Human microbiota encompass the populations of microorganisms that live on and in human organ systems. Importantly, a large proportion of the microbiota lies in the digestive tract. Gut microbes facilitate beneficial, and necessary, metabolic and protective processes within their hosts. Imbalances in gut microbial load or composition may lead to inflammation and changes in intestinal physiology, ultimately impacting whole organism health. Currently, we understand that age-related changes in gut microbiota are a primary source of immune activation. However, the cause-effect relationships between microbiota dynamics, immune activity, and changes in intestinal health are not yet fully understood. The fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, has enabled us to show how chronic immune activation in young flies drives early-onset mortality as well as increased loss of barrier function. Changes in digestive transit and microbial populations are also characteristics of flies that experience immune activation throughout life. Thus, there are clear physiological changes that occur not just with age, but also as a product of immune responses in the fly. A better understanding of microbial and immune pathway dynamics may allow for development of interventions to delay age-related decline.

This dissertation analyzes three important Catholic organizations at the turn of the twentieth century in the United States: the Catholic Theater Movement; the Catholic Summer School; and the Catholic Educational Exhibit at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, Illinois. In studying these three organizations, I rely heavily on the writings of Father John Talbot Smith, an understudied leader in these Catholic endeavors, along with internal organizational records such as ledgers, promotional materials, newspapers, magazines, papal encyclicals, and US Supreme Court decisions which provide helpful information regarding the historical and legal contexts in which these organizations formed. A prolific author and reformer, Smith founded the Catholic Theater Movement and articulated its main goals in a text he published in 1917 titled The Parish Theater. He featured prominently in the organization and leadership of the Catholic Summer School at Lake Champlain, New York, serving as president at the peak of its success in 1905. In 1896, he published a provocative book on Catholic parochial and seminary education titled Our Seminaries: An Essay on Clerical Training which challenged his colleagues to reimagine seminary education as a tool of cultivating healthy, attractive, and well-spoken priests who could, on the one hand, lead outsiders to the Roman Catholic fold in a secular age and, on the other, serve as evidence of the distinct truth, vitality, and strength of the Catholic faith.

In tracing Smith’s leadership in and contribution to Roman Catholic educational and media institutions in the United States, this dissertation intervenes in a historiographical discussion regarding the “Americanist” controversy at the end of the nineteenth century. Scholars have considered how Americanist priests such as Smith advanced a Catholic vision which could appeal to modern audiences without sacrificing Roman Catholicism’s sacramental core while at times attracting strong rebukes from traditional Catholic leaders. This dissertation explores a new angle of the Americanist controversy, analyzing how Smith, with papal support, marketed Roman Catholic sacramentalism as a means of preserving white family structures and patriarchal leadership following the abolition of slavery in the United States. In Catholic theaters, summer schools, parochial schools, and seminaries, Smith believed, along with Pope Leo XIII, that devotions to the Virgin Mary and priestly models of masculine valor could spur the nation toward religious revival and racial purification. Moreover, given the precarious reality of the Vatican’s future following the loss of the Papal States in 1870, I highlight how Smith’s and Leo’s investments in the cultivation of prosperous Euro-American Catholics in the United States became pivotal to Roman Catholicism’s institutional maintenance at the end of the nineteenth century. This dissertation, then, explores how Catholic leaders aimed to build successful Euro-American Catholic families in large part through adopting exclusionary and racist policies in the United States which pitted white Euro-American communities against non-white, and especially Black, populations following the abolition of slavery.

This dissertation also intervenes in theoretical debates regarding the privatization and relativization of religion in a secular age. Scholars have regularly rendered techno-capitalistic modernity as an era of individualization and calculation which has alienated modern humans from premodern forms of community and religious affiliation. As they have done so, they have often represented Catholicism as traditional and “other” in relation to the dominant ethos of modern capitalism. This dissertation traces how John Talbot Smith and other Catholic leaders, in envisioning their religion’s symbols and sacraments in relation to the preservation of Euro-American communities and families, articulated Catholicism’s traditional and sacramental culture as oppositional to “urban” modernity in particular and, in so doing, built and framed Catholic institutions against the “lower” cultures and realities of non-white populations. Instead of studying the capitalistic and technological West as contrary to premodern emotional and communal bonds which an individualizing secular age has reportedly eclipsed, I focus on Euro-American Catholic identity at the turn of the twentieth century as an aesthetic and political project — facilitated through three Catholic organizations — which generated emotional investments in ideas of nature, family, and reproduction which were crucial to the perpetuation of racial capitalism.

Mitochondrial dysfunction, a hallmark of aging and degenerative diseases, increases the production of mitochondrial Reactive Oxygen Spices and decreases the production of ATP. Damage mitochondria can result in the release of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) into the cytosol, where it acts as a damage-associated molecular pattern (DAMP) and triggers the activation of the immune response. Our study demonstrates that as flies age, there is an accumulation of cytosolic mtDNA. However, we found that improving mitochondrial function through the overexpression of Parkin during adulthood and DRP1 from midlife onwards effectively reduces the build-up of cytosolic mtDNA in both heads and thoraces of aged flies. Moreover, we observed a significant decrease in the expression of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) and stress immune effectors. These findings highlight the potential of mitophagy-promoting interventions to mitigate cytosolic mtDNA accumulation and dampen the immune response activation in aging organisms. Therefore, promoting mitophagy may offer an effective approach to counteract the detrimental effects associated with cytosolic mtDNA accumulation and immune response activation in aging organisms.

In 1975, a journalist named Stephen Strang founded Charisma, a Florida magazine that would serve and cover what scholars call the neo-Pentecostal or charismatic movement. Charisma was both responding to a growing commercial and religious market and helping to create that market through its editorial circulation. The magazine would develop into a multimedia company over the decades, today offering a daily news website, podcasts and a book-publishing house. Over the years, Charisma sought to turn its readers into media-makers in their own right, instructing and encouraging their audiences to participate commercially in media creation, in large and small ways. Many scholars have looked at Pentecostal media-makers as a way to argue for a particular type of religious vitality in the modern moment, either as a way of rethinking the religious nature of media itself or as a counterargument against the concept of secularization. The literature raises productive questions, and we do well to elect charismatic and Pentecostal creators for serious consideration. Drawing on archival sources and elements of ethnography, this paper approaches the media-saturated world of Charisma with an appreciation for this creative and commercial work and takes into account how it is through these editorial labors that charisma, religious or otherwise, takes shape.

“Religious Dynamics of Secrecy in Cold War American Life,” explores the role religion has played in conceptualizations, imaginations, and rituals of secrecy in twentieth-century American history. I examine these articulations of secrecy and religion in two case studies from the 1950s and mid-1970s, which highlight how Americans have recruited the language and conceptual schema of religion to convey the gravity and internal logic of secrecy, as well as to negotiate the limits of its acceptability in American democracy. In so doing, I demonstrate how secrecy is not only a matter for religion, but also a matter of religion. My first case study addresses the entanglement of secrecy and religion in Cold War constructions of “brainwashing.” I take as my starting point the influential representation of brainwashing found in Richard Condon’s classic 1959 novel, The Manchurian Candidate. I then trace the history of this icon of Cold War popular culture to its origins in the U.S. intelligence community following the scandalous false confessions of bacteriological warfare issued by American POWs in the Korean War. In addition to traditional historical analysis, I aim to shed new light on the relevance of religion in early Cold War American culture and politics by redeploying the ancient politico-religious category of maleficium as a framework to highlight brainwashing’s early associations with diabolical magic, secret influence, and perceived transgressions of normative gender roles and sexuality. Through these historical and cultural analyses, I situate the history of brainwashing at the nexus of Cold War religion and politics, illuminating the religious significance of fears and fantasies of secret influence in the spheres of domestic life and foreign policy. My second case study examines debates surrounding the expanding national security state through close attention to the 1971-1973 Pentagon Papers trial, in which co-defendants Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo were indicted on espionage charges for conspiring to leak classified documents pertaining to the Vietnam War. Here, I focus on material manifestations of “sacred” national secrets, from official prohibitions against their disclosure to the spectacle of their presentation throughout the course of the trial. In this case, I build on a courtroom reporter’s reflection on the striking significance of an otherwise everyday object—namely, a cardboard box. This, of course, was no ordinary box, but rather a vessel containing the TOP-SECRET documents known colloquially as the “Pentagon Papers.” This reporter’s description rendered this ordinary cardboard box an emblem with religious significance: a “totem of the age of information.” Using this courtroom description as an entry point into a wider analysis of Cold War religion and politics, I demonstrate the analytical import of ascriptions of sacred value to classified information. This material analysis of religion provides a new avenue for re-examining the sacred significance attributed to state secrets, bringing into focus the socio-cultural meanings underpinning and shaping the politics of secrecy in American history. In my concluding epilogue, I address the legacy of these Cold War developments in contemporary American politics in view of recent speculations surrounding the impending rise of a “New Cold War.” As this study will demonstrate, exploring the origins and historical transformations of these Cold War entanglements of secrecy, religion, and politics can provide a new lens onto current manifestations of these entanglements in the press headlines and cultural debates shaping American society today.