Matching Items (4)
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- All Subjects: Religious history
- Genre: Academic theses
- Creators: Bennett, Gaymon
Description
Contemporary Christian American politicians have diverse identities when integrating their faith with their political ideology and have developed their worldviews and interpretive schemas and have defended, enacted, and given meaning to their positions, knowingly or unknowingly. There are two distinct theoretical clusters which are a result of an already existing dichotomy. This ideological divide happens along the philosophical notions of individualism or communitarianism, libertarianism or egalitarianism, capitalism or collectivism, literalism or hermeneutics, orthodoxy or praxis. One cluster, Institutional Christianity, exerts a dominating influence on the political and cultural landscape in the US, particularly during the last ten years, and could be considered a hegemonic discourse; while the other, Natural Christianity, serves as the counter-hegemony within a political landscape characterized by a two party system. This study explores the relationship of these dichotomous clusters with contemporary Arizona Christian politicians. Using a phenomenological, qualitative study, interviewing sixteen Arizona Christian politicians, this study yielded ten themes, and binary meaning units within each theme, that describe the essence of politicians' faith and political behavior as they intersect. Finally, this study found, as reported by each subject, what political perspectives generally created a sense of dissonance with one's faith and what perspective exhibited a unified sense of congruence with their faith and political behavior.
ContributorsAbleser, Edward (Author) / Gomez, Alan (Thesis advisor) / Oliverio, Annamaria (Committee member) / Herrera, Richard (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
The ancient religious practices and beliefs of the indigenous people of Northern Scandinavia, known as the Sámi, have been misrepresented and misinterpreted by well meaning ethnographers and researchers who view such practices and beliefs through an Descartes-Cartesian, objective-subjective lens. This thesis develops a more accurate, intersubjective paradigm that is used to illuminate more clearly the religious workings of the 17th-18th Century Sámi. Drawing upon the intersubjective theories presented by A. Irving Hallowell, Tim Ingold and Kenneth Morrison, ethnographic examples from the writings of early Lutheran missionaries and priests demonstrate that the Sámi lived in a world that can be best understood by the employ of the categories of Person (ontology), Power (epistemology) and Gift (axiology).
ContributorsGoettl, Eric Daniel (Author) / Gereboff, Joel (Thesis advisor) / Swanson, Todd (Committee member) / Kristiansen, Roald E. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Peyote is a subject which renders the mechanisms, forces, and assemblages of colonialism clear. It is in the very inability of the colonial world to categorize, locate, understand and react to peyote that reveals so much about how colonialism operates. A primary goal of this project is to demonstrate that through understanding peyote, and its role in both colonial and contemporary history, one may come to better understand or recognize racial hierarchies and colonial forces which have not gone away with time. The first chapter is primarily a discussion of the Ghost Dance, I lay out some of the difficulties that indigenous appeals to religious freedom face both in terms of political power, but also conceptual, cultural, and academic thinking. In chapter two I move more specifically to the topic of peyote, tracing peyote’s history from precolonial times to the present. Chapters three and four deal with peyote as part of the borderlands and part of the War on Drugs respectively.
I argue that understanding peyote can benefit a broader decolonial project within scholarship. The richness of the intersections between peyote and myriad other subjects is vastly understudied in academia and continued decolonial scholarship on the topic could have immense potential in bringing new insights into view. I draw heavily on scholars such as Edward Said and Aimé Césaire, but I have also been strongly influenced by other scholars such as Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Frantz Fanon, and Gloria Anzaldúa. In keeping with the decolonial mission, it is important to recognize that much of what I am presenting in this work is necessarily new or radical to the indigenous communities who are close to the topics at hand. While I present my own novel insights and discoveries, I also intend for this project to be a call for greater attention and study to be brought to the subject of peyote.
ContributorsRosenberg, Harrison Charles (Author) / Bennett, Gaymon (Thesis advisor) / Berry, Evan (Committee member) / Alhassan, Shamara W (Committee member) / Swanson, Tod (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
This dissertation centers on the life of Patrick Francis Healy, the son of an enslaved woman and an Irish slaveholder. Born in 1834, Healy became a Jesuit priest in 1864 and the president of Georgetown University in 1874, seven decades before Georgetown admitted its first African American student. In the twentieth century, historical investigations of race and American Catholicism cast Healy and his family in a new light. Today, the Healys are upheld in some circles as African American Catholic icons. Patrick Healy is now remembered as the first African American Jesuit and Catholic university president, as well as the first African American to receive a doctorate. This dissertation pursues both the life of Patrick Healy as well as what I call his “afterlives,” or the ways in which he has been remembered since the 1950s, when Albert S. Foley, S.J. discovered that the Healys’ mother was enslaved and refashioned them from white Irish Americans to white-passing African Americans. How and why did Patrick Francis Healy understand and comport himself as a white, upper-class Catholic? How and why have others sought to construct him as African American in the years since his ancestry was made widely known? How has Georgetown incorporated Healy’s legacy, in the context of its and other universities’ coming-to-terms with their dealings with slavery more broadly? I pursue these questions through archival sources (primarily Healy’s diaries and letters) at Georgetown University and College of the Holy Cross, as well as secondary literature on passing, subjectivity, and hagiography.
ContributorsGriffin, Alexandria Gale (Author) / Fessenden, Tracy (Thesis advisor) / O'Donnell, Catherine (Committee member) / Bennett, Gaymon (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020