Yesterday, I defended my thesis and it was approved! After months of work it is terribly exciting to have it finally complete. Here's the title and abstract:

Images of Terror : The Christian call to see suffering and The New York Times photographs of the September 11 terror attacks.

The New York Times was awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography for their photographs of September 11, 2001. The twenty images of the Pulitzer portfolio show the destruction, suffering, and grief caused by the terror attacks. For Christians, these photographs present an opportunity to see the suffering of Christ. Drawing on Matthew 25:31-46, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Jürgen Moltmann, Susan Sontag, Barbie Zelizer, and Stewart Hoover, this paper explores how these photographs can help Christians develop an open-eyed mysticism that sees Christ in photographs of those who suffer.

I'd love to be able to post a digital version here for you to read, but I'm going to be sending pieces of it out to try and get it published in a journal, so I can't publish it in this format. However, in the next few weeks, I'll have printed and bound copies of the thesis in hand, so if you'd like to read it, let me know and I'll loan you a copy.