Religious History

Sr. Donna Maria Moses, OP

Having finished the course on Historical Methodology, I want to give a grateful shout to my professor Penelope Moon for her insightful critique and for nudging us along the way in our class discussions.  The course has given me greater clarity about my own historical method.  While I have been trained in postmodern theory and have been writing a ethnographies of consecrated religious life in America, I am still a religious historian called to witness to God’s involvement in human history.  I am setting out flags for a new historical methodology that draws upon anthropology, feminist critical theory and the evolving narrative of the life and work of Jesus Christ.  Like all historians I am grappling with the line between fact and myth, while returning to historic legendary accounts to discover new truths about class, culture, race and gender as it intersects with religious beliefs.  Myth has the power to carry culture and change the fundamental way a society views its values and the heroic adventure of living a life worth living.  As Peter Novick observed, “Myths change, are questioned, or even abandoned, as the needs and purposes of actors change.  Competing values intrude, which may demand modification in previously settled beliefs. For historians, periodic demands for the political mobilization of scholarship produced very serious strains in the myth of objectivity.”¹ New myths arise when the old myths no longer function to carry the values, assumptions and beliefs of a culture.  We are at that point in the present age. Current scientific understandings of the nature of time and space, new perspectives of God as multi-gendered and feminist critical interpretations of mystical writings are giving rise to a new Christian mythology.  This emerging worldview is transforming the study of theology and motivates religious scholars like myself to step beyond the framework that dominated the historicism of the twentieth century.   

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1 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream, 5.