Jewish disloyalty by describing her Jewishness as something “given and not made.” This dissertation explores the significance of givenness in Arendt’s thought from its emergence in her dissertation on Augustine through her Jewish political theory in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Hannah Arendt has loomed large in several disciplines and even in popular culture, but she has remained largely at the margins of Jewish thought. Given and Not Made repositions Arendt from being read as a writer of mere Jewish extraction and experience to one who thinks Jewish. For givenness to serve as a basis for modern Jewish thought raises a basic question: where and how is being Jewish experienced as given? Answering this question requires thinking through some of the most rudimentary elements of modern Jewish experience: family ties, the waning significance of Jewish tradition, and antisemitism. An engagement with Arendt’s politics is thus reserved for the final part of the dissertation, only after parts one and two on “the pre-political” and “history.” Given and Not Made is a work of constructive modern Jewish thought. Reflecting the biographical dependency of givenness as a concept, the constructive work is sometimes done at the level of intellectual and even personal biography. As an exercise in thinking Jewish, it draws together the spheres of life and work.

It can be quite striking, on reflection, to consider the fact that nearly the first entire year of our lives are spent inside another human being. None of us is created ex nihilo: we are all forged within the crucible of another. It would behoove theorists and ethicists to concentrate on this undertheorized phase in human life. “Matrices: Pregnancy, piety, and the social constitution of human agency” thus foregrounds pregnancy and early motherhood to enrich our understanding of human responsibility and social obligation. Pregnancy, I argue, reveals the social constitution of persons and yet it also puts their discreteness into sharp relief.Pregnancy can be deeply theoretically generative. On the one hand, pregnancy is unique, as only a subset of humans can experience and perform it; on the other hand, it is also universal, insofar as every single human is a product of a pregnancy. Moreover, even as pregnancy unites persons—childbearers, coparents, relatives, healthcare workers—it also powerfully demonstrates the fundamental separateness of persons. After all, no one else can endure morning sickness, insomnia, or labor on the pregnant person’s behalf. At the same time, it also complicates that separateness, given that, in pregnancy, the boundaries of the childbearer and her child’s respective personhoods are difficult to draw. The dissertation identifies five lessons pregnancy teaches. First, it highlights the ways human social cooperation extends over time and necessitates human expectations. Second, it shows how humans are both interdependent and discrete, and that these characteristics are not merely to be counterbalanced but may be mutually reinforcing. Third, the dissertation focuses on the dissimilar sexed embodiment of human beings and what that means for the realization of gender justice. Fourth, it underscores the role communities play in childrearing and the ways socialization can be an important contributor to autonomy competency. Fifth, and finally, the dissertation concentrates on what we owe to our proximate and ultimate sources of being—often theorized as the virtue of piety. It examines past thinkers’ views of piety and presents a view which includes critical piety, which criticizes those sources that form us in condemnable ways.

This dissertation explores how Anglo-Protestant authority was crystalized through the publishing process in colonial and early British-America. It engages with book history, media studies, literary studies, religious studies, and American religious history to illustrate how contingency, as a framework, could reveal how Protestant power operated where and when itmay have been deemed weak or absent. In five chapters, I examine both constraints on religious printing beyond censorship and opportunities to reach audiences through manuscript publication. The stories of eighteenth-century manuscripts and their authors who aspired to publish demonstrates the limits of the public sphere framework to describe print as media for dialogue. It was too embedded in Anglo-Protestant logics that imagined Anglo-Protestant readership for published translations, discouraged non-English religious publications through mechanical limits on the printing press, and sustained the mediatory capacity of ministers to speak to and on behalf of a religious public. Far from being an accessible platform, print publishing preserved the Anglo-Protestantism character of public religion at a period when ministers’ political influence waned and print was the ascendant medium for public discourse. Given print’s constraints, writers continued to rely on manuscripts to reach a broader audience. Manuscript circulation and scribal publication were not only comparable alternatives to the highly curated publishing process, but survived as a practice into eighteenth-century because of how well it facilitated conversation among communities that publishers never served. Whatever exceptional texts or literary firsts occurred in print paled in comparison to the religious pluralism that thrived through manuscripts. More importantly, this dissertation encourages more dynamic readings of manuscript and print mediums to better understand the complex worlds that they not only generated, but also were made and unmade to inhabit.

This dissertation is an exploration of the phenomenon of humor as a tool of religious world-building among American evangelicals in the twenty-first century. As a group defined as much by their independence from strict denominational hierarchies as any other features, American evangelicals nevertheless maintain a strong group identity and commitment to certain boundaries of acceptable behavior and beliefs. I argue that humor—especially humor deployed through media—is essential to this work of boundary maintenance and identity formation among contemporary evangelicals. The dissertation contains five case studies showcasing evangelicals’ use of humor in media ranging from online satirical news to web comics to fish out of water comedy films. In each case study, I demonstrate how humor—as a rhetorical device that highlights the incongruity between humans’ sense of the world as it is and the world as it “should” be—reaffirms boundaries around gender roles, sexual taboos, and race relations. By activating oppositional emotional resonances that reinforce evangelicals’ moral, intellectual, and social separation from nonbelievers on the basis of their beliefs about gender, race, and sexuality, among other theological touchstones, humorous evangelical media constructs a self-policing humor community that wields immense social power. Engaging with humor studies, media studies, and religious studies, this dissertation offers humor as a salient site of analysis for religious groups. It contributes to studies of how American evangelicals use media to forge religious values, identities, and—importantly—consensus among its diffuse community of believers. Finally, it provides the field of humor studies with a new set of case studies on a religious community that uses humor to a variety of social, emotional, and ideological ends. To ensure that adherents buy in to the party line regarding political beliefs, gender roles and sexual practices, and general worldview, American evangelical institutions must offer a product worth consuming. Through the cultivation of a variety of overlapping humor communities that provide consumers with ideological reassurance and emotional validation, the case studies in this dissertation provide just such a product.

This dissertation traces the history of the transmission, reception, and study of the Mishnah, the central text of the Rabbinic corpus, from its inception in third-century Galilee until the publication of Maimonides’ commentary to the Mishnah in 12th c. Egypt. The first chapter looks at the evidence for the Mishnah’s creation and initial dissemination in Roman Palestine, arguing that there is sufficient evidence to conclude that the Jewish Patriarchate was responsible for the creation and early dissemination of the Mishnah and of several related texts. The second chapter continues by analyzing evidence for Mishnah study in third- and fourth-century Palestine, and the third chapter discusses the reception of the Mishnah in late ancient Babylonia; both chapters deal with the “Scholastic Scripturalization” of the Mishnah by late ancient rabbis. The fourth chapter addresses the evidence for the study and perception of the Mishnah in Byzantine and Early Islamic Palestine, showing that in response to the rise of Christianity, the Mishnah achieved a place of increased importance for Jewish identity—a non-scholastic aspect of the Mishnah’s “Scripturalization.” Relying heavily on manuscript evidence, Chapter Five addresses Mishnah study in medieval Islamicate lands, and Chapter Six does the same for Christian Europe, focusing on Southern Italy. In both chapters, special attention is given to the continued intermedial nature of Mishnah study. The seventh chapter turns to the place of the Mishnah in various rites of theJewish prayerbook. In the final chapter, I analyze attitudes towards the Mishnah and its creation in the works of Medieval Jewish writers, looking at how these authors used the history of the Mishnah to articulate rabbinic identity. The conclusion of the dissertation frames several directions for further study and outlines a program for the “Critical Philology” of the classical rabbinic corpus. By centering on the dissemination of the Mishnah across the Near East and Europe in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, this dissertation demonstrates that avenues of textual production and transmission can shed light on the very spread of rabbinic knowledge and on the ways in which rabbinic Judaism itself became the hegemonic form of Judaism.

The dissertation discusses how Buddhist talismans were made, used, and understood in medieval China from the fifth through the tenth centuries. The study is based on a wide range of medieval sources, including transmitted canonical scriptures, apocryphal texts (yiwei jing 疑偽經), catalogues, hagiographies, standard histories, anecdotes, and unearthed ritual manuals from Dunhuang. The dissertation proposes that the current category of talismans in medieval China should be expanded. Instead of considering those labelled fu 符 as the only samples of talisman, the study provides a much broader conceptual framework that includes all consecrated man-made objects that release their efficacy through their contact with the human body. The new framework enables us to see the multivalent positions towards talismanic practices in medieval Buddhist communities. It also allows the dissertation to explore the commonalities in the making process between different religious traditions in medieval China. The research analyzes the major paradigms of utilizing talismans. It argues that the different patterns of logic behind these paradigms contribute to the construction of efficacy in talismans. This study also questions the bias that believes talismanic benefits are limited to the this-worldly realm. It shows that talismans were also tools concerning soteriological goals. Meanwhile, medieval people, no matter religious masters or lay practitioners, did not berate the mundane and materialistic benefits bestowed by talismans. Finally, the study reveals that talismanic practices were closely related to other ritual techniques and belonged to a larger ritual milieu. These techniques often inspired each other and were used together to address the difficulties and anxieties facing medieval minds. In sum, the dissertation proves that Buddhism, as an imported religion, both significantly benefited from and contributed to the talismanic tradition in medieval China.

This dissertation examines the history of Catholic decline and change in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia from the 1970s through the first decade of the twenty-first century. It proposes religious decline as an analytical lens for interrogating not only quantifiable markers of religious change—the number of attendees at Mass, clergy or vowed religious, or sacraments—but also the types of diocesan policies and community responses that Catholics have developed in response to these markers. Employing archival, ethnographic, and digital humanities methods, this study argues that Catholics have actively participated in shaping the institutional presence of the Church in the metropolitan area, with profound implications for the racial and spatial composition of the region’s Catholicism. It presents this argument in two parts: first, by examining the history of the Archdiocese’s practice of closing parishes as a policy of decline starting in the 1970s; and secondly, through an analysis of the practical, narrative, and affective strategies that Catholics have developed in local sites—what this project terms repertoires of decline—to respond to decline and contest archdiocesan authority in the 2010s. This study demonstrates that demographic changes do not tell the whole story of the institutional history and lived experience of Catholic decline. In Philadelphia, although the decreasing numbers of white, European-descent Catholics play a role in shaping the twenty-first century Church, the racialization of religious decline as Black and urban has deep roots. This dissertation thus calls for scholars of Catholic studies, as well as American religious studies more broadly, to consider decline not as a linear process of secularization. Rather, it proposes decline as a lens for examining institutional systems of support and divestment, as well as practices and narratives that create meaningful interpretations of religious change, challenge, and sustainability.

Late Antique scholars have become increasingly interested in questions of regionality, time and landscape, as well as the intersection between oral and visual media. A fruitful angle from which to examine these topics proves to be the cult of saints in northern Italy in the late fourth century, due to the conception of saint as exemplar and to its manifestation in physical and discursive spaces. My dissertation compares three figures who provide different viewpoints on these issues, namely: Zeno of Verona, Ambrose of Milan, and the poet Prudentius. It examines lesser-known evidence, such as Prudentius’ Tituli Historiarum, and provides the first English translations of four sermons of Zeno as well as Ambrose’s Disticha. We begin with Zeno, whose tenure coincides with the earliest sermons in Latin, as well as the earliest martyr veneration and church-building in Verona. His Tractatus illuminate a tightrope upon which this bishop balanced pious intervention against the stubborn autonomy of his congregants. Ambrose, meanwhile, enjoyed far greater resources than his Veronese predecessor, and compares contemporary substitutes to historical exemplars whom he integrated into nascent ecclesiastical institutions. In Prudentius we see the rise of the elite Christian poet, whose concerns differed from episcopal programs of authoritative expansion. He periodizes history through the lens of triumph and decline, explaining contemporary practice through exemplars. In these figures, we see a generational and professional divide in their use of space and history as ideological canvases upon which to layer ideals of Christian ethics.