Religious Studies Dissertations and Theses
https://hdl.handle.net/1808/14223
2024-03-28T18:21:19ZRituals and Sectarian Knowledge: Methods of Constructing Social Identity in the Community Rule (1QS)
https://hdl.handle.net/1808/30098
Rituals and Sectarian Knowledge: Methods of Constructing Social Identity in the Community Rule (1QS)
Schofield, Kyle Reid
This study deals with identity construction in the Community Rule (1QS). Examples of rituals and sectarian doctrines (knowledge) dictated in 1QS will be discussed along with a look into how these rituals and knowledge might have affected and constructed communal identity. The rituals that will be discussed are the communal meals, the admission process, and the nightly study sessions. Along with a discussion of these rituals and their effects, the doctrines that reinforce these rituals will be discussed, along with how that knowledge might have also shaped social identity. All of this builds up to the final section where the doctrine of determinism, as taught in 1QS, is discussed. To gain a better understanding of how this doctrine might have affected identity within the Qumran community, Calvinism is used as constructive comparative data.
2019-05-31T00:00:00Z"These Types of Sites Are Really Hard to Find": Lakota Oral Tradition and Resistance Against the Dakota Access Pipeline
https://hdl.handle.net/1808/27918
"These Types of Sites Are Really Hard to Find": Lakota Oral Tradition and Resistance Against the Dakota Access Pipeline
Goeckner, Ryan
The Dakota Access Pipeline resistance movement provides a poignant example of the way in which oral traditions remain authoritative in the religious lives of American Indian peoples. The members of Lakota communities confronted with the restriction of their religious freedoms and access to clean drinking water by DAPL’s construction have faced the consequences brought on in part by scholarly assessment of the veracity and importance of oral traditions. As I demonstrate in this thesis, the exclusion of Native voices from conversations about these traditions, both within and outside academia, has larger impacts than just incomplete understandings. Going forward, those engaged in scholarly discourses must understand that they have greater obligations than merely the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Understanding the wider impact of discussions like those surrounding oral traditions provides a stimulus for reflection and reevaluation of the research being conducted about, for, and with American Indian communities.
2018-05-31T00:00:00ZNew Wine in an Old Bottle: The Korean Monk Sangwŏl (1911-1974) and the Rise of the Ch’ŏnt’ae school of Buddhism
https://hdl.handle.net/1808/25980
New Wine in an Old Bottle: The Korean Monk Sangwŏl (1911-1974) and the Rise of the Ch’ŏnt’ae school of Buddhism
Roh, Yohong
The thesis explores the diverse ways in which a new Korean Buddhist movement that calls itself the “Ch’ŏnt’ae Jong (Tiantai school)” has appropriated and deployed traditional patriarchal narratives of the Chinese Tiantai tradition to legitimize claims to succession of its modern founder, the Korean monk Sangwŏl (1922-1974). Sangwŏl began his community as early as 1945; however, at that time his community simply referred to itself as the “teaching of Sangwŏl” or “teaching of Kuinsa,” after the name of his monastery. It was not until the official change of the name to Ch’ŏnt’ae in 1967 that Korean Buddhists found a comprehensive and identifiable socio-historical space for Sangwŏl and his teaching. Key to that transition was not only his adapting the historically prominent name “Ch’ŏnt’ae,” but his retrospective creation of a lineage of Chinese and Korean patriarchs to whom he could trace his succession and the origin of his school. It is through this kind of historicist rhetorical maneuver that he achieved legitimation for himself and his teaching in the eyes of the Korean public. The aim of my thesis is to explore the multiple ways in which the figure of Sangwŏl has been presented as a “Tiantai patriarch” in the cultural construction of modern Tiantai Buddhist school in Korea. Those forms of presentation include crafting of hagiographies, lineage narratives that leap centuries and connect him to Chinese patriarchs, creation of rituals for celebration of patriarchal death anniversaries, construction of patriarch halls and images, sponsorship of modern scholarship and research, and even film and digital media. As “New Wine in an Old Bottle,” the symbolic manipulations of modern Korean Ch’ŏnt’ae order look to strategies of religious authorization that have been used by various Buddhist groups in China and East Asia from as early as 6th century China and as recently as the Buddhist sects of Meiji Japan and the Chogye order of post-colonial Korea.
2017-08-31T00:00:00ZTeaching Through Devotion: The Poetics of Yaśaskara’s Devīstotra and Premodern Kashmir
https://hdl.handle.net/1808/25817
Teaching Through Devotion: The Poetics of Yaśaskara’s Devīstotra and Premodern Kashmir
Leveille, Matthew
The Devīstotra of Yaśaskara (c. 12th to 17th centuries CE), is a little studied and heretofore untranslated Sanskrit text from Kashmir. This thesis not only provides the first English translation and close reading of selections from the text, it uses the Devīstotra along with current research on its literary, cultural, and political contexts to illustrate the functions of the text and its intended audiences, and to provide a case study with which to evaluate the wide range and flexibility of the genre of stotra (a hymn or poem of praise) in Sanskrit literature. The Devīstotra is a unique example of a text that has both a religious dimension (offering praise to the Goddess Pārvatī) and a literary-critical dimension (giving verse examples that elucidate Sanskrit poetic ornaments or alaṃkāras). With regard to the latter, the text follows the structure of the Alaṃkāraratnākara of Śobhākaramitra (c. 12th century CE), one of the last major works on Sanskrit poetics to be distributed and studied outside of Kashmir. A later editor, Ratnakaṇṭha (17th century CE) may have added definitions of alaṃkāras and prose explanations from the Alaṃkāraratnākara into the Devīstotra (if they were not present already), which arguably helped to popularize and preserve the poetics of Śobhākaramitra’s text. Lastly, the Devīstotra, and the stotra genre more broadly, serves as a distinct and important textual vehicle in the preservation of the Sanskrit language and its knowledge systems during times of widespread social and political upheaval in Kashmir and the Indian subcontinent leading up to modernity. Ultimately, stotras served as a vehicle of creativity, innovation, and preservation in later Sanskrit literature. The Devīstotra itself illustrates the close link between devotional literature and pedagogy in Sanskrit.
2017-05-31T00:00:00Z