In recent decades, the idea that moral facts are not discovered but constituted by some hypothetical procedure or the attitudes of rational agents has been gaining support inside and outside of religious ethics. Often referred to as constructivism, this metaethical view proposes that moral facts are constituted by the attitudes of agents, i.e., what people would agree under some rational or idealized procedures of construction, not by facts determined by independent moral reality.

When members of the early rabbinic group created the Jewish legal text known as the Mishnah in the late second or early third century, the concept of heresy was relatively common in the wider cultural discourse of the Roman world. Christian apologists, among others, frequently employed the Greek term hairesis (“heresy”/“heretic,” originally meaning “school of thought”/“adherent”) as part of their larger projects of drawing boundaries, defining identities, and making an argument for the authority of their own ideas and practices.

Toward the end of his nine-year tenure as Fellow, Thomas Hooker awoke in his sleeping quarters at Emmanuel College terrified by a sense of “the Just Wrath of Heaven.” His God, the same God in whom he had always put his trust, had turned against him and was furious at his sinfulness. Dreading divine punishment, Hooker found himself “fill'd. . . with most unusual Degrees of Horror and Anguish.” Alone in the night, Hooker was haunted by the anger of a terrifying God.

According to rabbinic literature of late antiquity, a Jew could be excommunicated or banished from the community for around twenty-four spiritual and social violations. The Talmuds’ list of sins that necessitated the separation of a transgressor includes, for instance, profaning the name of God, selling forbidden meat, insulting one's master, and obstructing justice. Once condemned, the sinner was physically isolated from other people and prohibited from the same actions that a mourner was, such as cutting one's hair or wearing phylacteries. After the sinner repented or a certain amount of time passed, the ban was then lifted, typically by the master who had initiated it. Indeed, the master-disciple relationship is often at the center of banning and cursing in rabbinic literature. Although the rabbinic concept of excommunication draws from earlier biblical and Second Temple precedents, such as the book of Ezra, it is in many ways a late antique innovation featuring prominently in Babylonia. The reason that bans and excommunication emerge as a salient feature of Jewish society in this period is related to the rabbis’ historical contexts within Roman Palestine and Sasanian Babylonia. As I show in this article, exegesis and history both played a role in the formation of the talmudic laws of banishment.

When we read early Christian narratives such as the Acts of Paul and Thecla, what is the relationship between the characters portrayed in the story and the “real-life” persons and groups who composed and transmitted the work? In the second-century Greek account, Thecla abandons her fiancé and family to follow Paul and his ascetic message. She endures a trial by fire in Iconium, resists sexual assault on the road to Antioch, and survives attacks by beasts in the Antiochene arena, all the while supported by a wealthy widow as her patron, a friendly lioness as her protector, and a chorus of women in the stadium who extol her perseverance and cry out to the governor for mercy. In the end, after baptizing herself, Thecla is released, dresses herself like a man, and begins preaching the gospel as an itinerant apostle.

The Hellenization of Christianity is a long-standing and notoriously contentious historiographical construct in early Christian studies. While it has been deployed in surprisingly fluid ways, most scholars associate the thesis with Adolf von Harnack, for whom it acquired a decidedly critical valence. The “Hellenic spirit”—a concept Harnack usually left undefined—constituted a threat to the undogmatic gospel of Jesus. Whenever this adversarial Hellenic spirit triumphed, as it inevitably did, it corroded an authentic living Christianity into an institutionalized, dogmatic religion. For many others, both before and after Harnack, the Hellenization of Christianity has signaled a similar narrative of decline. The teachings and way of life that marked an authentic Christianity often stood in a disjunctive relationship with Greco-Roman culture, especially its philosophies. The influence of the latter precipitated a debasement of Christianity, the ossification of its teachings, or more seriously, the infiltration of heresy.

A trustworthy guide to all students of Christian antiquity, Peter Brown is Princeton University's Rollins Professor Emeritus of History. Born in Dublin in 1935, Brown was influenced early on by the L’École des Annales, a group who took its name from their work in the journal Annales d'Histoire Economique et Sociale. These forward-thinking scholars sought to break from traditional historiography in order to pay attention to all levels of society, taking into account not so much a seemingly monolithic doctrine, which emerges only retrospectively, but the collective concerns of a larger and more complex society. L’École des Annales formed Brown in such a way that he has helped generations of academics pay attention to more than just major players and canonical doctrines. Rather, they read the traditional narratives in the contexts of wider cultural, economic, demographic, religious and familial concerns, mundane matters unavoidably shaping how any group of persons thinks of historical issues. He accordingly opens this gargantuan work by admitting his debt to modern French historiography—singling out the sociologist and philologue, Louis Gernet (d. 1962)—who stressed how the memorable and well-cataloged aspects of a people actually invent nothing. Rather, Gernet asserted, the elite portion of any given people reflects and thus captures what the many below hold dear. Given this lifelong influence, it is no surprise that Brown would eventually turn his erudition into a study on a common universal that instantaneously unites as well as divides, one that characterizes both elite and plebe alike—money.

This dissertation examines the explicit and implicit currency of indigenous religious thought on political, moral, and social formations from precolonial through colonial to postcolonial Ghana. It advances new answers to debates in Ghana about the role, if any, indigenous religion has to play in a modern Christian-dominated public sphere that simultaneously defines itself as secular by situating these debates in the history of the suppression and appropriation of so-called “undesirable customs” and their agents by both British and Ghanaian government officials. Based on archival research (colonial reports, government records, legal documents, newspapers, diaries, etc.) and a dozen oral interviews (with former and current politicians, indigenous religious priests, chiefs, and elders), (Un)Desirable Customs argues that despite its “unpopularity” and decline, indigenous religion critically shaped the construction of the colonial and postcolonial Ghanaian state. I highlight the inherent paradox in how the state morally and culturally stigmatized indigenous religious beliefs and practices, in an attempt to perform certain conceptions of secular modernity and Christian morality, yet, at the same time, appropriated indigenous religious rituals and symbols. These contradictory measures, I argue, are better understood as strategies of purifications that the state has enacted and continues to perform on itself in its attempt to define itself as “modern.” My study fundamentally shifts the attention from Christianity and Islam in relation to politico-moral formations to a focus on indigenous religion.