Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item Sunday Morning Matters: The Production of Gendered Subjects in White Evangelical Life(2021) Michael, Kelsey Sherrod; Wong, Janelle; Padios, Jan; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As evangelical Christian demographics in the United States have increasingly diversified, pundits and scholars have sought to understand the persistent political power of white American evangelicals. This interdisciplinary dissertation argues that a key mechanism of the political formation of white evangelical Christians has been hiding in plain sight: The weekly church worship service in predominantly white congregations has provided remarkable continuity as a means of political formation for churchgoers, particularly through worship rituals indebted to ideologies of gender and race. Drawing on Black feminist thought, phenomenology, and the anthropology of religion, I describe the white evangelical church worship service as an axis of “haunting” across time and space, where patriarchal relations of power built on racialized discourses of manhood and womanhood continue to shape the everyday lives of churchgoing women. I rely on textual analysis of evangelical digital culture and original ethnographic fieldwork, including interviews, with churchgoing women in the southern U.S. to uncover how women’s experiences in church structure their consciousness in dimensions of their lives not often considered inherently “religious”—work and labor, sex and marriage, performance and material culture, and the knowledge and discipline of the self. In clarifying this phenomenological process by which churchgoing women become gendered and therefore political subjects, the project identifies the significance of the white evangelical church worship service to white evangelical subject formation and the implication of white supremacy in this process. More broadly, the dissertation calls for a reappraisal of the importance of religious ritual to the construction of identity and difference in and through white American Christianity.Item The Experiences of Religious/Spiritual Jewish Therapists Working with Religious/Spiritual Jewish Clients(2020) Gerstenblith, Judith Ann; Hill, Clara E; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)We used Consensual Qualitative Research (CQR; Hill, 2012) to investigate the experiences of eleven religious/spiritual (R/S) Jewish therapists working with R/S Jewish clients in psychotherapy. R/S concerns involved struggles with Jewish identity, relationships, and the Jewish community. Therapists used R/S and non-R/S interventions to help with R/S concerns, although therapists explicitly discussed Jewish laws, beliefs, and practices more in successful than in unsuccessful cases. Therapists in both cases experienced R/S countertransference, but therapists in unsuccessful cases more often expressed uncertainty and regret regarding their clinical decisions. Therapists perceived that effective therapeutic interventions led to client improvement. Factors associated with success included therapists’ effective use of a shared R/S identity, ability to overcome tensions raised by R/S differences, and countertransference management; and clients’ openness, stability, and motivation. Implications include therapists developing an approach that is sensitive to R/S identity and researchers investigating therapeutic dyads with cultural and value-based similarities and differences.Item Sacred Spaces, Secular Fictions: Nineteenth-Century American Domestic Literature(2018) Underland, Susanna Compton; Levine, Robert S; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Sacred Spaces, Secular Fictions puts the feminist study of domestic literature in conversation with the study of religion and literature in order to better understand the place of secularity in nineteenth-century American domestic literature. Authors such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Herman Melville, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper represented the space of the home, among other sacred spaces, as a place to navigate a dynamic relationship between religious and secular realms. While we often think of domestic literature as a didactic mode employed to promote Christian doctrine, a significant strand of this literature encouraged readers to consider how certain secular discourses shaped and was shaped by religious belief. A novel like Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), for example, stages debates about African American national belonging that incorporate religious, legal, political, and domestic discourses. Attending to the (sometimes unruly) reciprocity of these discourses is crucial for better understanding the Christian faith that Harper was known for, and which often characterizes Iola Leroy’s moral ethos. As the title of Sacred Spaces, Secular Fictions suggests, this project asserts the importance of space to domestic literature, as well as the impact of fiction on nineteenth-century religious culture. Domestic spaces, including but not limited to the home, were crucial for representing and negotiating conflicts between religion and such secular issues as sexuality, racial hierarchies, science and medicine, and political citizenship. From Sedgwick’s Puritan homestead to Phelps’s imagined houses in heaven or Harper’s living-room salon, these sacred spaces merged the religious and the secular in ways that modeled a secularist morality for nineteenth-century readers. Domestic fiction, I show, could instruct readers on moral issues without proposing a single (presumably Christian) doctrine or viewpoint. While the authors in this study believed in the importance of literature for cultivating moral readers, they did not necessarily believe that Christian faith was the only worthy mode of morality. Instead, readers could take in different sources—religious and secular—in order to best navigate a modern world.Item Faith in Markets: Christian Business Enterprise in America, 1800-1850(2017) Slaughter, Joseph; Sicilia, David; Ridgway, Whitman; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Faith in Markets: Christian Business Enterprise in America, 1800-1850, answers the question of how theologically conservative Protestants approached business in the expanding market economy of the early national period. Recent Supreme Court cases (such as Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.) have cast light on an important and controversial intersection of capitalism and religion in the United States: the Christian Business Enterprise (CBE). Three CBEs of the early nineteenth century form the core of my study: George Rapp & Associates (the Harmony Society of Western Pennsylvania/Southern Indiana), the Pioneer Stage Coach Line (upstate New York), and Harper & Brothers (New York City). These proprietors embraced the most influential strains of Christianity in early America: Pietism, Calvinism, and Arminianism while attempting to create an ethical marketplace. Their efforts produced three distinct visions of a moral economy in the early national period: Christian communal capitalism, Christian reform capitalism, and Christian virtue capitalism. Faith in Markets challenges the prevailing notion in the historiography that concludes CBEs were the product of twentieth century Bible Belt Protestants reacting to the New Deal, World War II, or the Cold War. Instead, Christian Business Enterprise has a deeper history, that dates back to the earliest decades of the American republic. Melding the new history of capitalism with the revived field of American religious history, Faith in Markets demonstrates how individuals’ religiously motivated choices shaped market activity, as well as the market itself. The Methodist Harper brothers, for instance, rose to prominence as the most powerful publishers of the nineteenth century, dramatically shaping American culture with their middle class Victorian literary products, all while serving as a model of trustworthy business in an age of anonymous market exchange. Ultimately, whether reforming the market by successfully limiting the workweek to six days, presenting an alternate vision for republican industry and community, or fostering middle class Victorian values, the key figures in Faith in Markets illustrates how Christian Business Enterprises indelibly shaped antebellum American culture.Item A VOICE OF THEIR OWN: MUSIC AND SOCIAL COHESION IN TURKISH ALEVI LIFE(2016) Pinkert, Melanie Terner; Witzleben, J. Lawrence; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the role that music has played in the expression of identity and revitalization of culture of the Alevis in Turkey, since the start of their sociocultural revival movement in the late 1980s. Music is central to Alevi claims of ethnic and religious difference—singing and playing the bağlama (Turkish folk lute) constitutes an expressive practice in worship and everyday life. Based on research conducted from 2012 to 2014, I investigate and present Alevi music through the lens of discourses on the construction of identity as a social and musical process. Alevi musicians perform a revived repertoire of the ritual music and folk songs of Anatolian bards and dervish-lodge poets that developed over several centuries. Contemporary media and performance contexts have blurred former distinctions between sacred and secular, yet have provided new avenues to build community in an urban setting. I compare music performances in the worship services of urban and small-town areas, and other community events such as devotional meetings, concerts, clubs, and broadcast and social media to illustrate the ways that participation—both performing and listening—reinforces identity and solidarity. I also examine the influence of these different contexts on performers’ musical choices, and the power of music to evoke a range of responses and emotional feelings in the participants. Through my investigation I argue that the Alevi music repertoire is not only a cultural practice but also a symbol of power and collective action in their struggle for human rights and self-determination. As Alevis have faced a redefined Turkish nationalism that incorporates Sunni Muslim piety, this music has gained even greater potency in their resistance to misrecognition as a folkloric, rather than a living, tradition.Item Contemporary Spiritual Re|Image|ination: Relating the Traditions of the Episcopal Church to Modern Society(2015) Bennett, Patrice Michelle; Noonan, Peter; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the American colonial era, Anglicans associated with the Church of England founded parishes and built churches throughout the colonies. After the Revolutionary War, many of these Anglicans refused any sort of loyalty toward the Church of England, and thus established the Episcopal Church. Early churches were often central within individual settlements and central to the lives of its inhabitants. Over the centuries, however, the Episcopal Church has migrated to the peripheries of communities and has diminished in importance to much of the populace. Over the last decade membership in the Episcopal Church has decreased by nearly twenty percent, despite progressive attempts by church leadership to evolve with an ever-changing society. Utilizing the canon and customs of the Church as a guide, this thesis will explore how the Episcopal Church can respond and relate to a diverse contemporary society while maintaining its rich history and traditions so vital to its tenets, and explores what role innovative architectural thinking can play to support that evolution.Item Mysticism in 20th and 21st Century Violin Music(2014) Bagley, Paul M.; Salness, David; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Mysticism," according to the Oxford dictionary, can be defined as "belief in or devotion to the spiritual apprehension of truths inaccessible to the intellect." More generally, it applies to the aspects of spirituality and religion that can only be directly experienced, rather than described or learned. This dissertation examines how mysticism fits into the aesthetic, compositional, and musical philosophies of four prominent composers of the 20th and 21st centuries—Ernest Bloch, Olivier Messiaen, Sophia Gubaidulina, and John Zorn, with a cameo by the Jewish composer David Finko—and how their engagement with the concept of mysticism and the mystical experience can be seen in a selection of their works featuring the violin: Bloch's Baal Shem suite and Poème mystique; Finko's Lamentations of Jeremiah, Zorn's Kol Nidre, Goetia, All Hallow's Eve, and Amour fou; Gubaidulina's In tempus praesens; and Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time. These works exemplify the mysticism shared by these composers, despite their different religious and cultural backgrounds, particularly their belief in the transcendental nature of music. This belief is expressed in their works through programmatic, melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and formal elements, all of which display, to a greater or lesser degree, the influence of mystical philosophy and symbolism.Item Reinhold Niebuhr and an Ethic of Humility in Deliberative Politics(2014) Spino, Matthew Peter; Glass, James; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the degree to which the political psychology of Reinhold Niebuhr contributes to a more capacious theory of deliberative politics and to what degree such a theory may permit individuals to express themselves with more workable forms of democratic practice. Considerations of Reinhold Niebuhr's understanding of impermanence, anxiety, self-reflection, and empathy borne of humility guide the framework of the argument in that they inform and augment individual political preferences. The author uses these ideas to develop a theory of deliberative politics built upon the empathetic tendencies found in the self-scrutinizing humility of Reinhold Niebuhr's politics. The author considers this theory in contradistinction to ascendant strains in political theory and theologies of public life, which at times may disavowal Niebuhr's understanding of natural theology, his correspondent political realism, or otherwise miscategorize Niebuhr's political claims. The degree to which Niebuhr's ethical framework can or should be separated from Christian considerations of ethics more broadly, especially from Christian eschatology, is a major topic of discussion. Contrasting Niebuhr with other Christian ethicists permits us to see in what manner Niebuhr's political psychology might retain political value beyond a particular religious community. This work also considers limits of Niebuhr's understanding of liberal politics, and whether an ethic of humility can be overly disempowering at times. Tension between individual and aggregate political perspectives frames that discussion.Item Redefining Religion through Literature in Nineteenth Century France(2013) Cefalo, Erica Maria; Brami, Joseph; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)From the Enlightenment to the end of the nineteenth century, France experienced political change and literary innovation which resulted in new definitions of the relationship between mankind and God. Current research in nineteenth century French literature has discovered a wealth of diverse and provocative topics within this humanist tradition precisely because it was a time of experimentation and change which gave birth to new viewpoints on everything from gender roles and sexuality to socialism and human rights. This dissertation delves into the evolution of an often overlooked element of French life which went hand in hand with social and intellectual innovation: religion and spirituality. Under the Catholic monarchy, France had traditionally relied on religion as the foundation for a collective morality. Enlightenment philosophy challenged traditional religious concepts and France's post-Revolutionary break with the Catholic Church encouraged intellectuals to continue exploring new notions of the divine. This dissertation focuses on a number of spiritual ideas put forward by various writers. While some, such as Chateaubriand, Ballanche and Lamennais famously advocated a return to Catholicism, others like Mme de Staël and Lamartine used their writings as a means for devising a new spiritual direction that would rely less on institutionalized religion and more on the conscience. Advancements in science and in the study of history ushered in a new awareness of the relationship between the past and the future which inspired scientifically minded intellectuals, such as Auguste Comte and Emile Zola, to consider themselves as part of a progressive succession of human beings more dominated by time and society than by any god. By shedding what they saw as outmoded conceptions of the universe, philosophers, poets and novelists alike moved to embrace a more progressive spiritual direction incorporating compassion, empathy and justice as sources for moral truths. These are concepts that have carried over into secular France today as citizens continue to focus on ethical concerns in political debates that touch on topics such as welfare programs, immigration, and secularism.Item Tuning Into the Gospel: How the Growth of Sports Television Popularized Public Prayer Among Athletes(2012) Goldenbach, Alan M.; Hanson, Christopher; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Whether the game is played among friends in a community park or in front of tens of thousands inside a packed stadium with millions more watching on television worldwide, prayer has become an omnipresent tool for athletes of all ages and skill levels. No longer do players invoke their spirituality in private or among themselves off the field; they do it in front of whoever is watching. While the ties between religion and sports date to ancient times, the public display of their union has become a phenomenon in the current generation. This book proposal will trace how public prayer among athletes has evolved. It will ultimately show that the boon of sports television programming over that span has given athletes a platform to use as a pulpit, while also exposing viewers to content they had not previously received through other mass media.