Doctoral

Recent Dissertations

Ph.D. | Th.D.

Ph.D. Dissertation Titles

2008-2009

AVIV, Eyal
Differentiating the Pearl From the Fish Eye: Ouyang Jingwu (1871-1943) and the Revival of Scholastic Buddhism

BAIN, Katherine
Economics and Gender: The Socioeconomic Religious Status of Women in Asia Minor in the First Two Centuries of the Common Era

BRAUN, Erik
The Birth of Modern Buddhism: Ledi sayadaw, Abhidhamma, and the Origins of Insight Meditation

DALRYMPLE, Timothy
The Ladder of Thorns: Søren Kierkegaard on the Varieties of Suffering

KENG, Ching
Yogacara Buddhism Transmitted and Transformed? Paramartha (499-569) and His Chinese Interpreters

MILLER, Anna
Ekklesia: 1. Corinthians in the Context of Ancient Democratic Discourse

OMER, Atalia
After Peace: How Does the Israeli Peace Camp Think about Religion, Nationalism and Justice?

PAGE, Tovis
“The Problem of the Land is the Problem of the Woman”: A Genealogy of Ecofeminism at Grailville

PRESTON, Ryan
The ‘Eternal Return’ of the byzantine Icon: Sacred and Secular in the Painting of Photis Kontoglou

THORPE, Tracy
The Power of Silence: The Empty Temple Mount in Late Antique Jerusalem

2007-2008

ADRIAN, Melanie
Restricting the Public: France, the Veil and Religious Freedom

BLAIR, Heather
Peak of Gold: Trace, Place and Religion in Heian Japan

CLOWER, Jason
The Unlikely Buddhologist: Mou Zongsan (1909-1995)

CORLEY DUNN, Mary
Sainte-Anne-du-Petit-Cap: The Making of an Early Modern Shrine

LELE, Amod
Ethical Revaluation in the Thought of Santideva

RINDER, Michael
The Evolution of Religious Nationalism in Pakistan: Islamic Identity, Ideology and State Power

SCOTT, Mark
Cosmic Theodicy: Origen on the Problem of Evil

SEITZ, John
No Closure: Catholic Practice and Boston's Parish Shutdowns

WAGNER, Alan
How does a Chan Buddhist Practice what he Preaches: A Study of the Works of Layman Ruru

WEIMER, Adrian
Protestant Sainthood: Martyrdom, Apocalypticism, and the Meaning of Sanctity in Early New England

2006–07

AMBALAVANAR, Darshan
Arumuka Navalar and the Formation of a Saiva Public Colonial Jaffna

LANAGHAN, Tammy
Transforming the Seat of the Goddess into Visnu's Place: The Complex Layering of Theologies in the Karavira Mahatmaya

SCHEIBLE, Kristin
"For the Anxious Thrill and Serene Satisfaction of Good People": Rethinking the Pali Mahavamsa

YU, Baofeng
Learning as a Way of Living: Lu Xiangshan and the Neo-Confucian Orientation to Learning

ARY, Elijah
Logic, Lives and Lineage: Jetsun Chokyi Gyaltsen's Ascension and the Secret Biography of Khedrup Geleg Pelzang

KIM, Hwansoo
Toward a New History of Japanese and Korean Buddhist Relations, 1877-1912

MIRSKY, Yehudah
An Intellectual and Spiritual Biography of Rabbi Avraham Yitzhaq Ha-Cohen Kook from 1865 to 1904

2005–06

BOWEN SAVANT, Sarah
Forging New Identities: Genealogy, Ethnicity, and the Pre-Islamic Prophets in Medieval Islam

JONES, Paul
The Humanity of Christ in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics

LANGE, Christian
Executing Justice in Islam: Historical, Poetical, Eschatological and Legal Dimensions of Punishment under the Saljuqs (1055-1194 CE)

SCHMIDT, Jalane
Cuba’s Rival Rituals: 20th C. Festivals for the Virgin of Charity and the Contested Streets of the “Nation”

SMITH-SPRALLS, Mitzi
The Function of the Jews, Charismatic Others, and Women in Narrative Instabilities in the Acts of the Apostles

TIRRES, Christopher
John Dewey and the Dynamics of Moral Faith: An Assessment of Reconstruction

UKELES, Raquel
Innovation or Deviation?: Exploring the Boundaries of  Islamic Devotional Law

WILLIS, Andre
Hume and Hope: A Study in David Hume’s Philosophy of Religion

2004-05

ANDERSON, Emma
Failed Pygmalions: The Conversion and “Apostasy” of Pierre-Anthoine Pastedechouan, Seventeenth-Century Montagnais Indian

CAMPAGNA-PINTO, Stephen
The Workshop of Being: A Comparative Study of Jonathan Edwards and William James

DUNNING, Benjamin
Aliens and Sojourners: Self as Other in the Rhetoric of Early Christian Identity

EVANS, Curtis
The Burden of Black Religion: Representing the Race and Enlisting the Black Churches in the Nation’s Racial Struggles

RASMUSSEN, Joel
Between Irony and Witness: Kierkegaard’s Poetics of Faith, Hope and Love

SHOEMAKER, Stephen
God-talk in the Yard: Religion in the Nineteenth Century  Harvard College Curriculum

SPRINGS, Jason
Between Barth and Wittgenstein: Pragmatist Themes in Hans Frei’s ‘Postliberal’ Theology

WINBORNE, Sheila
“Behold It Is I”: A Theological Interpretation of F. Holland Day’s Representations of Person of African Descent

2003-04

KELLEY, Nicole
New Testament and Christian Origins
Discursive Competition and the Production of Truth in the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions

MAEDA, Hiromi
Japanese Religions
Imperial Authority and Local Shrines: Institutionalization of Shinto by the Yoshida House

SCHOMBURG, Susan
Islam/Hinduism
Reviving Religion: The Qadiri Sufi Order, Popular Devotion to Sufi Saint Muhyiuddin "Abdul Qadir al-Gilani and Processes of "Islamization" in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka

SHUKLA-BHATT, Neelima
Indian Religion
Nectar of Bhakti: Devotional Songs of Gujarati Saint-poet Narasinha Mehta

2002-03

GHANNEABASSIRI, Kambiz 
Islam
Three Conceptions of Justice in Early Islam: Toward Understanding the Role of Religion in the History of Muslim Societies

KAO, Grace
Religion and Philosophy
Grounding Human Rights in a Pluralist World: Assessing the Strategies of Minimalism

REIN, Nathan
History of Christianity
Religion and Violence in the Schmalkaldic War, 1546-47

VARGAS, Ivette
Buddhism
Falling to Pieces, Emerging Whole: Suffering Illness and Healing Renunciation in the Life of Gelongma Palmo

2001-02

LAWRENCE, Lisa
Religion and Celtic
The Irish and the Incarnation: Images of Christ in the Old Irish Poems of Blathmac

McCLINTOCK, Sara
Buddhism
Omniscience and the Rhetoric of Reason in the Tattvasamgraha and the Tattvasamgraphapanjika

PETRELLA, Ivan
Religion and Law
Liberation, Democracy and Capitalism: A Study of the Role of Historical Projects in Latin American Liberation Theology

VIEFHUES, Ludger
Religion and Philosophy
Cavell, the Skeptic and the Diva: The Human Self Between Gender and Transcendence

WHITE, Christopher
History of Christianity
"Working Out Our Own Salvation": A History of Liberal Protestant Faith and Religious Practice, 1844-1893

WU, Jiang
Chinese Religions
Orthodoxy, Controversy, and the Transformation of Chan Buddhism in Seventeenth Century China

YAGI, Kumiko
Islam
Naguib Mahfouz’s ‘Socialistic Sufism’

 

Th.D. Dissertation Titles

2009-2010

KIM, Joseph J.
“What is This World?”:  An Early Christian Narrative of the Universal Spread of the Spirit-Accompanied Word

MOZINA< David J.
Quelling the Divine:  The Performance of a Talisman in Contemporary Thunder Ritual

2008-2009

CHANG, Peter
A Comparative Study of Bishop Joseph Butler and Wang Yang-ming’s Conception of Conscience

ITTZES, Gabor
The Doctrine of the Soul’s Immortality in Sixteenth-Century German Lutheran Theology

LEE, Simon
Jesus’ Transfiguration and the Believers’ Transfiguration: A Study of the Transfiguration and Its Development in Early Christian Writings

McINROY, Mark
Perceiving Splendor: The “Doctrine of the Spiritual Senses” in Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theological Aesthetics

MOORE, Brenna
Leaning over the Abyss: Raissa Maritain (1883-1960) and the French Catholic Revival

RICE, Christian
For the Common Moral Benefit: Thinking Through the conditions Necessary to Secure the Moral Priority and Fixity of Individual Rights

2007-2008

DANIEL-HUGHES, Carly
Gender is Secured to Them: Discourse on the Body and Women's Practice in Tertullian

ELLISON, Linda
Abortion and the Politics of God: Patient Narratives and Public Rhetoric in the American Abortion Debate

FISHER, Linford
Traditionary Religion: The Great Awakening and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Southern New England, 1736-1776

HINKLE, Christopher
Secularization Troubles: Sociology and Liberal Protestantism

JONES FARMER, Tamsin
Apparent Darkenss: Jean-Luc Marion's Retrieval of Greek Apophatic Tradition

LEE, Simon
Jesus' Transfiguration and the Believers' Transformation: A Study of the Transfiguration and Its Later Interpretations

PARTRIDGE, Cameron
Transfiguring Sexual Difference in Maximus Confessor

SENTILLES, Sarah
Just Looking: Theological Language, Ethics, and Photographs of Violence

STANG, Charles
No Longer I: Dionysius the Areopagite, Paul the Apophasis of the Self

LANDAU, Brent
The Sages and the Star-Child: An Introduction to the Revelation of the Magi, and Ancient Christian Apocryphon

2006-2007

DOBE, Tim
Faqirs in the Colony: Rama Tirtha, Sundar Singh and Comparative Sainthood in the Punjab (1849-1929)

2005-06

BILLINGS, Todd
Calvin, Participation and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in  Union with Christ

BUGG, Laura
Baptism, Bodies, and Bonds: The Rhetoric of Empire in Colossians

GOERING, Greg Schmidt
To Whom Has Wisdom’s Root Been Revealed?: Ben Sira and the Election of Israel

LLANOS, Christopher
Catholic Social Thought, Regional Economic Integration and Immigration Policy: Reconstructing Catholic Social Thinking Regarding the Right to Freedom of Movement

MARTINEAU, Fay
Envisioning Heaven with Faith, Imagination, and Historical Relevance: Selected Writings from Early and Medieval Christianity

MILLER, LINDA
Divinity, Difference, and Democracy: A Critical Materialist Reading of Luce Irigaray’s Politics of Incarnation

PLAYOUST, Catherine
Lifted up from the Earth: The Ascension of Jesus and the Heavenly Ascents of Early Christians

SHORT, Randall
The Story of David’s Rise as Political Apology: A Reconsideration

WHITEHEAD, Deborah
A Mediating Way of Thinking: Rhetoric, Gender, and Religion in the American Pragmatist Tradition

2004-05

COOPER, Valerie
Word, Like Fire: The Biblical Hermeneutics of Maria Stewart

CURTIS, Heather
The Lord for the Body: Pain, Suffering and the Practice of Divine Healing in Late Nineteenth Century American Protestantism

DEWITT-KNAUTH, Robin
The Jubilee Transformation: From Social Welfare to Hope of Restoration to Eschatological Salvation

DUBOVSKY, Peter
A Study of the Neo-Assyrian Intelligence Services and Their Significance for 2 Kings 18-19

EID, Talal
Marriage, Divorce, and Child Custody as Experienced by American Muslims: Religious, Social, and Legal Considerations

FRECHETTE, Christopher
The Name of the Ritual: Investigating Ancient Mesopotamian “Hand-lifting” Rituals with Implications for the Interpretation of Genre in the Psalms

KIM, Nami
Constructing “Asian Women”: A Critical Examination of Cultural-Theological Rhetoric

LUIJENDIJK, Annemarie
Fragments from Oxyrhynchus:  A Case Study in Early Christian Identity

SCHIFFERDECKER, Kathryn
Out of the Whirlwind: Creation Theology in the Book of Job

YOUNG, Malcolm
One World at a Time: Henry David Thoreau’s Religious Practices

2003-04

BODMAN, Whitney
Comparative Religion
The Poetics of Iblis: Qur’anic Narrative as Theology

IZUTSU, Margaret
Comparative Religion
The Geography of Grieving: Exploring Bereavement with the Compass of Japanese Confucian Rites

KIM, David K.
Theology
Politics and Religion: The Religious Significance of Charles Taylor and Judith Butler on Agency

SHERROD, Marc
History of Christianity
That Great and Awful Change: Death and Protestant Practical Theology in the American Northeast, 1700-1900

STEIN, Valerie
Hebrew Bible
Anti-cultic Theology in Biblical Interpretation: A Study of Isaiah 66:1-4 and Its Reception

YIP, Francis
Theology
Toward a Critique of Capitalism as Quasi-Religion: A Study of Paul Tillich’s Critical Interpretation of Capitalism and Modernity 2002-03

ABRAHAM, Susan
Theology
Karl Rahner’s Theology of Freedom in a Postcolonial Context

MANTER, Bette
Theology
Toward a Pragmatic Theology of Reconciliation:  An Examination of Atonement in Josiah Royce

PEARSON, Lori
Theology
From Essence to Synthesis: Ernst Troeltsch as Historian and Theorist of Christianity

2001-02

BOYER, Ernest
Theology
"What is Religion?":  Shaftesbury, Schleiermacher, and the Enlightenment Sources of Schleiermacher's Question

CHAPMAN, Cynthia
Hebrew Bible
The Gendered Language of Warfare in the Israelite/Assyrian Encounter

DUBOIS, Joel
Comparative Religion
The Hidden Life of Brahman: Uncovering Traces of Sankara’s Vedanta in Contemporary Karnataka

JOHNSON-DEBAUFRE, Melanie
New Testament and Christian Origins
It's the End of the World as We Know It: Eschatology, Q, and the Construction of Christian Origins

MATLESS, Sally
Theology
Jonathan Edwards' Relational Metaphysics of Love

NASRALLAH, Laura
New Testament and Christian Origins
'An Ecstasy of Folly': Rhetorical Strategies in Early Christian Debates over Prophecy

NIENHUIS, Nancy
Religion, Gender and Culture
Neighbors and Other Strangers: A Critical Feminist Liberation Theology of the Neighbor and Welfare Reform

TANIGUCHI, Yuko
New Testament and Christian Origins
To Lead Quiet and Peaceable Lives: A Rhetorical Analysis of the First Letter of Timothy

2000-01

CAPONI, Francis
Theology
Karl Rahner's Theory of Religious Language

COBLE, Christopher
History of Christianity
Where Have All the Young People Gone? The Christian Endeavor Movement and the Training of Protestant Youth, 1881-1918

FULLAM, Lisa
Ethics
The Virtue of Humility: A Reconstruction Based in Thomas Aquinas

HILL FLETCHER, Jeannine
Religion and Society
Ultimacy and Identity: Karl Rahner and George Lindbeck on Religious Pluralism

REVERING, Alan
Theology
Social Criticism and Eschatology in M. Walzer and J.B. Metz

WARREN, David
New Testament and Christian Origins 
The Text of the Apostle in the Second Century: A Contribution to the History of its Reception