School of Religion Graduate Projects
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Recent Submissions
Item It’s the End of the World as Christian Zionists Know It (and They Feel Fine): Finding the Apocalypse Among the Privileged(2022-08) Alsabagh, Manaal SereenThis project aims to develop a theory of collective memory that is better able to account for the Evangelical employment of apocalyptic themes and tropes, especially as it concerns American politics and policies. This project will demonstrate that the obsession with the apocalyptic imagination among American evangelicals stems from a collective memory in which they view themselves as "Othered" by the greater population that has forsaken their conservative Christian beliefs. Specifically, this paper will investigate how American evangelicals have positioned other states (especially Israel, Iran, and Russia) as personas in the Gog and Magog prophecy (as found in Ezekiel 38-39). It will be shown that standard views of collective memory need to be nuanced in order to understand both why and how Evangelicals have developed this political picture using this apocalyptic myth. For American evangelical Zionists, the United States must actively assist and protect Israel's international security if they wish to avoid God's wrath. Rather than dismiss these politics as an instance of irrational zealotry, this project will show that this position is part of an attempt to develop a collective memory.Item Painting You, Painting Me: Viewing the 'Other' through Gendered-Violence against Indigenous Women and Girls in Kent Monkman's "Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience"(2018-08) Dool, KaceyThis paper presents a critical analysis of the ‘Other’ as a mechanism of hegemonic Eurocentric colonialism. ‘Othering’ as a methodological lens allows for consideration of the complexities of identity politics, in an interdisciplinary manner. Through this interdisciplinary approach, a re-telling and re-consideration of the position of Indigenous Peoples in Canada is possible, engaging in a process of decolonization through ‘resurgent recognition’. The disproportionate gendered-violence perpetrated against Indigenous women and girls in the Canadian context acts as an example of the extent to which the prescription of the ‘Otherness’ distorts power relations: not only does the ‘colonial imagination’ situate the West and European settlement as ‘civilized’, and the Indigenous as ‘savage’, but it also inscribes a heteropatriarichal hierarchy. Through the representational art of Kent Monkman, ‘resurgent recognition’ provides public audiences, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, with the opportunity to reflect and reconsider the past 150 years of colonialism in Canada.Item Sick Religion: Towards a Genealogy of Hysterical Stigmata(2020-08) Maclennan, SamuelIn 2016, a case report of an Italian woman presenting with stigmata, the spontaneous manifestation of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion wounds, graced the pages of the international medical journal, Medicine. In the report, the authors, a group of Italian physicians, warned that as the woman had a “hysterical personality,” she could have easily been encouraged by family members to simulate her wounds for profit and attention. This paper offers a genealogy of the association of stigmata with the diagnosis of hysteria, tracing it from its origins in fin de siècle Paris to its appearance in contemporary medical literature with particular attention to how ‘religion’ may be constructed as ‘sick.’Item Walking with God through Nature: An Examination of John Flavel’s Behavioural Instructions on Matters Related to Christian Piety(2016-07-26) Van Straten, PaulJohn Flavel was a Reformed Puritan of the seventeenth-century who wrote a series of devotional guides that offered instructions drawn from Christian mystical traditions on how to improve religious activities as a means of ecstatically encountering God. Evaluating the efficacy of these instructions from a scientifically-based behavioural perspective, this study has found that Flavel’s techniques were likely helpful to his readers in facilitating socially normative ecstatic experiences through ordinary Christian practice. Furthermore, discovering that Flavel promoted the use of these techniques for engaging with ecological materials in the wilderness and country-side, this essay proposes that Flavel introduced his readers to effectual manners that could help them ecstatically encounter God during the practice of meditational nature-based walks.Item Disciplining Madness, Disciplining Yoga(2013-09-19) Eaton, MarkThis paper will examine contemporary North American yoga, specifically the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Center in Toronto, using theoretical frameworks taken from the work of Michel Foucault. Drawing on his work in Discipline and Punish, it will look at yoga as a modern “carceral” institution. Using Foucault’s analysis in Madness and Civilizaition, this paper will explore how yoga intersects, is some ways, with madness. The underlying argument is that yoga and madness, as discourses, are both based upon institutional disciplining of pre-discursive experiences. This paper contends that the pre-discursive “sources” of experience should not be seen as unified points of origin, but as an underlying “difference”, or capacity to be otherwise. This “difference” points to multiple, undifferentiated, mutual sources of yoga and madness.