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This research proceeds from the premise that Okullu was a significant church leader in Kenya. His significance relates to his outspokenness on issues of social justice including the struggle for political liberation from the oppressive one party system and issues of human rights. The purpose of this dissertation is to reconstruct Okullu's Christian political theology through establishing what motivated him and the biblical basis for his socio-political activities. An attempt is made to reconstruct the socio-political environment, which gave birth and necessitated Okullu's prophetic ministry and to investigate the social and spiritual factors, which shaped him. The findings of the research reveal that Okullu spoke out of conviction. His theology of development and participation had its roots in evangelical and ecumenical perspectives emerging between the 1960's and early 1980's. For Okullu the mission of the church was the total liberation (salvation) of the whole person body, soul and spirit. Evangelism and social concern were mutually inclusive. The major sources of his theology were African socialism and the Bible. The ideals of African socialism, which he incorporated in his theology, which are in harmony with biblical principles were: the high value placed on the individual, the principle of equality and the central place of the community in development. He argued for a people-centred holistic development, which took account of the whole human person- body, soul and spirit. For Okullu, the biblical basis upon which Christians should act in a non- Christian society is the prophetic role of the church, founded upon the justice of God as illustrated in the writings of the Old Testament and continued in the concept of the 'kingdom of God' and the concept of 'God as judge in the teachings of Jesus Christ in the New Testament. Although Okullu affirmed the validity of the doctrine of separation in church-state relations, the concept of separation according to him does not fully explain the relationship. The separation is only institutional but at value level the two are bound together in the realm of ethics owing to their common origin in God. It is this integrated whole that gives the church its mandate for involvement in politics. Okullu's significance is demonstrated historically, by the literary out-put containing his socio-political challenges that faced Kenyan society in his time, testimony of others expressed in condolence letters and the views of groups of persons interviewed for this work. Okullu spoke out against injustices. He fought for human rights. His most significant contribution was spearheading the multi-party debate and the repeal of the section of the constitution of Kenya, which had made Kenya a single party system. His prophetic ministry was hammered out in the public arena. He was an Amos of his time. / Thesis (M.Th.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2003.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the pedagogical and performance aspects of Robert Muczynski's Concerto No. I for Piano and Orchestra. The work targets the early-advanced level of performance, representing a tutorial step in technical and musical difficulty. Muczynski's writing offers mild characteristic tendencies in comparison to later practices within the century, but does exhibit the emergence of a variety of significant keyboard skills. Moreover, his intermittent use of atonality is ideal for a student who is not yet comfortable with this idiom. For these reasons, the concerto serves as an excellent introduction to the genre for this level of study.This investigation is prefaced by an introduction to the topic of piano pedagogy in relation to concerto study, along with a brief biographical sketch of the composer. The investigation then provides a stylistic analysis of the Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Orchestra. Each movement is examined comprehensively (by formal structure) according to inherent technical and interpretive challenges, and musical examples are offered in connection with suggestions for practice and execution.Findings reveal a cross-section of twentieth-century innovation and challenge which not only represent the unification of Muczynski's style, but also offer opportunity for growth and development in terms of keyboard performance and the application of sound musical decisions.The investigation closes with suggestions for the study of other twentieth-century concerti closely resembling this work in style, but more artistically challenging in performance. / School of Music

his dissertation examines the rhetoric of the homestead movement in antebellum America as a particular instance of domesticity. Homestead rhetoric alters the modes of identity and subjectivity usually found in domesticity, and alters the home-nation metaphor at the moment when the nation faced an increasing sectional divide that would lead to a Civil War. As deployed by Congressmen, homestead rhetoric used domesticity to define the relationship between manhood and citizenship. Harriet Jacobs uses this rhetoric in her autobiographical Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to shape an identity more in line with male homesteaders than with the subjects of women’s domesticity. E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Haunted Homestead offers the home-nation metaphor as a solution to national crisis, but ultimately the crisis is too large to solve through domesticity. This dissertation uses Jurgen Habermas’s concepts of lifeworld and system to assess the types of subjects created through the different modes of domesticity. Lifeworld describes modes of communication that foster the agency of individuals, and system describes the instrumentalization of individuals into roles where they are only a means to an end. The lifeworld created through homestead rhetoric is ultimately systematized by the importance of transforming land into property; Harriet Jacobs recognizes that she must escape the systematization of slavery and enter into a new economic system to have her rights fully acknowledged; Southworth’s failure to find a literary solution to national problems suggests the limits of a literary lifeworld, or the extent to which the domestic itself has been systematized. This dissertation concludes by considering how Laura Ingalls Wilder’s experience homesteading in South Dakota can bring an ecocritical perspective to lifeworld and system. Ingalls Wilder rejects the system of commodified nature to find contentment in a lifeworld affirmed through an agrarian relationship to the land.

Based on Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class, this thesis gives an interpretation of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. Published in 1899, the Theory proposes a sociological analysis of the economical and social American elite, from 1850 to 1900, a time of major capitalistic expansion in the United States. Veblen's concepts of leisure and conspicuous consumption allow us to demonstrate how each character in Proust's novel distinguishes itself in a context of social rivalry. Referring to Pierre Bourdieu's theory, various conspicuous social practices are analyzed according to the social milieu of La Recherche from which they originated. Therefore, Mme Verdurin's upper middle class perception of reality confronts the aristocratic ethic embodied by the duchesse de Guermantes. In the conclusion of the thesis, we acknowledge the predominant sociological aspect of La Recherche, which is however only one of the many underlying elements of Proust's technique of fiction.

In Canada, the depression of the 1930's forced existing private and public charities to adjust to the overwhelming financial pressures of the decade. Canada's largest urban centre, Montreal, was markedly different from every other major Canadian city because of the municipality's failure to accept any degree of responsibility for the poor and unemployed prior to 1930. Montreal was dominated by a complex private charity network that was divided by religion and language. This thesis examines how one large private charity organization, the Montreal Council of Social Agencies reacted and adjusted to the depression of the 1930's. Because the Montreal Council of Social Agencies was English and Protestant, it borrowed its methods and ideas from England, the United States and other provinces rather than from the largely French Catholic province of Quebec. During the depression, conceptions of charity were radically altered. The Montreal Council of Social Agencies tried to compel municipal, provincial and federal governments to play larger roles in welfare work and supported the professionalization of social work. Most significant, the Montreal Council of Social Agencies was guided through the 1930's by its own charity philosophy which was retained and reinforced rather than weakened by this crisis.

The academic study of religion has for too long laboured under a flawed understanding of the relationship between modernity and religion. Any narrative of the displacement of religion by a universal and secularising modernity fails to recognise the complexity of the historical and cultural realities. While modernity has demonstrably contributed to the erosion of certain forms of religion, there is a growing body of evidence, and new interpretations of existing evidence, which suggest that the interconnections between modernity and religion are far more complex than any simple opposition could account for. Indeed, modernity appears, in certain circumstances, to be capable of producing its own religious effects. This thesis seeks to answer what then becomes a fundamental question: what does it mean for the study of religion if we accept that modernity can generate the religious? New conceptual tools are needed to deal critically with the far-reaching consequences of embracing the true density of modernity. The study of religion can be greatly enhanced by one such concept: reenchantment. However, reenchantment, as an interpretive framework, must be carefully formulated. Reenchantment cannot be properly understood as a reversal of disenchantment, a conception this thesis will be calling thin reenchantment, but as an ongoing dialectic of reenchantment and rationalisation, which this thesis will be calling thick reenchantment. The formulation of a credible and useful concept of reenchantment can in turn be aided by the work of the philosopher and cultural critic Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard�s work is not itself an expression or example of reenchantment, but it demonstrates a remarkable congruence with the concept of thick reenchantment, as both interrogate dominant understandings of modernity in relationship to differing systems of value. The thesis is divided into two sections. The first, substantially longer, section presents in some detail thick reenchantment as an interpretive frame. Though it does not claim to offer any new evidence, the first chapter outlines the evidential background for the thesis, which adopts the concept of religious modernity, developed by sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger, as a way of framing this evidence. The second chapter develops the concept of reenchantment and the typology of thin and thick reenchantment in relation to the foundational work of Max Weber. The third chapter is an analysis and review of the extant multidisciplinary discourse on reenchantment. The fourth chapter, the theoretical core of the thesis, presents an innovative reading of Baudrillard�s considerable body of work. The second section elaborates on a further insight of the first - that text is a necessary element in the study of religious modernity - by offering detailed readings of the work of three contemporary authors - novelists Douglas Coupland and Chuck Palahniuk and filmmaker Tom Tykwer - as instantiations of the sorts of cultural artefacts that the conceptual framework of thick reenchantment means to explore. Though its claims remain conceptual and interpretive rather than evidential, normative, or explanatory, this thesis, interdisciplinary as it is, is intended as a contribution to a number of related fields, from the study of contemporary literature and film to the exploration of Baudrillard�s work, which the study of religion has to date largely neglected, to its detriment However, its primary purpose is to suggest new and fruitful ways to approach the study of religion in modernity.

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