Harvard Theological Review articles from October 2011

Harvard Theological Review archives from October 2011

Evil, friendship, and iconic realism in Augustine's Confessions.(Critical essay)
October 1, 2011... "The icon and the idol determine two manners of being... not two classes of beings." (1) * Evil's Conundrum Early in Confessions, Augustine offers two conceptual frameworks for understanding evil. (2) One account provides a psychological...

The view from across the Euphrates.(Euphrates River)(Critical essay)
October 1, 2011... * Introduction This essay is about broadening the perspective from which we view the origins of Christianity. The vehicle is a gospel by now perhaps as familiar to students of the New Testament as the canonical four, the Gospel of Thomas. It...

Comfort, o comfort, Corinth: grief and comfort in 2 Corinthians 7:5-13a.(Essay)
October 1, 2011... Paul's correspondence with the Corinthian congregation chronicles the story of an absent leader trying to encourage an often wayward congregation to hold fast to his message of God's reconciling action in Jesus. As the conclusion to 2 Cor...

Apocalypse now: the state of Apocalyptic studies near the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century.(Essay)
October 1, 2011... Apocalyptic studies flourished in the 1970s and early 1980s. This interest probably had something to do with the social and political upheavals of the 1960s and their effects, but I won't go into that issue today. In 1970, Klaus Koch's book...

Theology and the historical-critical study of the Bible.(Critical essay)
October 1, 2011... One salient characteristic of our current situation is the emergence of a growing consensus among theologians and biblical scholars alike that the time has come to "dethrone" historical criticism as the reigning paradigm of scriptural exegesis...

J Mary Margaret Anderson [Ph.D.]: Thou art: on representation of the word and the incarnation of the human subject; a Christological aesthetics.(Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations)(Report)
October 1, 2011... THOU ART is an interdisciplinary and christological aesthetics that theorizes an integral relation among Christ, representation, and the formation of human subjectivity. Through a critical poetics it addresses the space of difference between a...

Brian R. Doak [Ph.D.]: The last of the Rephaim: conquest and cataclysm in the heroic ages of ancient Israel.(Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations)(Report)
October 1, 2011... This dissertation explores the role of giants in the narrative and historiographic worlds of symbol, geography, and religion in ancient Israel. The Nephilim, Anaqim, Rephaim, Emim, Zamzumim/Zuzim, some Gibborim, and other individuals (e.g.,...

Eve Samara Feinstein [Ph.D.]: Sexual pollution in the Hebrew Bible.(SUMMARIES OF DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS)(Report)(Brief article)
October 1, 2011... This dissertation explores the use of pollution language in the Hebrew Bible to describe problematic sexual relationships and their effects. It argues that while the idea of sexual pollution shares a conceptual framework with other uses of...

Aryay Bennett Finkelstein [Ph.D.]: Julian among Jews, Christians, and "Hellenes" in Antioch: Jewish practice as a guide to "Hellenes" and a goad to Christians.(SUMMARIES OF DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS)(Report)
October 1, 2011... Emperor Julian the Apostate ruled the Roman Empire between 361 and 363 C.E. in the midst of its Christianization. Born and raised a Christian, Julian turned to theurgic neoplatonism and converted to Mithraism. As emperor he set out on a...

David C. Flatto [Ph.D.]: Between royal absolutism and an independent judiciary: the evolution of separation of powers in biblical, second temple, and rabbinic texts.(SUMMARIES OF DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS)(Report)
October 1, 2011... Even as Jewish political sovereignty waned during Late Antiquity, Judaism experienced a profound flourishing in the legal sphere. Confronting a changing political landscape, while encountering distinctive Greco-Roman power structures, Jewish...

Philip Francis [Th.D.]: We dive and reappear in new places: aesthetic experience and fundamentalism undone.(SUMMARIES OF DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS)(Report)(Brief article)
October 1, 2011... The stories of these men and women come to me firsthand, in the thousands of pages of memoirs they have written for me and in the hundreds of hours of conversation we have shared. I discovered their names in the alumni lists of the Bob Jones...

George J. Gonzalez [Th.D.]: The spiritual disciplines of contemporary business management at seeing things whole: the lived metaphors of shape-shifting capital.(SUMMARIES OF DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS)(Report)
October 1, 2011... This dissertation applies a phenomenological and existential ethnographic method to encounter and engage the formal theology and ritual practices of one group of workplace reformers that is comprised of business leaders, organizational managers,...

Shai A. Held [Ph.D.]: Reciprocity and responsiveness: self-transcendence and the dynamics of covenant in the theology and spirituality of Abraham Joshua Heschel.(SUMMARIES OF DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS)(Report)
October 1, 2011... This dissertation seeks to fill a major lacuna in the scholarship on Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972), one of the most influential Jewish thinkers in modern times. Although academic study of Heschel's work has burgeoned in recent years, nearly...

Mari Johanna Jyvasjarvi [Ph.D.]: Fragile virtue: interpreting women's monastic practice in early medieval India.(SUMMARIES OF DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS)(Report)
October 1, 2011... This dissertation examines the representations of nuns in Indian Buddhist and Jain monastic commentaries from the sixth and seventh centuries C.E. Although these texts comment extensively on the rules for nuns in the two traditions, they have...

Marcie E. Lenk [Ph.D.]: The "apostolic constitutions": Judaism and anti-Judaism in the construction of Christianity.(SUMMARIES OF DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS)(Report)(Brief article)
October 1, 2011... Because of its anti-Jewish rhetoric, the Apostolic Constitutions, composed in fourth-century Antioch, has been classified by some scholars as part of the "Adversus Ioudaeos" literature ubiquitous among early Christian writings. At the same time,...

F. Dominic Longo [Ph.D.]: Spiritual grammar: a comparative theological study of Jean Gerson's "Donatus moralizatus" and "Abd al-Karim al-Qushayri's "Nahw al-qulub".(SUMMARIES OF DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS)(Report)
October 1, 2011... This dissertation is a comparative theological study of a Christian text and an Islamic text, which, though seemingly unrelated, share a commonality that allows one text to illuminate the other. The first is Donatus moralizatus by Catholic...

Piotr Jozef Malysz [Th.D.]: "Elementally interrupted": divine and human freedom in the thought of Eberhard Jungel.(SUMMARIES OF DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS)(Report)
October 1, 2011... The principal goal of this study is to engage Eberhard Jungel's views on freedom and, with the help of this engagement, to think through the intimate connection between the doctrine of God and anthropology. This larger goal contains within it...

Zachary A. Matus [Ph.D.]: Heaven in a bottle: Franciscan apocalypticism and the elixir, 1250-1360.(SUMMARIES OF DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS)(Report)
October 1, 2011... This dissertation examines the Franciscan engagement with medicinal alchemy between 1250 and 1360. It investigates the works of three generations of Franciscan alchemical and apocalyptic authors: Roger Bacon (ca. 1214/20--ca. 1292), Vitalis of...

Shady Nasser [Ph.D.]: The transmission of variant readings of the Qur'an: the problem of Tawatur and the emergence of Shawadhdh.(SUMMARIES OF DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS)(Report)
October 1, 2011... This dissertation studies the transmission of the variant readings of the Qur'an, the canonization of the system readings, and the emergence of the non-canonical (shawadhdh) readings. I argue that Ibn Mujrahid and the Muslim scholars before him...

James F. Osborne [Ph.D.]: Spatial analysis and political authority in the iron age kingdom of Patina, Turkey.(SUMMARIES OF DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS)(Report)
October 1, 2011... The ancient Near Eastern culture conventionally known as Syro-Hittite flourished in what is today northern Syria and southeastern Turkey during the late second and early first millennia B.C.E. A collection of a dozen or so Syro-Hittite...

Margaret L. Stevenson [Ph.D.]: "This man does many signs" (John 11:47): controversies over raising the dead.(SUMMARIES OF DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS)(Report)
October 1, 2011... This dissertation examines a controversial moment in the Gospel of John--the raising of Lazarus--in light of three interrelated discourses in antiquity, which counterpose "miracle" and "magic." Part I, "Prophecy and False Prophecy," traces a...

Wei Jen Teng [Ph.D.]: Recontextualization, exegesis, and logic: Kuiji's (632-682) methodological restructuring of Chinese Buddhism.(SUMMARIES OF DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS)(Report)(Brief article)
October 1, 2011... This dissertation is a close examination of Kuiji's (632-682) endeavor to restructure the methodology of the Chinese Buddhist intellectual practice of his time. More precisely, it focuses on the three methodological dimensions that I found to be...

Richard Jude Thompson [Ph.D.]: The deuteronomistic covenant and neo-Assyrian imperial ideology: a study of the deuteronomistic history in its historical context.(SUMMARIES OF DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS)(Report)(Brief article)
October 1, 2011... This study investigates Martin Noth's conclusion that the Deuteronomistic History (DH) portrays the people of Israel as having committed apostasy, ceased to obey the law code of YHWH, and thus lost their land. Scholars have challenged Noth's...

Mara Willard [Ph.D.]: "recasting the old questions": theological reliance and renunciation in the political thought of Hannah Arendt.(SUMMARIES OF DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS)(Report)
October 1, 2011... This dissertation examines the role of religious ideas in the work of Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), a German-Jewish refugee and leading twentieth-century political theorist. It shows that Arendt's relationship to religious thought and language is...

Books received.
October 1, 2011... Agbonkhianmeghe, E. Orobator, ed. Reconciliation, Justice, and Peace: The Second African Synod. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2011. 259 pp. n.p. pb. Anlezark Daniel, ed. and trans. Old Testament Narratives. DOML 7. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval...