Thesis (Ph.D.)--Columbia University, 1994. / Sponsor: Myron L. Cohen. Includes bibliographical references.

Classless: On Being Middle Class in America is a documentary film that explores what it means to be middle class in America. The film combines personal narrative, folksy reporting, and comedy as the film's director— Joe Brown, tries to reconcile his own status anxiety with everyday understandings of social class. Classless takes the form of a journey; the film travels through the American South, Northeast, and the Mountain West while trying to get at the heart of our middle class American Dream. Classless forwards three main arguments: (1) the American middle class is not as all-encompassing as seems; (2) Americans are more concerned about inequality than both politicians and the media suggest; and (3) many Americans are not actually middle class, economically speaking.

Twentieth-century scholarship on the social composition of the Pauline communities has focused on a binary model of the social structure of Roman society that posits a very small group of the élites and an enormous group of the non-élites. More recently, studies have tried to differentiate between strata within the non-élite groups by qualitatively identifying their economic conditions and quantitatively estimating the percentage distribution of each stratum. However, the major problem has been the lack of an economic reference line or a “poverty line” that would enable the meaningful comparison of different standards of living among the urban non-élites. This thesis aims to examine the economic strata of the non-élites in Roman society in the first century CE and estimates their standards of living by clarifying and establishing the concept of subsistence as an economic point of reference. This study first surveys the history of research on the social position of the earliest Christians in order to understand the debates of the twentieth century and the last decade. Then, the two levels of basic needs that are embedded in the concept of subsistence are explored and estimated: the “survival standard” and the “subsistence standard”. The former is more scientifically defined, while the latter focuses on aspects of social provision. The survival standard in the urban settings of the first century CE is used as a baseline to measure and compare the standards of living of various strata of non-élite groups such as unskilled workers, slaves, ordinary artisans, traders and professional artisans. Finally, once the economic stratification of the urban non-élites and their respective standards of living have been established, this framework is applied to the Pauline communities in Thessalonica, Philippi and Corinth in order to explain the issues of poverty, charity and wealth in the letters.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2009. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 189-197).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Central Florida, 2009. / Adviser: James Wright. Includes bibliographical references (p. 44-50).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 170-183).

Thesis--University of Wisconsin-Madison. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 246-251).

Thesis (M.Phil.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 54-60). Also available in electronic version.

No description available.