Thesiss

The usage of the term “sacred” is often unclear and is usually regarded as the same as “holy." According to scholar Matthew T. Evans’ study of the theory of religion which was established by French sociologist David Émile Durkheim, there are three categories of the meaning of th…

The autonomy of the shari ` a courts in Ottoman-Egypt during the 16th and 17th centuries, is the subject of this thesis. Specifically, it pursues the question of formalization (the incorporation of courts and their functionaries into the civil apparatus of the state) and, relate…

Although much research exists regarding the performance practice of European sacred music in the colonial era, little research has been available regarding the performance practice of sacred polyphony in colonial Mexico. Music of this colonial era is often ignored or redefined t…

Ahl-i Haqq (Yārisān) is a unique religion with the fundamental teaching that the power of God, following the original stage of nothingness or absolute oneness, manifests itself in a cyclic manner in seven layers. This sevenfold power of God is called the Haftan. The first comple…

This thesis seeks to demonstrate the extent to which secularizing tendencies are present in Russian vitae of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to examine what role these tendencies play in the evolution of sacred life-writing and also consider how they reflect changing pe…

The focus of this dissertation is the sacred choral compositions of three of the composers active in the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music, a group dedicated to the study and creation of Jewish music in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Although their st…

How can readers identify a text as being "Jewish" if there is no Jewish language? How can they explain the term "Jewish literature" if there is no Jewish nation and if an author can declare himself Jewish while denying any relationship to Judaism? This study seeks to clarify a J…

This dissertation is a hermeneutic phenomenological study of synagogue-school teachers of Jewish sacred text. The phenomenological question that orients this study asks, What is the lived experience of teaching sacred text in a Conservative synagogue-school? This study takes pla…

My dissertation, Sacred Subjects: Gender and Nation in South Asian Literature , intervenes in the ongoing debates in postcolonial and feminist studies about the mapping of woman onto nation. There has been a tendency to read the land as female in both colonial and postcolonial d…

In addition to contributing to all major compositional genres, Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) was a prolific composer of choral music. In total, Schnittke's output contains eighteen pieces for chorus plus two stage works that use a tape of mixed chorus. A detailed survey of Schnit…

A Celebration of Psalms is a musical setting of Psalms 23, 22, and 130. They are scored for mixed chorus, vocal soloists, and chamber orchestra. As the Psalms are the Scriptures which perhaps most strongly connect the many Jewish and Christian worship traditions, this work emplo…

Purpose: The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to describe the essence of a sacred moment for a nurse during patient care, and to explore the impact of the phenomena on nursing practice and commitment to the profession. There were two specific aims and four main …

An existential and theological crisis immediately followed the American Civil War causing many southerners to lose their faith in institutions, including organized religion. As white working-class and middle-class southerners in the Georgia piedmont recovered from the war, burge…

Employing interdisciplinary literatures on migration, kinship, race, place, and religion, this dissertation explores the literal and metaphorical establishment of a city called Zion in a zone of migration between Peru and Utah. Zion, in its Mormon instantiation, is central to th…

This study is an initial examination of the dichotomy of the sacred and the profane in early country music, during the years 1921–1957. These years represent the formational years of country music when the genre was first recorded, until the beginning of the modern period of cou…

In their attempts to explain the dysfunctions of modernity in Latin America, theorists see it as a failed project (Néstor García-Canclini), a chronic deferral of the modern (Aníbal Quijano), or blame residual colonial practices (Walter Mignolo). Rather than continuing this obses…

Composing music for worship in the twenty-first century is intriguing in that there are so many traditions, styles, genres and forms to draw on for inspiration. Even modern idioms (such as Contemporary Christian Music) have a history and tradition that one may study and emulate.…

Numinous experiences (defined in this study as direct, unwilled experiences which evoke a sense of being gripped or seized by a powerful affective state of trembling fascination in relation to a mysterious non-ego ‘other’) are described as having both a fragmenting and healing e…

The Dissertation utilizes the concept of "Sacred Global Cities" to analyze Rome (Italy), Mecca (Saudi Arabia), and Jerusalem (Israel). It expands the notion of national imagined communities to include global imagined communities epitomized by Islam and Christianity. Looked at in…

This dissertation focuses on the transformation of Islamic theology through the experience of everyday life and politics in contemporary Delhi, as well as the changing role of nature and ecology in the experience of the sacred, across religious communities, in the post-colonial …