Chaplaincy provides a microcosm through which the public role of religion can be examined and interrogated. Only two studies have examined the question of minority faith involvement in chaplaincy, both conducted before the large-scale introduction of formalised substantive chaplaincy posts for minority faith groups. The rapid development of Muslim chaplaincy, from visiting ministers to lead chaplains, has begun to be explored. But it is clear that a study concerning all minority faith groups involved is necessary in order to fully understand how far the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion have shifted since the turn of the century. Practitioner literature barely accounts for these developments in chaplaincy, while contributions by minority faith groups are rare. This thesis develops this literature by exploring the status and integration of minority faith groups in acute healthcare chaplaincy. This is achieved through a multi-site ethnography of five case studies of chaplaincy teams across England. Minority faith involvement is largely, but not solely, characterised by mediation, negotiation, and stagnation. These findings are situated within a broader framework of participatory parity, which not only refers to distribution and recognition, but also the socialisation 'gap' that exists for many minority faith chaplains. These factors impact on their ability to speak the language of the institution and the chaplaincy profession. These findings and analyses are then compared with the chaplaincy literature to show the situatedness of the mainstream chaplaincy discourses around spirituality, marginality, professional identity, and collegiality. The findings and analysis have significant implications for an understanding of how the roles of religious professionals adapt and change in a diasporic context, but also for understanding how religion is mediated in the National Health Service.

Mahatma Gandhi’s religious thought and pluralism have received attention from scholars and activists. This thesis provides an original contribution by addressing underexplored areas which reveal shifting boundaries in his pluralism. It explores Gandhi’s relationship with atheists, in particular his Indian friend Gora; the relationship between Quakers and Gandhi, in particular Marjorie Sykes and Horace Alexander; and Gandhi’s approach to inter-religious marriage in an Indian context, exploring both religious and societal dimensions. Throughout the thesis religious pluralism is addressed both in its philosophical or theoretical dimension and in the practical dimension of how one relates to people of other faiths. I provide a critique of the breadth of Gandhi’s pluralism in dealing with atheists in an inclusivist fashion and in his early opposition to inter-religious marriage. I also draw out its strengths in placing religious/ethical life above beliefs. This provides a framework for strong friendships with Quakers and atheists, and a positive approach to inter-religious marriage (in his later years) by allowing individual interpretations of religious life as opposed to community belonging. Gandhi’s theology and friendships offer a critique to theories of dialogue emphasising commitment to a particular tradition. They open a way to include marginalised groups in dialogue and respect the whole person rather than treating religion as a compartment of a person’s life.

Serious academic considerations of magic, beyond its merely social, cultural or psychopathological contexts are few. As one of them, this thesis claims that a coherent function of Dion Fortune’s The Cosmic Doctrine, according to demonstrable textual intention, is as a participative magical process. Fortune’s text consists, primarily, of an extended, incomprehensible metaphor: the movement of infinite space. It claims to be designed to train the mind of the reader rather than inform it. The abstruseness of the text, wherein subjective and objective referents are treated simultaneously, prompts an interpretive tool; this thesis presents a tripartite hermeneutic as such a tool. An exploration of emanationism, according to Fortune’s understanding of Qabalah, presents the conceptual matrix of The Cosmic Doctrine. An implicit dialogue with the philosopher Henri Bergson provides a basis for discussing process thought as integral to Fortune’s emanationist cosmology. The literary theory of manuduction embraces intuitive cognition of reality as process and the spiritual practice of reciprocity between human and divine activity inherent within Fortune’s emergent emanationism. The resulting hermeneutic serves to provide a practical, participative approach to The Cosmic Doctrine whereby reading the text functions as a psycho-cosmological magical experience in accordance with its author’s definition of such.

This thesis is an analysis of the X-ray, optical, infrared and radio properties of a sample of candidate BL Lac objects, identified from two catalogues of colour-selected point sources, the 2QZ and 6QZ. The importance of the sample lies in the fact that it is the first BL Lac sample in which initial selection has been made from optical spectra, independent of the objects' flux levels at X-ray and radio frequencies. These optically selected candidate BL Lac objects thus provide an unbiased sample (in terms of radio flux density) with which to study the proportion of radio- dominant and X-ray-dominant BL Lac objects in the global population. The observed number counts and redshift distribution of the 2BL are consistent with theoretical predictions based on the QSO evolutionary model. Given the small number statistics we are not, however, able to show that this distribution is significantly different to that of the 2QZ/6QZ white dwarfs. A median redshift of z=1.25 was computed for these candidate BL Lacs, a value supported by redshift information obtained for ~25% of the sample. This median redshift is much higher than redshifts found for X-ray selected BL Lac objects and suggests that in the past high redshift, low luminosity, radio-weak BL Lacs may have been missed in radio- and X-ray-selected samples. From results of the above studies it appears that this sample of optically selected candidate BL Lac objects is different to that of hitherto known radio-loud BL Lacs. We explore mechanisms that might produce such radio-weak/radio-quiet continuum objects, and also demonstrate that such radio-quiet BL Lac objects could exist at low redshift. Failure to include these radio-quiet BL Lacs in X-ray selected samples could explain the negative evolution found for this class of object.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 282-294). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

It is widely accepted among secularisation theorists (Wilson 1966,1982; Dobbelaere, 1981; Berger 1981; Bruce, 1999,2002) that the more modern a society becomes, the more likely it is to secularise - i.e. the social and political significance of religion will most likely diminish. At the opposite end of the theoretical debate, scholarly work seeking to explain the recent phenomenon of the re-affirmation of religious values argues that the consequence of modernisation is not secularisation but rather the resurgence of religion (Huntington, 1996; Kepel, 1994; Juergensmeyer, 1993, 2000). With religion gaining salience in some societies but losing ground in others, this ongoing debate appears more critical than ever. The cases of Ireland and Greece are pertinent examples: The Republic of Ireland is experiencing secularising tendencies and the legitimacy of the Church is being increasingly challenged, while in Greece the role of religion remains strong, if not strengthened in recent years, and the legitimacy of the Church is maintained. For secularisation theorists, failure to secularise is likely in instances where there is an explicit link between religion and nationalism-'Cultural defence' or the 'nationalist pattern' (Martin, 1978). But while both cases constitute instances of cultural defence, Ireland is now secularising. This is precisely the puzzle this thesis is concerned with: where traditionally religion, culture and politics are linked, under what circumstances does religion cease to play a politicised and mobilising role, and under what circumstances is this role retained or even strengthened? This thesis argues that the answer can be found precisely in the nature of the nationalist pattern. Rather than being a monolithic model, there are significant variations within the pattern itself: religious based national identities, like all national identities, are fluid, not static. The dynamics of national identity change are dependent on two interlinked variables:(a) the degree to which a Church obstructs modernisation, and (b) external threat perceptions. This thesis will attempt to illustrate the inter-relationship between the above dynamics through a thematic comparison between Greece and Ireland. This model may be used to explain not only what accounts for the variations between the Greek and Irish cases, but also more generally to identify the conditions under which religion may remain or cease to be politically active and legitimate in societies where secularisation has been inhibited given a strong identification of religion with the nation.

This thesis on Calvinist subjectivity within the work of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) explores how the dialectic of word and image, and subsequently the Word, Logos, and word as rhetoric constructs conceptions of selfhood necessarily associated with and bound by the rhetoric of sinfulness. In contrast to studies that synthesize Edwardsian, and, in turn, Calvinist schemas of sin and selfhood within religious doctrine and treatises, this project examines the experiential nature of sinfulness as expressed through language or poetics. Given such examination, this work posits three things. First, in general terms, it contends that, during the Reformation, the displacement of icons led the Word to acquire the positive and negative functions of religious imagery that it meant to displace: to lead persons to God and to lead them away from him. Second, the project finds that the work of Edwards, which emphasizes feeling and personal spiritual experience, signals another shift in the Calvinist dialectic of word and image, and, then heralds the possibility of a type of ecstatic or ‘sweet’ communion with God outside of sin and language itself. Third, and more particularly, this text argues that despite Edwards’ rhetoric of ‘sweetness’, the geography of sinfulness that both pervades and varies within Edwards’ language, creates a Calvinist subjectivity, as it filters through the word/image dialectic, that becomes trapped within Edwardsian rhetoric, and, in turn, encounters difficulty experiencing the salvation to which it portends. In the end, then, this project both challenges and expands the corpus of Edwards’ scholarship in two ways. First, it demonstrates that, although valuable, sole attention to historical and theological exegesis of Edwards’ texts does not adequately account for the paradoxical tensions and meaning of Calvinist selfhood posed by the Puritan’s work and evidenced by the word/image dialectic. Second, and most importantly, the project indicates that, in actuality, apart from what the majority of Edwardsian, particularly Evangelical, scholarship contends, the ‘sweetness’ and spiritual sensations Edwards speaks of selfhood only partially open to the divine and salvific assurance. True, Edwards can still be celebrated as the Father of American Evangelical thought and practice. This project, however, questions if Edwards’ interpreters have ignored the signposts of his language and created an icon(s) of himself, and, subsequently, of a type of Calvinist selfhood that figures the narrative of their own story. In the end, then, this thesis finds itself back at its beginning as it confronts the nature and work of icons and the possibilities and variances of language—as icon and idol itself—that lay in their wake.

As an exercise in hermeneutics this study explores the relation between various concepts of evil and their associated forms of salvation. A definition of salvation is offered in terms of that aspect of the sociology of knowledge which might be called plausibility theory. The major academic traditions of history, sociology, phenomenology, and anthropology of religion are shown to have been concerned with the question of 'meaning' and it is proposed that a general paradigm of meaning has now replaced the nineteenth century evolutionary paradigm. This approach eliminates the necessity of having to adopt theological terms from one religious tradition when studying other traditions. To show that the distinction between world religions and primitive religions is misleading some comparative study and analysis of some African tribal religions, the Sikh, and Mormon religions is presented in terms of the paradigm of meaning. A philosophical consideration of the nature of man is employed throughout the argument to suggest the appropriate level of analysis that each discipline should adopt, and to evaluate the methodological issue of reductionism.

The investigation of the host galaxies of BL Lac objects (BL Lacs) is a promising new field made practical in recent years by advances in detector technology and improved telescope siting. By better understanding the nature of these host galaxies we can test the standard beaming and lensing models for BL Lacs. This thesis describes the techniques that we have developed for studying the host galaxies of BL Lac objects, and presents the results of a survey of BL Lac host galaxies that we have undertaken with the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope. This survey successfully resolved many new host galaxies, determined the morphology of three BL Lac host galaxies for the first time, and confirmed the morphology of an additional three objects. One BL Lac object, PKS1413+135, displayed a number of surprising properties, and was consequently studied in greater detail at multiple wavelengths. These observations are also presented in this thesis. We conclude with a description of Monte-Carlo simulations that we have undertaken in order to better determine the uncertainty in the results from our survey, and to assess the promise of future telescope/instrumentation combinations for host galaxy imaging.

In the context of earlier studies of Sikhs in the British diaspora and of the nurture of children in their parents' faith tradition, this thesis reports an ethnographic study of the nurture of eight to thirteen year old Sikhs in Coventry. The study develops earlier anthropological insights, notably using the interpretive approach of Clifford Geertz. For the purpose of analysis nurture is classified as informal (unplanned and family based) and formal (supplementary classes in mother tongue and devotional music). Both provided evidence of diversity within the Panth (Sikh community), signalled for example by iconography and dietary norms. They also suggested processes of change, as details of Sikh and non-Sikh cultural practice interacted. The celebration of birthdays and of the Vaisalchi festival serve as exemplars of the complex interactions involved, for which Baumann provides analytical tools. Examination of the data in association with the presentation of the religious worlds of young Sikhs in religious education curriculum books revealed some divergence. This is explored with particular reference to subjects' use of the word 'God', their experience of amrit (holy water) and their understanding of the word 'Sikh', especially in relation to the five Ks. On the basis of these observations of change, diversity and the discrepancy between curriculum book presentation and the ethnographic data, chapter twelve identifies processes at work in the Panth. Fox's dynamic concept of culture 'in the making' strengthens the contention that the Sikh tradition is shaped at the level of individual decisions (eg over language use) by children and their elders. Further it is argued that ethnographic findings have implications for the portrayal of the religious lives of young Sikhs in curriculum books.