Religious Studies

Graduate Student Dissertations

Jason BeDuhn (June 1995)
"The Metabolism of Salvation: The Manichaean Body in Ascesis and Ritual"

Lucinda Peach (June 1995)
"Legislating Morality: Problems of Religious Identity, Gender, and Pluralism in Abortion Lawmaking"

Jean Pierre-Sonnet (January 1996)
"When Moses had Finished Writing: Communication in Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy as Communication"

Jeffrey Fry (May 1996)
"Self-Esteem, Moral Luck, and the Meaning of Grace"

Catharine Cookson (May 1997)
"Bridging the Garden and the Wilderness: A Proposed Alternative Process for Resolving Free Exercise Conflicts"

Sarah Pike (May 1998)
"Magical Selves, Earthly Bodies: Self-Identity and Religious Community atContemporary Pagan Festivals"

Robert Kapitzke (December 1998)
"Order and Disorder on the Spanish Frontier: Conflict, Ceremony, and the Experience of Religion in Colonial St. Augustine"

Elizabeth Agnew (August 1999)
"Charity, Friendly Visiting, and Social Work: Mary E. Richmond and the Shaping of an American Profession"

Dawn Bakken (October 1999)
"Putting the Shakers "In Place": Union Village, Ohio, 1805-1815"

Jennifer Girod (November 1999) "Ethical Issues in Transplantation: Making Decisions and Living with the Consequences"

Jason Bivins (June 2000)
"The Fracture of Good Order: Christian Anti-Statism and the Challenge to Postwar American Politics"

Aaron Hughes (August 2000)
"Between Literature and Philosophy: The Philosphical Novel in Medieval Islam and Judaism"

Lisa Sideris (August 2000)
"The Limits of Theodicy: Ecological Theology, Natural Selection, and the Problem of Suffering"

Douglas Winiarski (August 2000)
"All Manner of Error and Delusion: Religious Conflict in Eighteenth-Century Southeastern New England"

Kristy Nabhan-Warren (December 2000)
"Religion in El Barrio: Apparitions of Our Lady of the Americas and Mexican-American Catholicism in South Phoenix, Arizona."

Mary Thurlkill (April 2001)
"Chosen Among Women: Mary and Fatima in Medieval Christianity and Shi'ism"

Craig Davis (September 2002)
"Dara Shukuh and Aurangzib: Issues of Religion and politics and their Impact on Indo-Muslim Society"

Mark Willis Graham (December 2002)
"Authority, Expertise, and Tradition: A Comparative Study of Academic Intellectuals and Religious or Philosophical Traditions in American Public Life."

Byron Bangert (July 2004)
"Toward a Naturalistic, Theocentric, Theological Ethics: An Examination, Critique, and Appropriation of Three Contemporary Protestant Approaches."

Sonja Spear ( June 2005)
"Spiritual Semites: The Holocaust in Jewish-Christian Dialogue"

Holly Folk (May 2006)
"Vertebral Vitalism: American Metaphysics and the Birth of Chiropractic "

Mark King (June 2006)
"Moral Violence: Levinas and the Limits of Role Morality"

David Cockerham (July 2006)
"Toward a Common Democratic Faith: The Political Ethics of John Dewey and Jaques Maritain"

Taylor Halverson (September 2006)
"Improving Blended Learning Environments for Biblical Studies: Applications of the 'Innovations in Distance Education' Theory"

Stephen Taysom (November 2006)
"Divine Resistance and Accommodation: Nineteenth-Century Shaker and Mormon Boundary Maintenance Strategies"

Douglas Morgan Padgett (March 2007)
"Religion, Memory, and Imagination in Vietnamese California"

Mark Wilson (November 2007)
"The Emotion of Regret in an Ethics of Response"

Clarke Hudson (December 2007)
"Writing Salvation: Chen Zhixu and the Social, Soteriological, and Literary Contexts of Fourteenth-Century Chinese Inner Alchemy"

Ellen Muehlberger (April 2008)
"Angels in the Religious Imagination of Late Antiquity"

Cuong Mai (April 2009)
"The Pure Land in the West: Configurations of Mainstream and Specialized Amitabha Cults as Seen in Medieval Chinese Scholasticism, Hagiography, Inscriptions, and Mortuary Texts"

Erik Hammerstrom (April 2010)
"Buddhists Talk Science in Modern China (1919-1949)"

The following students have dissertations in progress:

Carol Barnsley
"Tales of Warning: A Study of Ismaili Ginans"

Richa Pauranik Clements
"Social Lives of Religious Symbols in Brajbhasha Poetry, Rajput Paintings, and Hindi Cinema"

Geoffrey Goble
"Chinese Esoteric Buddhism: Amoghavajra and the Tang Ruling Elite"

Si-Yong Ha
"Images of Yahweh Under Foreign Rule in the 6th-4th century BCE"

Aimee Hamilton
"Solah Shringar: Hindu Women and the Aesthetics of Adornment"

Jennifer Hart
"Identifying the Mandaeans: An Examination of Mandaism and Mandaean Studies"

James Honeyford
"All is Harmony and Love”: Evangelical Sociability in Britain and America, 1660-1770"

Nicole Karapanagiotis
"Does Cyber Smoke Reach the Gods? The Shift from Materiality to Virtuality in Hindu Divine Embodiment and Ritual Performance"

Barbara Krawcowicz
"Covenantal Theodicy Among Haredi and Modern Jewish Thinkers During and After the Holocaust"

Jonathan Pettit
"Creating the Cusp of Paradise: Early Daoist Lodges as Centers of Salvation"

Jeremy Rapport
"Becoming Unity: The Making of an American Religion"

Will Smith
"Spiritual Marriage and Visionary Experience in Margery Kempe, Eliza's Babes, and Anne Wentworth"

Nicole Willock
“The Life of a Tibetan Buddhist Teacher in Modern China: In Pursuit of Knowledge”