Copyright (c) 2013 Macalester College All rights reserved. http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/reli_honors Recent documents in Honors Projects en-us Sun, 19 May 2013 01:38:24 PDT 3600 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/reli_honors/10 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/reli_honors/10 Fri, 17 May 2013 10:10:17 PDT Hasidic Judaism emerged as a Jewish revivalist movement in early eighteenth century Eastern Europe. Hasidism’s founder, the Ba’al Shem Tov (Besht), sought to redefine spiritual attainment by developing a unique attitude toward food, sexuality, and the body. Unlike the Kabbalists that came before him, the Besht did not regard material elements as impediments to the divine. Rather, he believed they were useful in expanding relationships between God and man. As the movement grew, however, the ascetic focus of many Hasidim began to shift from practices centered on worship through corporeality to practices based in the annihilation of the self. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, leaders of the movement developed more radical ascetic conceptions of the body, essentially reversing previous Beshtian teachings. This paper explores the practices and teachings that transformed the movement from one based in joy and ecstatic worship to one based in self-denial.

]]> Max L. Edwards http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/reli_honors/9 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/reli_honors/9 Wed, 19 Oct 2011 12:37:20 PDT Daniel Rocklin http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/reli_honors/8 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/reli_honors/8 Mon, 18 Oct 2010 08:01:44 PDT Ryland Witzler http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/reli_honors/7 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/reli_honors/7 Thu, 03 Dec 2009 07:29:46 PST Elliott Niblock http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/reli_honors/6 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/reli_honors/6 Wed, 07 Oct 2009 05:28:58 PDT “What should the role of Islam be in American public life?” Rather than answer this question through broad, theoretical discourse, I turn to a case study of Somali Muslims in a Midwestern charter school. Through this case study, I analyze how individual Muslims, tied to communities and Allah in diverse ways, actively negotiate how to incorporate their religious practices into public space. I argue that by examining specific strategies used by individuals in an actual school setting, as opposed to making generalizing assumptions, one can better understand that Islam already plays a variety of constantly changing roles in American public life.

]]> Elizabeth J. Baer http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/reli_honors/5 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/reli_honors/5 Thu, 19 Jun 2008 05:47:47 PDT The Pink Nun is an underground feminist performance artist, chastity advocate and pious evangelical Christian. In her artwork, the Pink Nun ironically deploys the methodologies and visual vocabulary of late American consumer capitalism, such that the evangelical Christian values of chastity and sexual purity become products to be bought and sold. In this unorthodox appropriation of capitalism, the Pink Nun finds an alternative way to preach her message, engage a self-announcing secular culture, and perhaps ultimately “harvest souls.” I argue that religion here does not perform in a conventionally “religious” way; it may be manifest more subtly, entwined with and disguised by the overarching economic system.

]]> Sonia M. Hazard http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/reli_honors/4 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/reli_honors/4 Wed, 26 Mar 2008 06:26:23 PDT Ashley Geisendorfer http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/reli_honors/3 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/reli_honors/3 Fri, 14 Mar 2008 09:12:46 PDT A study of a renewed ijtihad among Muslim women in the last century reveals a strong reliance on the veil symbol as a vehicle for asserting Islamic Feminist hermeneutics. The hermeneutics of these scholars shows how differing interpretations of the veil symbol or hijāb breaks open the [Weberian] ‘iron cage’ of ‘veiling essentialism’ posited by traditional male scholars, providing Muslim women with several possible ways of being in society. The veil is an exceptional frame of reference for this project as it is, borrowing Anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s theory; a symbol most closely related to the Muslim woman it has come to signify. In appropriating the veil as the center of their hermeneutical project these women have shown how, in Geertzian fashion, this symbol provides Muslim women a “model of” their situation as is in society and a “model for” how their situation should/could be. This use of symbols allows Islamic feminists to transgress Muslim cultural norms in order to transcend and reconfigure traditional Islamic ethos.

]]> Kimberly T. Wortmann http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/reli_honors/2 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/reli_honors/2 Wed, 25 Apr 2007 05:34:49 PDT Society and parents continue to ensure that American children are familiar with the stories of the bible. The bible is part of the American cultural milieu and has been inculcated in successive generations through schools and children’s bibles. Parents in the twenty-first century have turned to adapted children’s bibles as the principal means by which to teach their children the bible. This is due in large part to the bible loosing its place in the curriculum of American public schools. This paper examines how children's bibles developed, why teaching the bible has been a priority, and who have been the teachers and adaptors of the bible for children.

]]> Zachary S. Teicher http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/reli_honors/1 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/reli_honors/1 Thu, 04 May 2006 07:04:08 PDT This paper examines anti-Catholicism in Victorian England in conjunction with the birth of modern feminism, the changing nature of women’s roles, and the attendant phenomenon of “convent abuse” tales in popular literature. These tales are distinguished from other forms of anti-Catholicism by their focus on gender and sexual perversity. The convent provides a setting for the complete rejection of traditional Protestant gender roles and the stories betray fear of women’s crossover into a male dominated world. Though I acknowledge these tales as anti-Catholic, I reanalyze them as expressions of Protestant unrest over the freedoms women were gaining in the mid-1800s.

]]> Cassandra N. Berman