“Earn the Grace of Prophecy”: Early Christian Prophecy as Practice

This dissertation explores discussions of prophecy in early Christianity focusing on Origen of Alexandria's works. It argues that Origen engages the contested terms of prophetic activity to persuade his audience(s) toward the cultivation of a particular moral self.

The dissertation situates early Christian discourse on prophecy within a larger philosophical conversation in the Greco-Roman world from the first to fourth centuries CE, in which cultivating a properly religious self involves discipline or askēsis. Some early Christian debates about prophecy are predicated on the idea that certain practices are necessary to be considered worthy of the indwelling of the divine/the Holy Spirit. Using Pierre Hadot's insights, the dissertation contends that discourses on prophecy in early Christianity call for training in a particular way of living, and thus could be influential to early Christians regardless of whether they would ever attain the status of prophet or not.

By encouraging his Christian readers to participate in reading and studying the Scripture as a way to purify their souls, Origen argues that everyone needs to cultivate himself or herself to be worthy to receive spiritual gifts such as prophecy. In his Commentary on Romans, Origen turns Paul's exhortation to “strive for spiritual gifts, and especially that you may prophesy” (1 Cor 14:1) into a more general call to cultivate virtue through scriptural study. In Contra Celsum and the Homilies on Numbers, Origen invites the readers to participate in disciplined training so that they may become worthy instruments of the divine, just as the prophets are. The dissertation also compares Origen's arguments with those of the Shepherd of Hermas and Iamblichus's De Mysteriis, demonstrating that the ancient discussions of prophecy deploy similar strategies to persuade the audiences to participate in particular disciplined training, even if they have different ideas about what the best form of prophecy may be.

Adviser: Laura S. Nasrallah

Language and Religion in Modern India: The Vernacular Literature of Hindi Christians

A persistent interest in a particular type of Christian witness is found in a substantial amount of Hindi-language Protestant (hereafter, “Hindi Christian”) literature in modern India. Across a range of texts like Hindi translations of the Bible, theo-ethical works, hymns, biblical commentaries, and poems, this literature calls attention to a form of Christian witness or discipleship that is both credible and recognizable and is public.

This witness aims to be credibly Christian: as I will show, Hindi Christian texts have regularly rejected a Hindu concept like avătār in favor of a neologism like dehădhāran to communicate a Christian notion of incarnation in a predominantly Hindu context. Yet, the variety of polytradition (or, shared) words found in Hindi Christian texts suggests a comfort with loose religious boundaries. The witness aims also to be recognizably Christian. For instance, Hindi Christian texts on theology and ethics persistently reflect on a virtuous Christian life with a view toward perceptions in multifaith contexts. Perceptions of Christians matter to the authors of these texts. The attention to Christian witness in such literature, then, is to a very public form of witness. A reading of the works of three prominent Hindi Christian scholars—Benjamin Khan, Din Dayal, and Richard Howell—will show how a focus on the pluralistic context of Hindi Christian witness has shaped influential texts on ethics, theology, and evangelism in Hindi.

This dissertation is a first attempt in the academy of religion to study Hindi Christian texts in modern India. As a result, it seeks to achieve two goals: provide an introduction to Hindi Christian literature, and understand a prominent theme found in such literature. It is by no means an exhaustive study of Hindi Christian literature. Rather, it maps a literary landscape and subjects a key trope therein to further examination. Protestant Christian literature in India has generally portrayed the purpose of Christian discipleship in two ways: by describing it as a response to salvific grace and by denying it is works righteousness. Hindi Christian texts shed light on another rationale: to present a credible and recognizable witness in a multifaith public context.

Adviser: Francis X. Clooney, S.J.

Torah from Zion: Gentile Conversion and Law Observance in the Septuagint of Isaiah

The book of Isaiah envisions a future where foreigners will one day receive torah and worship Yahweh, but neither the text nor its later interpretation is univocal in its understanding of the relationship between foreigners and Israel's law. For example, does Isaiah imply that righteous Gentiles will observe all Mosaic law (e.g., purity laws, circumcision), or will they worship God as Gentiles, honoring the law but not observing commands meant for Israelites?

This dissertation examines the concepts of conversion and Gentile law observance in Isaiah and outlines the history of their interpretation, particularly in the Septuagint of Isaiah (LXX-Isaiah). Numerous semantic and cultural shifts took place around “law” and “conversion” from the eighth to second centuries BCE, and oracles that would have originally been interpreted as speaking of instruction and reverence for Yahweh came to be understood as speaking of Mosaic law and the conversion of foreigners to Judaism. This trend comes to fullest expression in LXX-Isaiah, where we see significant changes meant to emphasize such a later understanding. This happens in isolated instances, such as LXX-Isa 14:1–2, 24:16, 26:9, 41:1, 45:16, and 54:15, but the author of LXX-Isaiah also reworks entire sections to focus on law and conversion, such as LXX-Isa 8. Small changes can likewise be seen throughout the so-called “Servant Songs” in LXX-Isaiah, where the Servant's role as a “covenant of people” and “light of nations” (Isa 42:6) is reinterpreted to refer to Gentile observance of the law. The changes evident in LXX-Isaiah illuminate a strand of early Jewish thinking on conversion and law observance, and they help us understand the background of the debate surrounding these issues in nascent Judaism and Christianity.

Advisers: Andrew Teeter and Richard Saley

Gospel of the “Orient”: Koreans, Race and the Transpacific Rise of American Evangelicalism in the Cold War Era, 1950–1980

This dissertation is a history of the transpacific rise of American evangelicalism in the Cold War era (1950–1980). The Korean War (1950–1953), the first “hot” war of the Cold War, brought together a new generation of American fundamentalists and South Korean Protestants who forged transpacific networks that helped to reinvent a parochial American fundamentalism into mainstream American evangelicalism. These networks led to the birth of World Vision (1950), the internationalization of Campus Crusade for Christ (1958), and the largest Billy Graham Evangelical Association crusade (1973). While South Korean Protestants were incorporated into these evangelical “parachurches” through Cold War Orientalist logic, South Koreans also used parachurches to reimagine their place in the world order as they aspired to become the next leaders of Christian empire. Such South Korean Protestant ambitions suggested a critique of U.S. Cold War expansionism in Asia, yet led to the rise of a conservative Korean Protestant right that transnationally reinforced the Christian right in America. Not unlike its eighteenth-century transatlantic roots, evangelicalism remade itself in the twentieth-century by crossing borders. This study employs English and Korean sources from archives in the U.S. and South Korea, and oral histories conducted in both countries. In narrating history from both sides of the Pacific, this dissertation recasts a tradition primarily understood in Atlantic and national terms, and reimagines American religious history in global context.

Adviser: David N. Hempton

Karma and Punishment: Prison Chaplaincy in Japan from the Meiji Period to the Present

This dissertation analyzes prison chaplaincy (kyōkai) in Japan from the Meiji period (1868–1912) to the present day focusing on the chaplaincy activities of Shin Buddhist sects, Christian churches, Shintō shrines, and new religions like Tenrikyō. The sources for this study are drawn from archival research, interviews with chaplains, and site visits to prisons and religious institutions. I argue that the Japanese model of prison chaplaincy is rooted in the Pure Land Buddhist concept of doctrinal remonstration. I trace the history of Japanese prison chaplaincy by examining the development of chaplaincy discourse and the politics surrounding it. I found the discourse of chaplaincy to be a form of theodicy that derives an existential meaning from the crime and rehabilitation process. The chief limitation of this discourse is that its interpretation of crime focuses solely on the private troubles of individuals without considering criminal conduct as a reflection of broader public issues. An analysis of the politics surrounding the prison chaplaincy shows that the development of chaplaincy reflects the changing place of religion in Japanese society. Religion has been conceived as both a private affair and a public benefit that the state has a vested interest in promoting. The chaplaincy reflects both of these qualities in that chaplains are specialists in matters of the heart whose work is thought to contribute to the peace. I found that the practices of individual chaplains exceed the limitations of their discourse as they attempt to help their charges as best they can, often going beyond the requirements of their official responsibilities.

Adviser: Helen Hardacre

Trading Futures: Future-Talk, Finance, and Christian Eschatology

Standard textbooks describe finance as the field of economics that concerns itself with the future. This dissertation suggests instead that financial discourse conjures a particular mode of future-talk, one that renders the future as somehow predictable, manageable, and profitable. This mode of imagination informs broader social, political, and theological discourses and, in fact, constitutes a dominant mode of future-talk. Thus, this dissertation proposes a counter-discourse about the future by revisiting the work of two liberation theologians, Franz Hinkelammert and Rubem Alves. For each of these theologians, when the future is imagined from the margins of society, it functions as a counter-cultural and subversive mode of imagination.

“Trading Futures” unfolds in the form of a chiasm. Chapters one and five provide the theological edges of the argument, chapters two and four offer a critical account of capitalist economic discourse, and chapter three pivots my argument in order to shed new light on the ensuing chapters. In chapter one, I show how Hinkelammert's theological work was built around the perception that capitalism produces and benefits from a particular mode of imagining the future. Chapter two investigates the ties between the Enlightenment theory of progress and Adam Smith's political economy to propose that capitalism is constructed around a certain mode of future-talk. I then provide a reading of Karl Marx's Capital in chapter three to argue that time is materially constituted by forces of production; in dialogue with literary critic Gayatri C. Spivak, I indicate that Marx's labor theory of value provides a critical lens through which to view contemporary financial discourse. Chapter four then resumes my engagement with economics to account for the “financialization” of capitalism and its peculiar mode of future-talk; I then tease out some of the detrimental social consequences of financialized capitalism. Finally, I accompany Alves's theological work to claim that liberation theology appropriates the Christian eschatological imagination as a counter-narrative to dominant modes of future-talk. Liberationists suggest that the “sigh of the oppressed creature” (Marx) is a sign that points to different futures.

Adviser: Mayra Rivera

The Mimetic Life: Imitation and Infinity in Gregory of Nyssa

“Christianity is mimesis of the divine nature,” writes Gregory of Nyssa, the fourth-century CE author who also first makes the infinitude of God central to his theological project. How does one imitate the infinite? Or, perhaps more importantly, why frame the Christian life as an imitation of something infinite? This question becomes more urgent when it is set in the classical Greek and Roman worlds, which were organized largely through mimetic relationships. How a teacher molds a student, how art shapes a soul, and how the Creator creates creation—questions most intimate or most cosmic, questions of identity, cultivation of the self, formation of desire, power and persuasion, and more—are framed in terms of archetype and imitation. The ubiquity of this discourse in the classical world and in the early Church, however, can blind readers to the multiple ways mimesis is conceptualized to form desiring selves and communities. In late antiquity, discourses of mimesis that were previously held apart—aesthetic representation and ontological participation—combine and require new ways to theorize and form subjects.

Gregory's most famous contribution to Christian thought—divine infinitude and the human imitating of that infinitude in our endlessly expanding desire for God—is best understood, I argue, as a working out of these combined discourses of mimetic relationships. This transformation of mimesis requires and inspires, for Gregory, a new set of names, spaces, and characters to imitate, and also subtly transforms the function of mimesis. Mimesis becomes no longer a stepping stone or penultimate good, but the very end of the Christian life. It organizes a set of practices, a way of life, aimed at Christian perfection.

Advisers: Charles M. Stang and Amy Hollywood

The Poetic Path to Awakening: Reading the Buddhist Literary Text as a Form of Practice in Aśvaghoṣa's mahākāvya

This thesis proposes a new approach to reading and understanding a Buddhist literary work as a form of practice relying on aesthetic pleasure to engage readers on a textual path that gradually awakens understanding. Its starting point is the claim of Aśvaghoṣa, the first known author of the genre of classical Sanskrit literature known as mahākāvya, that he has told truth in literary form in order to reach an audience interested only in pleasure and not liberation. My investigation of his second-century CE works, Buddhacarita and Saundarananda, through the lens of this statement, together with traditional Indic commentaries on dramatic and poetic literature and contemporary theories of pleasure and textuality, suggests that the literary features of such works perform important functions in introducing Buddhist insights to their readers by focusing their attention in reading practices that may resemble and introduce more traditional forms of Buddhist training.

Through my exploration of the formal strategies Aśvaghoṣa's works rely on to engage readers on a literary path to truth, this thesis seeks to contribute to the development of new methodologies for reading Buddhist literary works. While scholars have increasingly recognized the need to address the prominence of literary features in Buddhist textual traditions, many in Buddhist Studies continue to view the formal features of a text as distinct from what is presumed to be its content and the repository of the meaning their interpretations seek. The literary methods I propose for reading Buddhacarita and Saundarananda challenge this assumption that the truth or meaning of a work can be extracted from its form as a whole and highlight the signifying powers of the poetic, dramatic and narrative features of these works, which actively engage readers in the production of meaning. Adopting methods that enable us to better read Buddhist literary texts in this way thus not only improves our analysis of how such signifying features operate to provoke insight, but also promises to refine our scholarly understanding of what both emerging and classic works in the field have to say to us today.

Adviser: Janet Gyatso

Big Religion: The Cultural Origins of the American Megachurch

“Big Religion: The Cultural Origins of the American Megachurch” narrates the complex historical genealogy of the “megachurch,” the ubiquitous congregational model that now dominates the practice of contemporary evangelical Protestantism. I interpret these congregations as the culminating expression of a longstanding set of debates within American Protestantism over the theological significance of size, scale, growth, material expansion, and numerical quantification. Tacking between the particularity of churchly context and the formation of wider patterns, this project charts the intellectual, social, and material channels through which congregational “bigness” was transformed from a spiritual danger into a theological mandate. Each chapter explores one of the many instantiations of this growth imperative within the American evangelical tradition: the “popular” preaching churches of the Gilded Age; the “institutional” architectures of the social gospel evangelicals; the revivalist tabernacle worship of the fundamentalists and Southern Baptists; and the novel creedal trajectories represented by wonderworking Pentecostals, undenominational Baptists, and positive-thinking Protestants. Throughout, I provide a culturally contextualized reading of these evangelical ecclesiologies, seeking to show their developmental ties to the American culture of celebrity and mediation, its capitalist imaginaries, its racial and gendered formations, and its politics of secularism.

Adviser: David N. Hempton

Genealogies of Survival: Christianity, Judaism, Sovereignty

This dissertation attends to survival as a notion of critical historical urgency. It begins with the observation that survival is a foundational but largely unexamined theme within the field of Jewish Studies, arguing that the absence of sustained reflection on this question confirms the politics of a scholarly tradition that has frequently made “Jewish survival” its defining project. Over the course of five chapters, it explores this problem by turning to canonical figures in modern Jewish thought: Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, and Sigmund Freud. In each case, its goal is to demonstrate that these writers—so often taken to be exemplary Jewish voices of the discourse on Jewish survival—actually inscribe the notion of survival within the theological-political and biopolitical history of Latin Christianity. Specifically, this study claims that modern, secular representations of survival perpetuate and expand upon older discussions concerning Christ's mystical body, his crucifixion and resurrection, as well as his subjectivity and sovereignty. At the same time, it continually returns to the issue of Jewish survival in order to show how it translates a parallel legacy of Christian interest in the body of Israel.

By making survival a matter of Jewish-Christian difference (or the Judeo-Christian), this dissertation also intervenes directly in contemporary debates about secularism, secularization, and the history of the comparative term “religion.” Following a scholarly tradition that has emerged from Jacques Derrida's work on globalatinization, it pays particular attention to the role of Latin Christianity in the globalization of these terms and divisions. Survival, this dissertation suggests, can act as a cipher for a set of transformations that do not offer an exit from Christianity so much as they extend and occlude its continuing dominance. In addition, the linguistic emphasis of the phrase globalatinization announces the final element of this inquiry into survival, which looks to the contingencies of translation as a way of particularizing a concept often taken to be a universal. This means that the genealogy of survival can only proceed as an investigation into the differences produced and disseminated through a history of translation, as it has made its way from Rome (Latin) to Europe (English, French, German) and to the United States (English). Against this background, this study narrates a broader story about how the language of survival, the figure of the survivor, and the image of Jewish survival have come to dominate the post-war period in Europe, America, and beyond.

Advisers: Amy Hollywood and Peter Gordon

Violent Lovesickness: Richard of St. Victor, Beatrice of Nazareth, Hadewijch, and Angela of Foligno

This dissertation examines four medieval Christian texts that describe the love between the soul and Christ in violent terms and demonstrates how images of violence, such as wounding, striking, and beating, illustrate the reciprocal suffering of the Christian who is lovesick for Christ and of Christ, lovesick for the soul. These texts challenge the normative account of suffering in Christian theology as always rooted in sin and uncover an underappreciated historical moment when Christian thinkers conceptualize suffering as intrinsic to loving God. Through my readings of Richard of St. Victor (d. 1173), Beatrice of Nazareth (d. 1268), Hadewijch (d. thirteenth century), and Angela of Foligno (d. 1310), I trace the emergence of this alternative vision of suffering as well as its waning and merging into more normative theologies of sin. In calling attention to this little-known strand of theology, I draw on the history of medicine to analyze how “violent love,” as Richard of St. Victor calls it, harnesses the concept of lovesickness, in order to show how specific, historical constructions of the body inform and produce an incarnational theology that defines the relation of humanity to an embodied Christ. Such a Christian notion of desire that is embodied in both the Christian and in Christ, lovesick for one another, offers an alternate history of Christianity's fraught relations to bodies, gender, and desire.

Adviser: Amy Hollywood

Pedagogies of Transformation: Teaching and Learning Muslim Ethics in Greater Paris

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of moral education and social activism among religiously-engaged Muslims in the Paris metropolitan area. It investigates how French Muslims are working to ethically transform their faith communities, their selves, and their society at large. Over the course of this investigation, I trace the way in which some French Muslims pose, debate, and respond to existential questions about the values, goals, and future of their religious community. I explore the ethical and political stakes of these debates for the French Muslims who are preoccupied with them, and situate them in the physical and discursive landscape of post-colonial metropolitan Paris. At its core, this dissertation is about how Muslims teach, learn, and argue about ethics, and strive to live ethically across an interconnected archipelago of settings of religious engagement.

Grounded in 20 months of in-depth ethnographic research, this dissertation makes four key findings, and from these findings draws out two key arguments. Findings: 1) Sites of Muslim education in greater Paris, while numerous and ever-multiplying, are relatively unstable—students and teachers flow in and out of them with regularity, and broad mobility around the metropolitan area is the norm for those who seek religious education, 2) sites of instruction in Islamic ethics are situated in a network of other types of Islamic organizations that function equally as sites of moral pedagogy, 3) class, and in particular class mobility, was a concern of a significant segment of my interlocutors, and a decisive feature of their ethical discourses, and 4) the Republican educational system was seen by many of my interlocutors as a primary arena for Muslim moral development and for the elevation of the Muslim community. This was true despite the significant obstacles that the educational system poses to various forms of Muslim piety. While public schools and universities were sometimes seen as a “battleground” in the fight against Islamophobia, they were also prized by many as the source of valuable moral resources and as a central terrain in which to live out Muslim values and participate in the formation of the ideal Muslim community.

Based on these findings, this dissertation makes two overarching arguments. First, for many of my interlocutors, “the community” is the primary target of moral formation, rather than the individual self. Current public discourse in France, among Muslims and non-Muslims alike, makes systematic reference to France's “Muslim community.” The Muslim community in France is an endlessly contested imagined community with deliberately blurry boundaries. Its moral and intellectual state, its future, its salvation, and, indeed, its very existence preoccupied many members of the broad network of activists, students, teachers, and religious professionals with whom I spoke. Secondly, this network of Muslim students, teachers, activists, and other actors has developed an “ethics of critique” that draws on the Islamic sciences as well as techniques and traditions of grassroots social activism to respond to the socio-economic, cultural, and political challenges faced by the Muslim community in France. This ethics of critique is focused on social change, and takes class, materiality, and space to be key concerns of Islamic ethics.

Adviser: Malika Zeghal

Unholy Ghosts in the Age of Spirit: Identity, Intersectionality, and the Theological Horizons of Black Progress

The dissertation offers, at the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and class, a constructive theological account of spirit in black Christianity. Although spirit is a pervasive trope in African-American religion, pneumatology is missing as theological method in black religious discourse in this “Age of Spirit.” In fact, spirit-talk has been used to pathologize some for the advancement of others, especially in the respectability politics of black racial uplift and the cis-heteronormativity of black charismatic Christianity. I am interested, therefore, in the discursive production of deviancy and the “demonic,” which is antithetical to spirit-talk.

Through consideration of the “rational spirit” of W.E.B. Du Bois, the “sanctified spirit” of Zora Neale Hurston, and the “mystical spirit” of Howard Thurman, I develop a pneumatology that establishes the empowerment of the marginalized as the sine qua non, the essential condition and consequence, of spirit-talk. In the dissertation, I trace the legacies of these public intellectuals on African-American Christianity, particularly on black and womanist theologies: the thesis rethinks the concepts of hope, courage, and vitality, using Du Bois, Hurston, and Thurman, respectively, as interlocutors.

In the end, I construct a theology of Spirit in black radical religion that resists, disturbs, and disrupts dispositifs of deviancy. By interpreting Jesus, the Spirit of God, as chief deviant and liberating power, I demonstrate that a progressive, queer pneumatology is possible.

Adviser: David C. Lamberth