Theses (M.A.)--Carleton University, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 134-148). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--University of Delaware, 2008. / Principal faculty advisor: Primo V. Toccafondi, School of Education. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2004. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 67-80). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2004. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 67-80). Also available on the Internet.

The photographer Rodney Smith shows us images of real things and people, but real things and people that aren’t positioned in real ways and places people would actually be. Instead, he uses something very familiar to each of us–the human body–and consistently puts it in very unfamiliar situations. By using something so intimately familiar to each of us as the body in weird ways, he automatically jars our own experienced sensations. And this jarring of familiar sensations, this defamiliarization of something so familiar to us, is what typically results in what literary critics term the feeling of the uncanny. What the uncanny does, in its defamiliarizing of the familiar, is to jar viewers from their sense of the familiar. It displaces them from where they normally are. In Rodney Smith’s photographs, our bodies, unfamiliar with the bodily experiences of his subjects, are dislodged from where they are. Yet the feeling produced by Smith’s photography is not uncanny; rather, it has a sort of reverent, almost sacred, effect. His background as a graduate of the Yale School of Divinity makes him deeply interested in truth beneath the surface, and so he uses photography to get at that sort of truth through his use of the body in ways that would typically produce an uncanny effect, yet don’t. The settings in which he places bodies, as well as the way he uses the bodies themselves, help to shift the feeling of the uncanny into the feeling of the divine or sacred. His ability to do so is highly contingent upon his use of bodies: because we, the viewers, all have bodies, our bodies resonate with those we see in his photography. We are connected to the subjects of his works in a fundamental and profound way because of our embodiedness. And using this connection, Rodney Smith takes our now displaced bodies and transports them with his bodies to somewhere beyond the surface, somewhere sacred. Through his use of techniques typical of the uncanny, he shifts the effects of the uncanny from simple displacement of the self to meaningful replacement of the self within the greater context of our unique and, in his eyes, beautiful world we live in.

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ABSTRACT SOLID GOLD OCTOBER MAY 2012 CHRISTOPHER S. WARD, B.F.A., MASON GROSS SCHOOL OF THE ARTS, RUTGERS UNIVERISTY, NEW BRUNSWICK M.F.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS, AMHERST Directed by: Professor Dara Wier This thesis is a collection of poems.

A Considered Conversion: The Conscious Choice to Accept Christianity by the Populace of Iceland and Greenland in the Era of Scandinavian Conversion Robert A. Burt Department of History, BYU Master of Arts Most studies of the Christianization of Scandinavia attribute the phenomenon to the influence of powerful kings. However, many times the conversion experiences of Iceland and Greenland are either ignored, or tied to the influence of these distant kings. This thesis unites sociological ideas relating to conversion along social and familial lines, ideas introduced by Roger Stark and Rodney Finke, with historical details of Icelandic and Greenland family genealogies found in Íslendingabók, Landnámabók, Kristni saga, and Njáls saga to demonstrate a clear pattern of Christian conversion along social and familial lines on the islands of Iceland and Greenland during the era of Scandinavian Conversion.

<p>This thesis places Hebrew Christianity and Messianic Judaism on the church-sect continuum devised by Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge (1979, 1980). According to an axis indicating low to high tension with the environment, Hebrew Christianity is placed on the para-church node, between the denomination and the sect. Messianic Judaism, in general, is placed on the high tension, sect end of the continuum. It is recognized, however, that individual organizations which comprise the movements may vary widely in their relationships to t he environment. Since the organizations as well as the movements may oscillate on the church-sect continuum, social movement propositions are introduced that can explain how and under what conditions these changes occur. A study of one Hebrew Christian organization, which contains both a low and a high tension group, shows, on the one hand, that a single organization can occupy two different . points on the church-sect continuum simultaneously. It shows, on the other hand, that this is made possible through the skillful use of leadership functions, which in turn is buttressed by the symbolic value of a Jewish leader. Finally, the peculiar situation of the HFOI is seen as reflective of the larger trends in the Hebrew Christian and Messianic Jewish movements, in general, and the different "agendas" of the Jewish and the Gentile followers, in particular.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)