Undergraduate honors paper--Mount Holyoke College, 2008. Dept. of Religion. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 128-129).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-11, Section: A, page: 4341. Adviser: Charles D. Wright. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 251-259) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Charlotte, N.C., 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 444-461).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Charlotte, N.C., 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 444-461).

This thesis examines how J.M. Coetzee's engagement with Christian thinkers and concepts has shaped his fiction. Through a series of close readings, I show how Coetzee, who does not identify as a Christian, reworks and reimagines concepts from key Christian interlocutors across his writings. Each close reading is informed by a consideration of what Coetzee had himself been reading during the writing process, based on evidence in interviews, essays, monographs, and archival materials. Attending to Coetzee's reading and writing, together, illuminates the distinctively self-conscious nature of his engagement with Christianity. Whereas current Coetzee criticism has given attention to specific Christian themes and lexical choices in his fiction, this thesis demonstrates that Coetzee's engagement with Christianity is more profound and pervasive than has been credited hitherto. In addition to the vast body of allusion to Scripture in his writings, Christian thinkers have in fact played a major role in his innovative approach to the novel, a genre predominantly forged in Christian contexts, and in his handling of narrative more generally. Through its explication of Coetzee's extensive dialogue with Christian thinking, and with the Bible, across the full span of his career, this thesis seeks to describe the nuanced and diverse ways in which Coetzee's writings have revised and reimagined this vast and complex religious legacy.

The aim of the present study is to examine how the legacy of Alexander was appropriated, altered and used in arguments in early Christian discourse (c. 200-600). There is an inventory of all the early Christian references to Alexander in Appendix 1. The structure of the thesis is conceived as an unequal triptych: it is divided into three parts with subdivisions into three chapters of varying lengths (Part III contains two chapters and the thesis conclusion). Each part is prefaced with a short description of its contents. Each chapter within those parts have a preliminary remark to introduce the principal subject area with a brief conclusion in the back of it. Part I explores the Alexander traditions of three geographical centres of the Christian world: Alexandria (Ch. 1), Jerusalem (Ch. 2) and Rome (Ch. 3). It shows how the Jewish tales from these cities, such as the Josephan tale about Alexander’s visit to Jerusalem, were used in a variety of diverging, often contradictory, ways. Part II turns to the writings of the apologists in the second and third centuries. It discusses three prevalent themes associated with Alexander: historiography (Ch. 4), divine honours (Ch. 5) and Greek philosophy (Ch. 6). Part III moves on to the central texts and Alexander themes in the fourth to sixth centuries. It focuses on his role in Christian chronicles, church histories and representations of their world (Ch. 7), and also the rhetorical use of the figure in Christian preaching and public speaking (Ch. 8). Taken together, these three parts form the overarching argument that Alexander did not only fill many diverse roles in Christian representations of the remote past, but also featured in contemporary discourse on Christian culture, identities and societies, as well as in arguments made on behalf of the Christian religion itself. Indeed, the Christians frequently juxtapose the figure with distinctively Christian features, such as the life of Jesus, the Apostles, the church, sacred cities and holy spaces. They incorporate him into discourses on peace, mercy, generosity and abstinence. In other words, they repeatedly made Alexander relevant for what they considered important and, thus, created their own distinct discourse on the figure.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in English." Includes bibliographical references (p. 176-184).

Thesis (M. A.)--Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, Mass., 1998. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 119-122).

Thesis (M.A.) -- Central Connecticut State University, 2007. / Thesis advisor: Aimee Pozorski. "... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 85-88). Also available via the World Wide Web.

This thesis explores how selected "decadent-dandyist" writers of late 19^th century France at once exemplify and subvert the self's act of shaping and imprinting its own selfhood upon the world: a model in which an autonomous, discrete artist-self freely creates, and in which both reader/audience and artistic "subjects" are treated as raw canvas and denied agency of their own. Storytellers like Barbey D'Aurevilly, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, J.K. Huysmans, and Remy de Gourmont create not only hyper-artificial, cloistered, "auto-telic" (to use Charles Taylor's term) textual worlds (e.g. Huysmans' theïbade raffinée) but also hyper-artificial selves: presenting themselves and their often autobiographical protagonists as dandy-artists for whom artistic creation is an extension of self-creation. Central to this thesis is the 19^th century figure of the dandy - he who, to quote D'Aurevilly, "[causes] surprise in others, and [has] the proud satisfaction of never showing any oneself." Appropriating the divine power of self-fashioning, the dandy transforms the chaos of existence into a clear narrative over which he alone exerts control, denying that he himself is subject to the control of the world. In my thesis, I first explore the cultural and economic roots of this understanding of the autonomous dandyist-artist in the light of wider tensions in 19^th century Paris. I then explore selected "decadent-dandyist" texts through close reading, focusing on the theological implications of our authors' treatment of narrative, character, setting, and language: showing how our writers cast doubt on both the possibility and morality "autonomous" creation on theological grounds. Finally, I ask how constructive theologians might learn from our authors' condemnation of "dandyist" storytelling to create a new Christian aesthetics for the novel: proposing elements of an alternate, "kenotic" novel, in which self-projection gives way to "self-giving", a model based not on power and ego but rather on love.