R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "Stroup, John M."

Browsing by Author "Stroup, John M."

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Chains of virtue: Seventeenth-century saints in Spanish colonial Lima
(1997) Wood, Alice Landru; Stroup, John M.
Seventeenth-century Lives of colonial saints in Peru reflect the Spanish colony's growing independence and changing missionary strategies. Lives of saints Luis Bertran, Francis Solano, Toribio Alfonso de Mogrovejo, Juan Macias, Rose of Lima, Martin de Porras and the unrecognized Nicolas de Ayllon reveal the symbolic resolution of alterity as a dominant theme. Concern with alterity appears most prominently in discourses about language and bodies. Hagiography provided Creole communities with religious narratives of self-legitimization and self-definition. This questions a general scholarly assumption that saints of the Early Modern period are the creations of the ecclesiastical powers in Rome. Likewise, the assertion that hagiography is written in order to provide exemplars of virtue for ordinary people is qualified by my study. The Lives mirror two phases of colonial development: the first phase described Spanish evangelization and confrontation with native populations. Saints were strongly identified with Europe and their Lives reflected the cultural struggle with external others and the need to justify Christian missions. Hagiographers focused on the power or language and gave little attention to the physical world of bodies. The second phase was marked by an increasing sense of Creole identity. Hagiographers shifted the focus from words and language--now treated as suspect--to the body itself. Lives of these saints showcased mortifications of the body in order to dissociate the saints from inferiorities associated with their race or gender.
Christianity and Marxism: A historical perspective on the role of ideology in the thought of Hanfried Mueller
(1997) Currie, James Stuart; Stroup, John M.
This work examines, critically, an East German theologian, Hanfried Muller, professor of theology at the Humboldt University in East Berlin and a committed Marxist. Specifically, the role of political ideology in Muller's theology, in general, and his views of the church, in particular, are explored. While the influence of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth on Muller are of major importance to Muller, it is argued here that his use and interpretation of them is shown to rest, in large part, on his ideological convictions. It is argued that Muller's Marxist perspective reflects a new direction in the Christian socialist tradition that began in the nineteenth century. Finally, this dissertation maintains that Muller's ideology replaces the traditional notion of ecclesiology, not only in Bonhoeffer and Barth, but for most of his contemporary theologians.
Earth Matters: Religion, Nature, and Science in the Ecologies of Contemporary America
(2013-09-16) Levine, Daniel; Kripal, Jeffrey J.; Faubion, James D.; Stroup, John M.
Earth Matters examines the relationships between alternative religion in North America and the natural world through the twin lenses of the history of religions and cultural anthropology. Throughout, nature remains a contested ground, defined simultaneously the limits of cultural activity and by an increasing expansion of claims to knowledge by scientific discourses. Less a historical review than a series of fugues of thought, Earth Matters engages with figures like the French vitalist, Georges Canguilhem, the American environmentalist, John Muir; the founder of Deep Ecology, Arne Næss; the collaborators on Gaia Theory, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis; the physicist and New Age scientist, Fritjof Capra; and the Wiccan writer and activist, Starhawk. These subjects move in spirals throughout the thesis: Canguilhem opens the question of vitalism, the search for a source of being beyond the explanations of the emerging sciences. As rationalism expands its dominance across the scientific landscape, this animating force moves into the natural world, to that protean space between the city and the wild and in the environmental thinkers who initially moved along those boundaries. As the twentieth century moves towards a close, mechanistic thinking simultaneously reaches heights of success previously unimagined and collapses under the demand for complexity posed by quantum physics, by research in genetic interactions, by the continued elusive relationship of mind to health. This allows the wild to return inside through the internalization of consciousness sparked by the American New Age, but also provides a new model to understand the natural world as complex zone open to a wide variety of strategies, including the multiplicities of understanding offered through contemporary neopaganisms. Earth Matters argues for the necessity of the notion of ecology, both as an environmental concern but also as an organizing principle for human thought and behavior. Ecologies are by their nature complex and multi-variegated things dependent upon the surprising and unpredictable interaction of radically different organisms, and it is through this model that we are best able to understand not only ourselves but also our communities and our efforts to make sense of the external world.
Extraordinary Healing and The Hermeneutics of Privilege: the Healer Valentine Greatrakes (1629–1683), Robert Boyle (1627–1691), and Equivocating about the Miraculous in Early Modern Scientific Medicine
(2015-04-20) Brochstein, Benjamin; Kripal, Jeffrey J.; Stroup, John M.; Ecklund, Elaine H.
This dissertation presents three basic theoretical ideas: the hermeneutic of privilege, how allegorical symbolism and esotericism protect elite privilege, and the socio-political utility of anti-dogmatism. Alchemical casuistry is this study’s modern analytical concept that combines aspects of these themes to show how elites cultivated anti-dogmatic perspectives to reconcile themselves with opposing and divisive dogmatic political positions. The ultimate expressions of alchemical casuistry were found in courtly favor, diplomacy, and statecraft; but it also served as a foundation of social suppression—concealing special knowledge. The earliest alchemical texts contained recipes for imitating substances like emeralds and gold—recipes whose value depended on both secrecy and lies. Over time, the systems of allegorical and linguistic contrivance that originally served to protect and preserve the secrets of imitations would extend to cover other things—like miracles. The concept of miracles was divisive after the reformation—characterizing phenomena as “miraculous” could have serious political consequences. Alchemical casuistry explains how members of the nascent Royal Society viewed Valentine Greatrakes (1629–1683) and his practically miraculous healing treatments. Because the term “miracle” was central to religious debates, these alchemical casuists carefully avoided using the word “miracle” and equivocated Greatrakes’ extraordinary effects (that had no mechanistic explanation). Greatrakes is the first instance of early modern science wrestling with what we call today the placebo effect and his witnesses were the product of an elite alchemical tradition that saw itself extending back to ancient Greece. Alchemical linguistic contrivance was an integral aspect of social privilege and education and protected one of society’s most dangerous secrets: how shifting political and philosophical paradigms related to economic disparity. Building on the momentum of the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment was a philosophical assault on the notion of mediated divinity that created a vacuum of institutional credibility. Trust in the both the Church of England and the monarchy suffered when the 1649 regicide challenged their claims to divine authority. Greatrakes’ “miraculous” effects simultaneously negated monarchal claims of divine authority (based on similar healing touch) and the Church of England’s position that miracles had ceased. When the Royal Society became the official institution of early modern science, it extended its influence and credibility by initiating organized Freemasonry as a polarizing device to direct the considerable political potential of lesser elites. The Royal Society’s assault on divinity placed it in the role of mediating truth claims, thereby usurping the social functions of divinity previously administered by the church and monarch. Given what we know about the placebo effect today, it is difficult to doubt that at least some of the Greatrakes narratives described authentic cures. The only consistent explanation for them (from Francis Bacon, to Robert Boyle, to Benjamin Franklin, and to today) has been the power of the imagination to heal. Through alchemical casuistry effective techniques like hypnosis, acupuncture, Reiki, and many others are marginalized for the economic benefit of medical elites whose pills and procedures have less value when the secret elixir of the imagination is widely known.
Irony, innocence, and myth: Douglas C. Macintosh's untraditional orthodoxy
(1996) Grubbs, Gayle Gudger; Stroup, John M.
This study analyzes the relationship of Douglas Clyde Macintosh to the time in which he lived using the concepts of irony, innocence, and myth. By employing these concepts, the author identifies four significant moves that Macintosh made to break with philosophical idealism. The author explores Macintosh's relationship to an older, reigning Ritschlian liberal theology, and the development of neo-orthodoxy by his students H. Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr. This Yale strand of neo-orthodoxy is relevant to the "new historicism" as described by William Dean. The author explores the relevance of Macintosh's work to the developing new historicism including neopragmatism in philosophy, radical empiricism, the American evasion of epistemology, and the role of apologetics in inter-religious dialogue. Macintosh's Yale strand of empirical theology emerges as a significant critique of the new historicist position. In response to the social, intellectual and religious crisis of modernity, Macintosh moved to recover objectivism in theology, attempted to rehabilitate the apologetic arguments for the existence of God and the reasonableness of religious belief, employed the Radical Method in theology to define and to defend an essence of Christianity, and employed the Anselmian apologetic tactic of leaving Christ aside to prove his necessity for human salvation. His use of the Ritschlian Radical Method in theology produced differences in Macintosh's and Ritschl's theological content. The author also analyzes the criticisms that H. Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr leveled against Macintosh. Eight reasons are presented for the eclipse of Macintosh's empirical theology in scholarship.
Out of the In-Between: Moses Mendelssohn and Martin Buber's German Jewish Philosophy of Encounter, Singularity, and Aesthetics
(2013-10-04) Atlas, Dustin; Kripal, Jeffrey J.; Stroup, John M.; Engelhardt, H. Tristram, Jr.; Wolfson, Elliot R
This dissertation seeks to clarify and articulate a trajectory in Germanic Jewish thought, beginning with the work of Moses Mendelssohn and ending with Martin Buber; the two concepts mapped by this trajectory are the in-between [zwischen] and singularity [die Singularität]. These ideas are developed in light of their philosophical context, and brought into dialogue with contemporary thought. Singularities are individuals that are not particulars, meaning: not particular instantiations of either a general or universal concept. Singularities cannot be grasped in terms of their differences and similarities to other things. Singularity is what makes something what it is, independent of its predicates or containment in a universal. The in-between is the ontological space that allows for an encounter between singularities, such that this encounter helps constitute the singularities meeting. In this sense, the in-between is the chief conceptual support of the idea of singularity. Because singularities are autonomous and cannot be defined by their differences from other singularities, the space where singularities encounter each other cannot be thought of as a container without transforming the singulars into particulars. This dissertation takes the modest goal of formalizing and clarifying these concepts, preparing the concepts of the in-between and singularity such that they can one day be used in the study of religion. I suggest that these concepts are useful insofar as they allow us to take a middle path between theology and reductive analysis, viewing the transcendent claims of religions in a manner that is at once sympathetic and critical.
Straddling the boundary: Messianic Judaism and the construction of culture
(2000) Jaffe, Devra Gilat; Stroup, John M.
Messianic Jews assert that one can be Jewish and also believe in Jesus Christ. They claim a continuous tradition originating with the disciples of Jesus, who were all practicing Jews and believers. However, a survey of the development of Messianic Judaism shows that there is no continuous tradition. Messianic Judaism is more accurately considered the result of social forces such as Protestant missions to the Jews, the counterculture movement, and the resurgence of Jewish ethnic identity after the 1967 war. In mixing Jewish heritage and Christian belief, Messianic Jews obscure the Jewish/Christian boundary. This thesis analyses the construction of culture within the framework of that boundary. Field methods were employed to gain insight into two Messianic communities. In considering these groups, particular attention is given to the roles of history and ritual in the mediation of ethnic boundaries and the shaping of a viable Messianic Jewish identity.
The discourse of sanctity: Early modern canonization of saints as a collaborative process
(1994) Wood, Alice L.; Stroup, John M.
Re-evaluation of the current scholarship on sainthood reveals canonization to be a process of deliberate creation by which candidates are first depicted as members of particular groups or communities and then represented as exemplary members of the Church of Rome. Collaboration among the multiple groups promoting the canonization yields saints with multiple identities who nevertheless serve as icons of consensus. This interpretation challenges the previous scholarly depiction of early modern canonization reform as the Vatican's attempt to change popular values by imposing elite models of sanctity. Instead, seventeenth-century reform, which forced communities to seek official approval for local saints, can be viewed as a unifying strategy rather than a repressive one. Scholars who emphasize the popular/elite dichotomy in religious culture or who examine only certain types of documents miss both the collaborative nature of canonizations and the importance of saints as symbols of Church cohesion.

Browsing by Author "Stroup, John M."

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