Religious Studies Publications (UMKC)
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Items in this collection are the scholarly output of the Center for Religious Studies faculty, staff, and students, either alone or as co-authors, and which may or may not have been published in an alternate format.
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Item Until We See His Blessed Face: Sight as Privileged Insight in the Spirituality of Margery Kempe(Interdisciplinary Doctoral Student Council at the University of Missouri- Kansas City, 2009) Marksbury, Erika; Religious StudiesThis paper explores how, despite an inherited Christian tradition that worked to elevate hearing and denigrate sight in an unofficial hierarchy of the senses, the fifteenth-century English mystic Margery Kempe came to privilege sight as a vehicle through which to achieve intimacy with Jesus. The paper suggests that for Kempe, sight gave way to vision, and this experience was achieved through a pattern of ritualized weeping. While some of her critical contemporaries viewed Kempe as an anomaly, this spiritual pattern locates her in a long and wide tradition of religious men and women who receive, both literally and metaphorically, new vision and insight following experiences of weeping.Item Penitence, Punishment, and Pain: Negotiating Personal Authority in Francis Lathom's The Midnight Bell(Interdisciplinary Doctoral Student Council at the University of Missouri- Kansas City, 2008) Condit, Lorna Anne; Religious StudiesFrancis Lathom's novel, The Midnight Bell (1798), uses conventional gothic themes of crime, guilt, and punishment to interrogate gender roles and to explore how individuals may conform to, reject, or subvert mechanisms of social control in order to preserve their autonomy and sense of self. This paper examines the treatment of two characters, Countess Anna and Count Byroff, who each commit murder and come under the auspices of the Catholic penitential system and French judicial system, respectively. For Anna, voluntary self-flagellation provides an alternative form of self-authorization and subjectivity based on the special status of Catholic female religiosity, while Byroff's state-controlled subjugation results in his being objectified and feminized. While the subversive vision of male and female power dynamics is ultimately reversed, I argue that the novel's radical potential is never entirely contained, the high cost of the “happy ending” interrogating the social values on which such an ending depends.Item Diverse Struggles to Preserve Tribal Identity on the Plains: Religion as Survival Strategy in the Late Nineteenth Century among the Lakota and Osage(Interdisciplinary Doctoral Student Council at the University of Missouri- Kansas City, 2007) Riggs, Michael S.; Religious StudiesItem Quest for the Legitimizing Jesus Deployment of a Contested Symbol by a Non-traditional Religious Movement(Interdisciplinary Doctoral Student Council at the University of Missouri- Kansas City, 2007) Fugitt, J. Jeff; Religious StudiesThere have always been alternative interpretations of Jesus throughout Christian history. The meaning of such a symbol is never static. However, a general theological consensus had maintained an essentially hegemonic position throughout much of the Christianized world for most of the centuries of the Common Era. Jesus as an authoritative religious symbol has been destabilized by modern scholarship. Popular books and movies that explore and experiment with variant interpretations have proliferated in recent years. This contested but still powerful symbol is reinterpreted and employed by many groups, including a non-Christian religious movement based in Salt Lake City. Even though this group does not employ the traditional meanings associated with Jesus, by constructing alternative interpretations they distinguish their identity boundaries with reference to the dominant culture, create plausibility for a different worldview, and lend legitimacy to their movement.