Thesiss

Though systems regulating purity and pollution are found in almost every culture and across historical time periods, and though the similarities among the purity systems of different cultures have been noticed, the field of comparative religion has failed to develop sophisticate…

niddahThis study of religious change explores how the dialogue with secular, "western," sensibilities shapes a traditional social order. Specifically, I examine how orthodox Jews in Israel negotiate their participation in Israeli culture and its major social institutions while a…

The most recent studies on the Islamic law of ritual purity argue, following Mary Douglas, that the underlying logic of the system is the reassertion of conscious control over the body after violations of its boundaries. This work argues that, while this theme is discernible in …

The Enriched Xenon Observatory (EXO) is an experiment which aims to observe the neutrinoless double beta decay of 136 Xe. The measurement of this decay would give information about the absolute neutrino mass and whether or not the neutrino is its own antiparticle. Since this is …

Once I Believed: Evangelical Sexuality, Critical Thinking, and the Process of Change questions the boundaries of literacy studies scholarship on home discourse communities, using religious students as a case study for groups that may or may not sit outside the boundaries of incl…

For over half a century, academic scholarship of the Babylonian Talmud (Bavli) has focused primarily on the dynamics of this work's internal textual (lower and higher criticism) and hermeneutical phenomena. This dissertation participates in a recent scholarly endeavor to conscio…