Browsing by Subject "religion"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Just Trash
    (2020-05) Campbell, Ashley
    Just Trash is a creative dissertation comprised of four personal essays that take on various questions of identity and empathy that arise when a non-binary bisexual woman grows up in a Southern evangelical, working-class home, an environment that is politically, religiously, regionally, and culturally so different from the one I currently inhabit. It also contains a scholarly introduction that explores the purpose of the memoir as a whole, as well as its origins; the functions and import of each chapter and the place of my memoir within the larger genre through looking at four key types of memoir with which it is in conversation: Southern memoir, trauma memoir, religious memoir, and queer memoir.
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    Pagan Imagination in Popular Culture; the Relationship Between Elves, Ghosts and Icelanders as Cultural Identity
    (2015-05) Gíslason, Björgvin
    Elves, ghosts and prophetesses have been, and remain, a significant part of Icelandic belief, culture and national identity. These beliefs are deeply rooted in connection to the land, and the hidden creatures that live in it. This phenomenon is referred to as the pagan imagination, and will be explored through five Icelandic works of arts by three separate artists.
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    Religion for a Sustainable Civilization
    (Nova, 2012-08-22) Andregg, Michael M.
    RELIGION FOR A SUSTAINABLE CIVILIZATION Dr. Michael Andregg University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA mmandregg@stthomas.edu ABSTRACT This paper looks at a paradox of large religions in the modern world, some driving us toward endless war even though all the founding prophets spoke about peace, and cited Golden Rules of very similar meaning. It identifies “authoritarian law and militant religion” as interacting evils wrapped in soft words of scriptural origin. It applauds the emergence of “sustainable stewardship” as a counterpoint to more primitive “multiply and dominate” theologies. It shows how “people of faith” and “people of reason” coexist in many churches, but differ in how they evaluate the world. The author discusses why we need a civilizational religion that could manage the planet and the people on it more humanely, instead of subjugating and exploiting them for anyone’s short term benefit. And he ends with a concrete list of characteristics that global religion should have. Key words: Civilization, religion, sustainability, spirituality, decay, war, authoritarianism, ethics, history, philosophy, sociology
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    The Rock of the Republic: The Ten Commandments in American Life from World War II to the Culture Wars
    (2018-08) Haker, Joseph
    This dissertation examines the various movements to propagate and publicly display the Ten Commandments in the United States since the end of World War II, using that history as a window to better understand the nexus of religion, nationalism, and capitalism. It demonstrates that such displays first emerged out of the impulses and needs of postwar liberalism, which sought to construct a broad and inclusive “Judeo-Christian” consensus, but were quickly seized upon by reactionary forces working to construct a more exclusionary form of nationalism. It then documents the role the Ten Commandments played in the politics and ideology of the Christian Right for whom they symbolized the foundations of a “Christian nation” that were under siege. This dissertation argues that public displays of the Ten Commandments, and the broader fusion of religion and nationalism they came to represent, helped to reconcile two contradictory impulses within postwar religious conservatism. Specifically, the embrace of liberal capitalism as a guarantor of freedom and prosperity on the one hand, and a deep aversion toward many of its material and social effects on the other. The Ten Commandments worked to displace concerns about structural changes onto individual moral failings or cultural institutions believed to shape individual conduct. For their proponents, the Ten Commandments offered a way of ameliorating social crises, arresting cultural liberalization, and reasserting traditional patriarchal authority without necessitating a broader systemic critique. This also helps to explain how conservative Christianity became reconciled with, or even necessary to, the functioning of neoliberalism.
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    Simple Medicines: land, health, and power in the 19th-century Ojibwe western Great Lakes
    (2021-09) Flood, Margaret
    “Simple Medicines: Land, Health, and Power in the 19th-century Ojibwe western Great Lakes” is a cultural history of medicine in mixed Indigenous Ojibwe and settler communities in the western Great Lakes between 1823 and 1891. This dissertation demonstrates that the ways that settler American and Ojibwe communities understood and sought health fundamentally shaped the dynamic transformations of political, religious, economic, and environmental landscapes in nineteenth century Anishinaabewaki or Anishinaabe territories. The period of 1825-1891 marked the beginning of the US-Ojibwe political relations and a resulting sea change in Ojibwe territorial management, lifeways, and population. While Anishinaabewaki had been and remained a richly international space, American settler colonialism deeply marked Ojibwe people, Ojibwe communities, and Ojibwe land through treaties, reservations, assimilation, and allotment. This dissertation situates the enduring if often contradictory value of medical practices and discourses in settler and Ojibwe relations. Medicine was consistently part of US political relationships with Ojibwe nations through the nineteenth century although the sites in which medicine operated changed over time. These changes were interlinked. The American settler state used settler colonial medicine through treaties, annuities, federally supported missions, and federally supported Indian agencies. Through these technologies and infrastructures, the settler state promoted a vision of health that was assimilative and as such genocidal. Medical practices and discourses of health were deeply entangled with religious reform, economic expansion, and the acquisition of land. This story of medical practice and health discourse must also be read through a longstanding Ojibwe medical pluralism, in which medical exchanges acted to create political, economic, and social relationships while refracting powerful relations with material and immaterial more-than-humans including land. Ojibwe brought settlers into relation through medicine and other forms of gift exchange through which relationships were created, recognized, and maintained. Relationships as a medium extended between humans and more-than-humans including powerful material entities and immaterial entities. Relationships created health and healthy lives for Ojibwe as Ojibwe. Processes of alliance-building, and processes of alliance-destroying, were and are processes of health.
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    Terrorism, Fear, Evil and the Challenge to Civilization, 62-slide PowerPoint
    (2015-02-27) Andregg, Michael M.
    This is a very long PowerPoint presentation on critical aspects of US history that bear on our understandings of "Terrorism, Fear and Evil" in the world today. It covers a number of topics that are semi-taboo, like whether "Evil" has dimensions other than the ordinary human failings and mistakes.
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    Time, Ecology And The Graphics Of The Borgia Group Of Codices
    (2024-07) Nair, Sreekishen
    This dissertation examines a selection of beautifully illustrated almanacs found in the Borgia Group of Codices: a set of sacred manuscripts drafted in Central Mexico by Indigenous scribes during the 14th-15th centuries ce (the Late Postclassic Period). A growing body of research demonstrates that these calendrical tools were used, in part, to record, organize, and tabulate data about seasonal ecology and the environment, here understood as vitally dynamic and intrinsically sacred. The information was archived through a sophisticated mode of visual communication, unique to Central Mexico, that combines glyphic, notational and pictographic signs with illustration. Contemporary studies have partially reconstructed this visual language using bilingual documents prepared by Indigenous scribes during 16th century, which incorporate both alphabetic Spanish and native glyphic entries. Drawing from these lines of research, I discuss Borgia Group almanacs whose graphical contents address agriculture, weather, and astronomy in terms of sacred calendrical cycles. I examine both the internal logic of their graphical language, and the external environment they describe, combing both inquiries with ethnohistoric data to construct a hypothesis for the social lives of the almanacs in their native contexts. I propose that priestly specialists compiled their ecological and astronomical observations into graphical archives that were referenced for managing vital civic concerns, such as agriculture or periodic environmental crises (e.g. drought or pestilence). Notable similarities among almanacs from different regions suggest that communities were sharing such data across wide geographies. The function of the ancient almanacs parallels governmental bulletins published in 18th century Guatemala that were compiled to manage potential locust outbreaks, researched by Martha Few (2013). This discussion contextualizes the sacred almanacs within Mexico’s Indigenous scientific scholarship as expressed through art, architecture, and landscape management. As sacred dossiers for ecological data, the almanacs in the Borgia Group comprise an archive that explains how their ancient authors experienced their environments. They thus enhance contemporary understandings of climate patterns, and present a sample of the rich, polyvocal scholarship that flourished in ancient Mesoamerica. This study is submitted in honor of the Indigenous authors of that archive, as well as their contemporary descendants.