<p> The context for this qualitative study is the church leadership in New England that is interested in revival. The hypothesis is the following: New England church leaders believe that revival is nurtured through practicing love, demonstrated by being secure in God's love, having mutual servant love, and valuing each other's giftings and calling. The hypothesis was tested by means of grounded theory. Data was triangulated from surveys, interviews, and focus groups of eighty-seven leaders who have ministered in New England. The hypothesis was proven, showing a remarkable consensus that love nurtures and sustains revival.</p>

This dissertation traces shifts in the way tears were perceived during the English Renaissance, from roughly 1509 to 1660. Examining medical treatises, sermons, and lyric poetry, I demonstrate that tears and weeping underwent a paradigm shift both as literary symbols and phenomena. Although this revaluation is inconsistent between the different discourses, by the end of the Renaissance, patterns in place a century earlier had been significantly challenged, even redefined, as the most popular model in each genre gradually yielded to new insights. Chapter One examines medical treatises, primarily on melancholy. The Renaissance inherited the paradigm of humours theory to explain human psycho/ physiology. During the seventeenth century, dissection began to replace humours with an empirical model based on the existence of glandular paths for tears. Chapter Two investigates the effect upon lyric poetry of this loss of vital, currently grounded metaphors derived from humoural models. Sixteenth-century poetic miscellanies are replete with tears wept unabashedly by poetic speakers to honor their unrequited love, tears shed in a type of serious, often melancholic play. By the end of the seventeenth century, although humour-based metaphors are still present, increasingly they are devoid of fundamental content. This drought embodies alterations in medical paradigm, as well as the homiletic tradition's long-standing distrust of affect. Chapter Three explores sermons, where, unless they were shed in repentance for sin, tears signified human sinful weakness. All "natural" grief was suspect. In addition, preachers struggled with the vestiges of the medieval 'gift of tears.' Theologically unpopular, this conception was sufficiently prevalent to require frequent rebuttal from the pulpit. Sermons on the verse, "Jesus wept" preached between 1509 and 1700 demonstrate an hermeneutical transmutation: from an early characterization as the superior, almost condescending, but compassionate king, Jesus has by 1700 become the divine architect, weeping only because his exalted design for humanity will be rejected. In Chapter Four, the works of three seventeenth-century devotional poets, John Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Crashaw, are shown to incorporate the most dominant effects of the overall change that tears underwent. In their poetry, metaphoric depletion is offset by gains in imaginative liberty. Donne wrestles with the dilemma of placing tears between himself and God; Herbert offers tears to God--with a problematic humility--because he is human; and Crashaw celebrates the sheer human wonder of tears. The vitality of poetic tear imagery culminates in their work.

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St. Hugh the Great,1024-1109, was sixth in a distinguished line of abbots who had made Cluny, founded in 909, famous. During his abbacy, Ulrich and Bernard definitively recorded oral and written custom. The horarium, mainly liturgical, was already established, but growth in the order and considerable rise in numbers (causing notable building developments) had profound effects on the life of the abbey, whose privileges, especially as regards episcopal immunity, multiplied. The monastery was governed by an expanding body of administrative and disciplinary officials. Greater use of money, the increase of scattered resources, and heavier expenditure, characterised the economy of the period. The greatest expansion of the order occurred under Hugh, though he tended to discourage it. A coincidence of factors caused monasteries to be founded or annexed in hitherto unpenetrated parts of France and Switzerland, and in Spain and Italy where the adoption of customs in independent monasteries had already prepared the way. Cluniacs also went for the first time to England, what is now Belgium, Germany and even the Levant. The beginnings of a system establishing a juridical link between Cluny and these monasteries appeared. Abbeys were reduced in rank to priories, except for some less fully incorporated. Dependent monasteries had, in turn, priories dependent on them. All monks made profession at Cluny and recognised Hugh as abbot; he controlled the appointment of abbots and priors. Annual payment of cens was not yet general. Once the spirit and basic pattern of life had been implanted, however, Cluny allowed dependent priories to develop with a reasonable measure of independence. The foundation of Marcigny in 1054 marked the introduction of Cluniac nuns who were strictly enclosed and governed by Cluniac monks. Hugh's abbacy was decisive, contributory and outstanding in many ways, though symptoms of later disasters were already apparent.

In 1940 the French Catholic Church was quick to blame military defeat on the laicism of the Third Republic. However, the Church was confident that it could rectify the errors of the past. The new authoritarian regime at Vichy offered the possibility of overturning the past sixty years of secularism and of rebuilding France along Christian lines. This thesis examines how the Church attempted to win France back to the faith through the vehicle of education. It shows how it hoped to strengthen the position of its own educational system and how it tried to re-assert its influence over children in the State school. The study is divided into four parts. The first looks at the role education played in Church/State relations and puts into context events treated in more detail later. The second part examines the curriculum of confessional schools and the ways by which the Church attempted to influence the lessons of the State school. Part three looks at teachers and pays particular attention to the teaching orders. Although they recovered much of their former legal status under Vichy, they never became fully-fledged supporters of the regime. In addition, the thesis looks at how the Church tried to break the traditional secularism of the State 'instituteurs'. Part four investigates the funding of Catholic education. It examines the measures that Vichy took to alleviate the material plight of Catholic schools and illustrates how State subsidies contributed to the growth of Catholic education. Analysis of Vichy's educational policy reveals that the regime was less clerical than has previously been recognised. This study alsoconcludes that the Church was not an unqualified supporter of the regime and that Catholics began to have their doubts about Vichy far earlier than has sometimes been suggested.

The number of Catholic women's colleges has decreased dramatically since 1970. This has caused a void in the Roman Catholic Church's educational system. This research investigated life-cycle theory and its application to organizations. A college as an organization can be analyzed within the framework of organizational life-cycle theory. The phases identified in life-cycle theory are birth, growth, maintenance, decline, and death. The birth phase includes all the events which make the organization a reality; ideas, funding, location, and personnel. The growth phase is of indeterminate length. It details the movement of the organization from the end of the birth phase until the organization has earned a place for itself in the organizational world. The maintenance phase is a period in the organization's history when it stops to take stock of its accomplishments and sets a direction for its future. The decline phase of life-cycle theory is characterized by a drop in production or in delivery of service with subsequent loss of income. The final phase, death, occurs when the organization no longer functions as intended--going out of business, experiencing a take-over, submitting to a merger. The case study of the two Catholic women's colleges presented in this research were developed around these life-cycle phases. In the account of one college, the case study chronicles the college's movement from birth to its untimely death. The other case study follows the college from birth through decline. It then describes the college's activities during decline which turned the college from death to new growth. The comparison of the events in the decline phase may lead administrators of other Catholic women's colleges to examine comparable factors in their settings and make adjustments to insure continued existence.

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In early 1530, the lay preacher and recent Anabaptist convert Melchior Hoffman published a series of seventy-seven visions by the Strasbourg butcher’s wife Ursula Jost. In its own day this series of visions, which is the longest extant sixteenth-century document written from the perspective of an Anabaptist woman, attracted the attention of Strasbourg’s authorities and became popular among Dutch Anabaptists who followed Hoffman. In the twentieth century the visions have been studied by Klaus Deppermann and Lois Barrett, who came to widely diverging conclusions on Ursula’s values and her place in the Anabaptist movement. Deppermann saw her as an angry, even bloodthirsty woman whose visions revealed “a murderous hatred of existing society” and inspired violent actions of the part of other Anabaptists, while Barrett argued that Ursula’s visions reflected “the Anabaptist-Mennonite ethic of establishing the reign of God nonviolently.” In light of the radically different conclusions reached by Deppermann and Barrett, this study conducts a fresh re-examination of the visions of Ursula Jost in order to determine what Ursula’s example reveals about sixteenth-century Anabaptism. It investigates her relationship to her own city of Strasbourg, the broader Anabaptist movement in the sixteenth century, and the breadth of the late medieval religious tradition in which Ursula and her contemporaries were raised. Contra Barrett’s claim that Ursula’s visions uphold a nonviolent Anabaptist-Mennonite ethic, this study argues that, while Ursula belongs to the Anabaptist tradition, she does not belong to the Mennonite tradition. Instead, her example illustrates the diversity and heterogeneity of the first Anabaptists in contrast to the relative homogeneity of the Hutterite, Mennonite, and Swiss Brethren traditions that survived past the mid-sixteenth century, as well as the indebtedness of the Anabaptist religious tradition to the late medieval religious tradition that preceded it.

In early 1530, the lay preacher and recent Anabaptist convert Melchior Hoffman published a series of seventy-seven visions by the Strasbourg butcher’s wife Ursula Jost. In its own day this series of visions, which is the longest extant sixteenth-century document written from the perspective of an Anabaptist woman, attracted the attention of Strasbourg’s authorities and became popular among Dutch Anabaptists who followed Hoffman. In the twentieth century the visions have been studied by Klaus Deppermann and Lois Barrett, who came to widely diverging conclusions on Ursula’s values and her place in the Anabaptist movement. Deppermann saw her as an angry, even bloodthirsty woman whose visions revealed “a murderous hatred of existing society” and inspired violent actions of the part of other Anabaptists, while Barrett argued that Ursula’s visions reflected “the Anabaptist-Mennonite ethic of establishing the reign of God nonviolently.” In light of the radically different conclusions reached by Deppermann and Barrett, this study conducts a fresh re-examination of the visions of Ursula Jost in order to determine what Ursula’s example reveals about sixteenth-century Anabaptism. It investigates her relationship to her own city of Strasbourg, the broader Anabaptist movement in the sixteenth century, and the breadth of the late medieval religious tradition in which Ursula and her contemporaries were raised. Contra Barrett’s claim that Ursula’s visions uphold a nonviolent Anabaptist-Mennonite ethic, this study argues that, while Ursula belongs to the Anabaptist tradition, she does not belong to the Mennonite tradition. Instead, her example illustrates the diversity and heterogeneity of the first Anabaptists in contrast to the relative homogeneity of the Hutterite, Mennonite, and Swiss Brethren traditions that survived past the mid-sixteenth century, as well as the indebtedness of the Anabaptist religious tradition to the late medieval religious tradition that preceded it.