Thesiss

The Social Life of ‘Conscience’: Rhetoric, Sacrifice and Community among Israeli Conscientious Objectors analyzes my long term ethnographic fieldwork with conscientious objectors as they realize, and live through, their refusal to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces. These consc…

The dissertation traces a crucial transformation of the early modern Jesuit (and European) approach to conscience. This revolution involved the confrontation between two divergent ethical rules employed by a person confronting a doubtful moral issue: the medieval rule that one s…

Centering a concept that cuts across categories of analysis and experience, “For Conscience' Sake” looks to the notion of the conscience as a new hermeneutic tool for understanding religious belief, ethical reasoning, and political action. The role of individual moral judgment w…

This dissertation explores the ways in which the Christian doctrine of grace and nature is understood and deployed in the works of John Wesley and Thomas Aquinas. Given the extremely broad nature of this topic, we consider principally their mature works on grace and nature: the …

This dissertation explores the intersection of forgiveness and religion in G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. I argue that religion and forgiveness can be profitably understood as parallel communicative practices through which a community affirms its sense of that which has…