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"

Glenn Zuber (March 2004)
"Onward Christian Klansmen: War, Religion, and the Rise of the Main Street Ku Klux Klan, 1915-1930"

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"

The following students have dissertations in progress:

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

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

Mark Wilson
"The Emotion of Regret in an Ethics of Response"