Department of Religious Studies

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Browsing Department of Religious Studies by Subject "Rhetoric"

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    Constructing conscience: freedom and self-governance in colonial New England
    (University of Alabama Libraries, 2020) McMurray, Keeley Malone; Altman, Michael J.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    American politics and law, like other liberal democracies, couches itself in the protection of the free individual, one who possesses both “beliefs” and the unalienable right to those “beliefs.” The “freedom of religion” guaranteed to U.S. citizens in the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses of the First Amendment prioritizes this supposedly private and transcendent realm of “sincerity,” “faith,” and “experience,” kept separate from the contextual and temporal world of society and politics. Historians of American religion, and scholars of religion more broadly, have long taken this “interiority” rhetoric to be self-evident, ignoring the prescriptive implications of positing such an interiority at all. Rather than understanding these rhetorics of “interiority” as referencing a non-empirical and apolitical reality of autonomous “selfhood,” this paper will argue that the constitutional protection of the autonomous individual is constitutive of a particular type of political subjectivity, one that allows for those in power to manage dissent by authorizing some differences and marginalizing others. I will therefore interrogate the function of institutionalizing such an “interiority” in the first place, in order to understand how and why American society works the way that it does. Using three cases from seventeenth-century New England to better inform contemporary cases involving “conscientious objection,” I will argue that the privatized discourse of “religion,” and thus a discourse of the “self-governing individual,” functions as a tool of governance through the authorization, exclusion, and negotiation of unfalsifiable claims.
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    Theorizing origins: an analysis of descriptions of hybridity in Marian devotional cultures
    (University of Alabama Libraries, 2019) Lawson, Sierra Lynn; McCutcheon, Russell T.; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    Scholars have long been interested in groups whose members describe themselves as devotees of Mary. Yet, in relaying the descriptions of such devotional communities, scholars too often merely repeat the history put forward by the devotees themselves. Scholars’ repetition of the tale of devotional origins provided by their informants—examined here in three separate case studies, each deriving from different periods and geographic regions—problematically reifies our understanding of the past and a group’s development, portraying it as an authentic account of that history. Instead, using recent scholarship on Marian devotional groups as the example, this thesis maintains that scholars should remain critical of the origins accounts provided by the groups they study and remain wary of recreating those narratives in their own descriptions of the groups.