Religion
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Recent Submissions
Item "It cannot be that the son of these tears should perish" : an interdisciplinary analysis of St. Augustine's relationship with his mother, Monica.(Wheaton College (Norton, Mass.), 2015) Reynoso, Natalie Maria.Item Founded in love : ritual dance and the detraumatization of the Mexican conquest.(Wheaton College (Norton, Mass.), 2014) Orelup, Margaret.Item From coexistence to cooperation : changing perspectives of the American interfaith movement(Wheaton College (Norton, Mass.), 2014) Gagnon, Meagan.This thesis provides one alternative to the belief that inter-religious encounters act solely as mechanisms for violence, specifically through the perspective of the American interfaith movement. Though the movement began with the concept of promoting tolerance of religious diversity, the changing landscape of American religions has led to a shift in the purpose and function of the movement. I attempt to categorize the new state of organized interfaith action in the country into three overlapping types. I evaluate how they function, and speculate on why the interfaith movement exists the way it does in America today.Item "A new kind of Christian": emergent Christianity and the redefinition of contemporary Christian doctrinal and social boundaries(Wheaton College (Norton, Mass.), 2013-06-06) Allen, Hannah RuthSeeks to explore an emerging group of Christians who claim to understand their faith in an ever-changing culture. Distinguishes emergent Christians from New Evangelical Christians. Adopts George Lindbeck's cultural linguistic approach to doctrine, Ninian Smart's worldview analysis of the relationship of doctrine to other dimensions of religion, David Loy's interpretation of the function of narrative, Anya Peterson Royce's anthropological understanding of style, while developing not only a different understanding of the role that doctrine and experience plays in emergent Christianity, but also explaining how these relationships to doctrine and experience divide emergent Christianity and New Evangelicals. Applies the theories of religious scholars outside of the evangelical Christian conversation to interpret the religious perspectives of both emergent and New Evangelical Christians, as reflected in the literature they have written and in personal interviews, in order to offer a new understanding of emergent Christianity and its relationship to the rest of the Christian community.Item Judging and being judged: rehabilitating moral evaluation in comparative religious ethics.(Wheaton College; Norton, Mass., 2011-11-23T15:49:07Z) Robinson, Seth P.Scholars of comparative ethics—who inquire into a crosscultural span of moral systems, both religious and secular—typically take a “neutral” approach to their subject matter that tries, through careful exercise of empathy, to get at accurate representations of others’ moral beliefs and practices. Such a methodology seems to command “Judge not, lest you be judged!”: take no moral stand, lest you be branded an intellectual imperialist. But what if empathy only smuggles the scholar’s own covert assumptions into interpretation under the guise of neutrality? What if we can’t help using the categories we’ve inherited from our respective traditions in order to make sense of others? In this study, I recommend that students of comparative religion junk their pretentions to empathy and seek instead a form of sympathetic understanding that makes explicit the norms and purposes each of us brings to cross-cultural comparison. I treat the process of casting off maladaptive methods and dissolving conceptual confusions as a kind of pragmatist therapy that aims to rehabilitate the practice of moral evaluation in comparative work without either marginalizing our lived experiences (ours and our subjects’) or relapsing into untenable epistemologies.