Olli-Pekka Vainio. Beyond Fideism: Negotiable Religious Identities. Ashgate, 2010

Olli - Pekka Kahilakoski Bayesian Regression Analysis of Sickness

ii Abstract (in Finnish) iiiin Finnish) iii

Ratings of Essentialism for Eight Religious Identities.

As a social identity, religion is unique because it contains a spectrum of choice. In some religious communities, individuals are considered members by virtue of having parents of that background, and religion, culture, and ethnicity are closely intertwined. Other faith communities actively invite people of other backgrounds to join, expecting individuals to choose the religion that best fits t...

Pekka Östman

supervisors: Olli Simula

In the history of human communication, the concept and need for secrecy between the parties has always been present. One way of achieving it is to modify the message so that it is readable only by the receiver, as in cryptography for example. Hiding the message in an innocuous medium is another, called steganography. And the counterpart to steganography, that is, discovering whether a message i...

Conjuring Boundaries: Inferring Past Identities from Religious Artifacts

A detailed examination of commonalities between folk religion beliefs and practices of African American and European American ethnic groups raises intriguing issues. Interpretations concerning the ethnic group association of conjuration artifacts uncovered at eighteenthand nineteenth-century sites in the mid-Atlantic region must be based on a clearer articulation of the interplay of three issue...