This thesis is an analysis of the X-ray, optical, infrared and radio properties of a sample of candidate BL Lac objects, identified from two catalogues of colour-selected point sources, the 2QZ and 6QZ. The importance of the sample lies in the fact that it is the first BL Lac sample in which initial selection has been made from optical spectra, independent of the objects' flux levels at X-ray and radio frequencies. These optically selected candidate BL Lac objects thus provide an unbiased sample (in terms of radio flux density) with which to study the proportion of radio- dominant and X-ray-dominant BL Lac objects in the global population. The observed number counts and redshift distribution of the 2BL are consistent with theoretical predictions based on the QSO evolutionary model. Given the small number statistics we are not, however, able to show that this distribution is significantly different to that of the 2QZ/6QZ white dwarfs. A median redshift of z=1.25 was computed for these candidate BL Lacs, a value supported by redshift information obtained for ~25% of the sample. This median redshift is much higher than redshifts found for X-ray selected BL Lac objects and suggests that in the past high redshift, low luminosity, radio-weak BL Lacs may have been missed in radio- and X-ray-selected samples. From results of the above studies it appears that this sample of optically selected candidate BL Lac objects is different to that of hitherto known radio-loud BL Lacs. We explore mechanisms that might produce such radio-weak/radio-quiet continuum objects, and also demonstrate that such radio-quiet BL Lac objects could exist at low redshift. Failure to include these radio-quiet BL Lacs in X-ray selected samples could explain the negative evolution found for this class of object.

Thesis (Ph. D.) - University of Adelaide, 2003. / Bibliography: leaves 191-202.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Boston University, 2010.

Essay I suggests that the context in which the enquiry concerning kerygma is being made is dominated by the rise of the historical-critical method. The hypothesis that theological language is an insoluble compound of historical and eschatological language is explored, then rejected in favour of the hypothesis that historical language is paradoxically identical with theological language. Essay II explores what it means to speak historically of the resurrection, finds it necessary to define God, to assert that the past is present and that my acts and words, like the acts and words of Jesus, are the acts and words of God, though these former are qualified by sin. Essay III assumes that the words of Jesus and the words of the early church were the words of God; that, if the words of the early church were kerygma, so too then were the words of Jesus kerygma. What differentiates kerygma from other language-games that deal with history is not that what they speak of remains past, lvhereas the kerygma makes present, but that in the kerygma he is present whose acts and words were, without the qualification of sin, God's acts and words. Essay IV summarises the position so far, with a parenthesis on the inseparable relation of narration and proclamation; suggests that the New Testament includes not one kerygma, but many, some of which"merely differ from one another, some of which contradict one another. It is further suggested that kerygma is created by men, or theologically speaking, by the Spirit, at the point where tradition and the present situation interact. As this interaction should be creating something new, it is not possible to test whether a new kerygma is true or false, as traditional norms cannot entirely measure what has gone beyond tradition. Essay V outlines the presuppositions that have been accumulating throughout the essays and suggests that they, or something like them, are necessary for' a comprehensive and consistent explanation of what kerygma is.

A fresh engagement with the formative work of Anthony C. Thiselton demonstrates that this work constitutes a source of insights of great value for a programmatic construction towards a unified hermeneutical theory. Such a construction provides powerful keys for unlocking six contemporary problems in hermeneutics. First, it brings organisation to a disorganised discipline by identifying three distinct spheres or strata of hermeneutical reflection. Second, it brings clarification to a complex discipline by identifying seven distinct hermeneutical 'conversations' centred on 'dialogue', 'history', 'epistemology', 'language', (Western) 'culture', the human 'self', and 'understanding' (including the hermeneutical task). Third, it tackles the problem of abstraction in hermeneutics by bridging the gap between hermeneutical theory and practice. Fourth, it addresses the problem of disunity in hermeneutical theory on three levels: philosophical subtext, the removal of perennial philosophical and theological 'dualisms' or 'dichotomies', and the relative ontological priorities of 'history' and 'language'. Fifth, it addresses inter-disciplinary polarisation in hermeneutics by clarifying the relationship between theological and philosophical hermeneutics. Sixth, it strikes at the heart of irresponsibility in interpretation by answering the question of what constitutes 'responsible interpretation'. However, despite these six potential advances and Thiselton's world-ranking stature, no thorough engagement with Thiselton's work yet exists in the literature. What little engagement there has been manifests serious misunderstandings and misrepresentations of Thiselton's thinking. Conversely, the criticisms emerging that can legitimately be made of Thiselton are relatively minor. His critical stance towards the Continental hermeneutical tradition necessitates a clearer highlighting of the grammatical changes implicit in his continued use of Continental terminology. Thiselton also needs to dialogue further with epistemological traditions, with philosophies and models of selfhood, with major 'postmodern' thinkers, with pastoral theology and with theological anthropology. Finally, a more sophisticated hermeneutic of fallen human relationships is required to provide a better understanding of historical conditioning

The study of religious dimensions of visitor experiences in public museums is an under-researched area, partly because of assumptions of the secular nature of the museum space, the dominant assumptions and methods of museum evaluation studies and the relative lack of study of material religion in public spaces not intended to be devotional. This project addresses this by examining the processes through which visitors experience sacred presences in the museum. This research employed Actor Network Theory (Latour 2004) in order to decentre the more prominent components within visitor studies and evaluations (such as the visitor). Using ANT, this study conceives religious interactions as networks that combine objects, people and divine/supernatural presences, all of which have the capacity to affect the network. This network approach was then used to explore and analyse interactions at two religious-themed exhibitions at the British Museum, and the religious tour groups that visit its permanent galleries. The study found that the sacred was evoked in a number of ways in the museum; through embodied interactions with artefacts, as memories, and through engagements with scripture. Each encounter had to negotiate an array of actors that were both present and absent within the museum space. These actors, which had the ability to facilitate and inhibit visitors' religious experiences, included elements often overlooked by museum professionals and within visitor studies (such as overheard comments and glass display cases). The findings also revealed how perceptions of the museum as secular shaped visitor norms and thereby influenced whether the museum became a site of conflict or opportunity for sacred encounters. Furthermore, the research demonstrated the limited capacity of museum staff to influence visitors’ interactions as, irrespective of the museum’s intentions, the commingling of certain objects, spaces and visitors can facilitate experiences of the divine.

This thesis is a critical comparison of the accounts of religious belief proposed by William James and Søren Kierkegaard. Both James and Kierkegaard greatly emphasize the subjective aspects of religious belief. In view of this fact, surprisingly little comparative work has been done in this area. I contribute to this literature in two ways. Firstly, I make a brief assessment of what James knew of Kierkegaard’s work. Secondly, I draw four comparisons between Kierkegaard and James. In Chapter One I examine the claim that Kierkegaard proposes a pragmatist account of faith of the kind that James sets out in his essay The Will To Believe. I argue that this claim rests on a misunderstanding of Kierkegaard’s argument that to have faith is to take a risk. In the following chapter I discuss James’s and Kierkegaard’s views on formal proofs for the existence of God. Both philosophers reject the notion that faith can be based on such proofs. I distinguish between their positions, and argue in favour of Kierkegaard’s. In the third chapter I compare Kierkegaard’s and James’s accounts of religious experience. James views religious experiences as a special kind of evidence for the existence of God. For Kierkegaard it is a mistake to view religious experiences as evidence. Such experiences should be understood in relation to the concept of religious authority. In the final chapter I examine Kierkegaard’s conception of faith as a life-view. I argue that for Kierkegaard a life-view is a fundamental perspective on one’s existence. I compare this conception with James’s concept of philosophical temperament and in relation to his discussion of the sick soul.

In the era prior to the Great Schism of 1054, Christianity was one Church composed of two culturally distinct elements: the Greek East and Latin West. The Greek and Latin halves of the Church each possessed their own independent liturgical and cultural customs which were part of the dispute that lead to the Great Schism, effectively separating the Church into independent Greek and Latin sides. While the West had retained liturgical expressions that differed from the majority Western Rite (in the form of the Italo-Albanian Catholic Church, which remained in communion with Rome after the official break with Constantinople), the Christian East was exclusively composed of Churches celebrating the Byzantine Rite for approximately nine hundred years. This changed in the latter half of the nineteenth century with the conversion of Julius Joseph Overbeck to the Russian Orthodox Church in London. Since that time, there have been attempts and successes in establishing a Western Rite in the Eastern Church. This thesis approaches Western Rite Orthodoxy as an established phenomenon in Eastern Christianity, especially as a facet of Orthodoxy in countries where Orthodoxy constitutes a minority. While previous short studies have attempted to substantiate or discredit the legitimacy of Western Rite Orthodoxy as a movement, this thesis accepts the reality of the Western rite and seeks to understand Western Rite Orthodoxy by documenting its history thoroughly, the investigating peculiarities of the Orthodox Western rite compared to other Western liturgies, exposing potential problems (spiritual and canonical) of the current rite and devotions when compared to accepted Orthodox theology and spirituality, and by evaluating some of the criticisms which are often employed against Western Rite Orthodoxy. To complete this critical evaluation, there are some important areas of consideration. Though there have been some studies of Western Rite Orthodoxy, there has been little historical documentation of the movement since the middle part of the twentieth century. Part of Western Rite Orthodoxy’s development has been the alteration of liturgical texts to bring them into conformity with the theology and spirituality of the Eastern Church. There is some question, both in academic and ecclesiastical circles, about how thoroughly these changes were implemented, whether there are still elements requiring further correction, and even if the Western liturgies can be brought into conformity with Eastern theology and practice in any instance. Furthermore, there is are ecumenical implications to the presence of Western Rite Orthodoxy that have yet to be addressed, particularly in the Western Rite Orthodox rejection of post-Vatican II liturgies used by the majority of Western Christianity, and the effect this might have on a future reunion between a Western Church and Orthodoxy. With this critical framework established, there is a greater opportunity to fully understand Western Rite Orthodoxy in the twentieth century, both as it affects the Orthodox Church itself and as it affects external relationships between the Orthodox and other Christian churches. Secondarily, the thesis provides a more complete history in terms of documentation and contextualization of Western Rite Orthodoxy than is presently available through any other medium.

The religion versus modernity dichotomy has become a platitude which is taken for granted by many researchers in the field of sociology of modernity. The dichotomy is the theoretical foundation of many violent ideologies, both religious and atheist. This thesis challenges the dichotomy and its variants – such as reason versus faith or ‘the sacred’ versus ‘the secular’ – as the results of the misreading of the history of the constitution of modernity. Modernity is historically shaped by and structurally intertwined with theology and sociologists’ need to reveal those theological forgotten roots and hidden structures. This is the first goal of the thesis which begins with the search for the theological roots of modern atheisms. Showing the theological unconscious of the modern atheist discourses will let us to see two sides of modern Prometheanism: The first side, which is well-known, is about the rebellion against the transcendental and considering the transcendental as the projection of the human mind into the sky. The point is that there can never be an overwhelming consensus about either this Promethean description of the origins of religion or another description of man being the projection of God on earth. We, nevertheless, are living in a society which contains both of those options and a lot more alternative possibilities in between. So, while we cannot reach an overlapping consensus about the principles, we can pragmatically engage in the process of self-formation through co-practice. The argument is that the desire of self-formation, self-creation and self-actualisation is the second side of Prometheanism which will prepare us with a framework for co-practice.

This thesis opens a new interdisciplinary frontier between religion and theatre studies to illuminate what has been seen as the religious or spiritual nature of Jerzy Grotowski’s theatrical work. The thesis corrects the lacunae in both theatre studies and New Age studies by examining the interaction between the two in Grotowski’s work. It argues that through an embodied, materialist approach to religion, developed in the work of Foucault and Vasquez, and a critical reading of the concepts of the New Age, a new understanding of Grotowski and religion can be developed. The central thesis argument is that by following discussions of the embodied and materialist understanding of religion and the New Age it is possible to show how Grotowski’s work articulated spiritual experience within the body; achieving a removal of spirituality from ecclesial authorities and relocating spiritual experience within the body of the performer. The thesis maps the specific dynamics of the relation between the body and the spiritual in ways which previous research on Grotowski has failed to do. It also shows how Grotowski became, in part, a spiritual teacher through his directing work, and contributed to an embodied spirituality of the New Age. The thesis begins with a brief historical mapping of religion and the theatre, not least to contextualize the interdisciplinary discrepancy in studies of Grotowski. It then unfolds a two-pronged analysis of Grotowski’s theatre work from the perspective of studies of religion, embodiment and the New Age. In Part One, I apply the critical thinking of French poststructuralism, linked in particular to the work of Michel Foucault, to Grotowski’s work. This shows how body and spirit are united in Grotowski’s thinking, and facilitates a new opening to the embodied spirituality of the New Age. Part Two then seeks to achieve a repositioning of theatre studies in a new dialogue with religious studies by looking at the later phases of Grotowski’s work through the lens of the New Age movement; detailing specific dynamics of the New Age that are at present not coherently appreciated in Grotowski’s theatre work. This section begins by critically assessing the concept of New Age and maps the active interface between the final four phases of Grotowski’s theatre work and the New Age through four frames: initially through the work of religious studies historian Steven Sutcliffe; then through the combined work of religious studies sociologists Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead; through the work of religious studies esotericist Wouter Hanegraaff; and finally through a lens that explores the embodied spiritual work of G.I. Gurdjieff and the numerous similarities between his work and Grotowski’s. The thesis establishes six key facets of the New Age as they have appeared in Grotowski’s work: a primacy of focus on the self, interests in yoga, ritual, shamanism, channeling and the presence of the ancestors. Such a correlation between the New Age and Grotowski occurs because of the redefinitions of the body and spirit, and the importance of the body as it has been renegotiated in religious scholarship on poststructuralism and the body; through a renegotiation that occurs through the New Age movement; and through the work of religious studies sociologist Manuel Vasquez’s reconstruction of a holistic form of embodied materiality in religion. This inclusion of the body in the context of spiritual experience provides the location through which Grotowski’s theatre work can be framed as spiritual. This thesis provides a new perspective on Grotowski’s work for theatre scholarship, exploring one of its heroes in the light of religious movements of the late twentieth century, and corrects a key lacuna within the field of modern scholarship on religious studies. Grotowski and his work have never been effectively recognized as playing a major part within the New Age movement or new explorations of spirituality. This omission is evident both in terms of the effect that the burgeoning New Age movement has had on his work, as well as in the legacy his work has left on the New Age itself. This study provides a fresh perspective for modern religious studies scholars, identifying a new forum within which to explore the effect of the New Age movement, as well as by expanding the remit of its pioneering New Age leaders. The thesis overall demonstrates how thinking about Grotowski’s work and legacy can be enriched through a new dialogue between religion and theatre studies, and how the centrality of the body becomes the key for understanding this relationship.