The vegetarian teachings of the Salvation Army, Quakers, the Seventh Day Adventists and other Christian groups have been largely neglected by academics. This study takes a prosopographical approach to the development of modern Christian vegetarianism across a number of Christian vegetarian sects, and some more mainstream traditions, over a period of two centuries. The method allows for important points of similarity and difference to be noted among these groups’ founders and members. This research contributes particularly to radical Christian groups’ place in the vegetarian movement’s modern history. This study demonstrates how and why Christian vegetarianism developed in the nineteenth century and to what extent it influenced the secular vegetarian movement and wider society. It contextualizes nineteenth-century Christian vegetarianism in the wider movement of temperance, and considers why vegetarianism never made inroads into mainstream churches in the way that the temperance movement did. Finally, the study considers the pattern of Christian vegetarianism’s development in four distinct periods (1809-1847, 1848-1889, 1890-1959 and 1960-2009) as well as the many principles and behaviours these sectarian groups shared such as a desire for a return to Eden or the Golden Age, dualism, purity and biblical vegetarianism.

This thesis poses the research question of whether curacy in the Church of England, in its current majority model of one curate in one benefice under the supervision of one training incumbent, continues to offer the most productive space for the post-ordination ongoing formation of the newly ordained. It uses an interdisciplinary methodology, in which theology and ecclesiology are brought into dialogue with the sociological thought of Casanova and Bourdieu, with Stanislavski’s theory of method acting, and with performance practice in art music and popular music. It additionally asks questions of how the increasingly complex external and internal contexts for ministry might be productively conceptualized, and of what kinds of ordained ministers might be needed by the twenty-first century Church of England. Consideration of these questions contributes to the conclusion that whilst aspects of good practice can usefully be retained from the current model of curacy, contextual demands and the changing nature of the role of the ordained, coupled with a significant shift in the demographic profile of those coming forward for ordination, call for a reframing of its structures.

Robert Leighton (1610/11-1684) was a significant Scottish churchman of the seventeenth-century. He has been the subject of religious confessional history-writing which continues to skew our understanding of him. This thesis offers a radical reassessment of the first fifty years of Leighton’s life based upon the available primary evidence. The formative influences of Leighton’s Puritan anti-Episcopal father and his student years at the Town College of Edinburgh are re-evaluated. The possibility that he studied in Huguenot France in the 1630s is posited. Using his relationship with the Earl of Lothian to illuminate his involvement in the Covenanting movement, he is placed in Scotland from 1638. Leighton’s commitment to the Covenant and to Presbyterianism is reconsidered by charting Leighton’s career as minister of Newbattle (1641-1653) and his appointment as Principal of the Town College by the English occupiers in 1653. His decision to become a Restoration bishop in 1661 is reviewed having regard to a new understanding of his journey towards Episcopacy and by careful attention to his own words and actions. This study concludes that our comprehension of the Church of Scotland during the Covenanting, Interregnum and Restoration periods is heightened by re-discovering the real Leighton.

This interdisciplinary study of devotional literature, drama and the visual arts examines the representation of Mary and her mother, Saint Anne, as wives in England between 1200 and 1540, and women's responses to these images. The thesis addresses a lacuna in modem Marian and Anne scholarship which has, hitherto, paid little attention to the fact of both saints' representation as wives in this period, and reclaims the meaning, function and reception of these forgotten images. The thesis commences with a synopsis of Marian and Anne devotion up until the central Middle Ages in order that English awareness of Mary and Anne as wives might be contextualised. Chapter Two presents evidence of this awareness; a chronological catalogue of medieval English representations of Mary and Anne as wives, in a variety of media. Chapter Three presents an historical account of the social context of medieval marriage; it examines the legal, social and canonical definition of marriage and demonstrates how this instruction reached the laity for whom it was intended. Chapter Four articulates how the representations of Mary and Anne as wives fitted into both contemporary marital discourse and its social practice. Chapter Five returns to the representations and interrogates their meaning and function, using medieval ars memorativa as the critical tool with which to do so, and demonstrates how real women responded to these images. The thesis concludes that Mary and Anne's wifely status was invoked by some theologians, canon lawyers and clerics to serve as an aide memoire and marital exemplar : of the Church's ideal wedding ceremony and of desired wifely behaviour(s) but that women's responses to these representations were less and other than that which their producers might have intended : generally they were met with silence.

This thesis is about the work and organisation of local religious congregations in England. It focuses on the congregation of two religions- Christianity and Judaism; that is, on 'churches' and 'synagogues'. In Chapter One, the study is positioned within the academic field of social policy and administration. Chapters Two, Three and Four review literature on the historical and societal context within which churches and synagogues operate, the role of religious functionaries and organisational features of congregations. Four organisational themes cutting across denominational and religious boundaries are identified: purposes and goals; roles and role relationships; organisational change; and denominational institutions. Chapter Five develops an approach for an empirical study and gives an account of fieldwork in an inner-city Roman Catholic church; a black-led Pentecostal church in an industrial town; an Anglican church on a housing estate; and a suburban Reform synagogue. Organisational features of the four case congregations are presented in Chapter Six. In the following four chapters the organisational issues which arise in the Congregations are described and analysed. Chapter Seven presents the perceived Issues in congregations around setting and implementing goals. Chapter Eight looks at clerical roles and Chapter Nine at the roles of lay employees and volunteers. Chapter Ten discusses organisational change, the links between congregations and their denominational institutions, and organisational structures. Finally, in Chapter Eleven, the study findings are drawn together and re-examined in the light of the earlier literature. The way in which the case studies elucidate and develop knowledge about the work and organisation of congregations is discussed. It is suggested that further progress towards the development of theory on congregation organisation could be made by conceptualising congregations as voluntary organisations.

This thesis engages with the biblical archive and its animals, asking what it means to read the Bible after Jacques Derrida’s “question of the animal”, that is, critical questions directed at the characterisations, representations and utilisations of animals past and present which deem animals distinctly different to humans in order to demarcate their inferiority. At the same time, it is a critical response to Derrida’s Bible. Derrida – arguably one of the most important and influential thinkers of the twentieth century – provides a significant philosophical contribution to the question of the animal. In animal studies, the Bible is treated as a foundational legacy for concepts of the “human” and is frequently held up to blame for a misplaced human hubris. Derrida too draws on the Bible in implicit and explicit ways to underpin his critique of human/animal distinctions. Building on Derrida’s work on animality, I provide close and critical interpretations of four crucial texts of the biblical archive. I argue that these biblical texts are caught up in irreducible tensions: on the one hand, these texts depict and describe how humans and animals alike abide as finite, fellow creatures under God as a justice to come which calls for a radical similitude and solidarity; on the other hand, animals are portrayed as objects that are mastered by humans to demonstrate God’s power over the living. God’s power thus resides in a double bind – it both displaces power from humans to show them as animals, and it simultaneously provides a model for human power over animal others. In the first chapter I explore the significance of Derrida’s motifs of nakedness and shame over nakedness for his critique of human/animal distinctions, arising from his reading of Genesis. Critically continuing Derrida’s play on myths of origin, I tackle the question of the first carnivorous man, Noah, in Genesis 9 in order to show how this text can both be read as a license to enact the sovereignty of man over animals, and, how this text radically resists such a reading in God’s covenant with all life, human and non-human. Following my exploration of myths of origin, the second chapter grapples with Derrida’s notion of a deconstructed subject through his emphasis on response and responsibility. Derrida puts forward the biblical response “here I am”, as the mark of vulnerability in every relation with the other. I explore what this responsible response might mean in the context of the Book of Daniel that portrays encounters between human, nonhuman animals and God. Developing Derrida’s injunction to follow the nonhuman other, I argue that the double context of Daniel conveys two distinct visions of the concept of the political as animal: one, in which a fantasy for a harmonious domestication and cohabitation amongst rulers and their human and animal subjects is fostered under the only true ruler, a benign God; and, a collapse of such a fantasy, where rulers – human and divine – are portrayed as carnivorous, ferocious creatures who turn their subjects from pets to prey. The third chapter follows this collapse to Derrida’s critique of the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” as a commandment relating only to humans and thus a detrimental Judeo-Christian legacy. Derrida draws on the story of Cain and Abel to discuss the way the killing of an animal leads to the killing of a brother. To explore questions of killability I, however, turn to the negotiations of such issues in Acts 10. In the animal vision of Acts 10, questions of clean/unclean animals are suspended and hospitality is apparently opened up between Jewish and non-Jewish Christians. I demonstrate that the universalism associated with this text refers to an exclusive human fellowship which evades the actual implications of the animal vision. Yet, I posit that there are again two ways of reading the animal vision. In the first reading the analogical resemblance set up between animals and Gentiles implies that Gentiles too become killable as “clean” and thus the animal vision allows for indiscriminate killability amongst the living in general. In the second reading the cleanness of all animals is in fact a radical redemption of animal life for fellowship, in the same way that Peter accepts the fellowship and hospitality of Gentiles. Ultimately, the category of the living and the dead draws humans and non-humans together into what I call “mortability”; that is, the capacity for death shared amongst the living in the suspension of judgement until Jesus returns. In the fourth chapter, I follow up on the suspension of judgement by analysing Derrida’s thinking of sovereignty and animality in relation to Revelation 17. Crucially, Derrida’s logic of sovereignty includes Christ as lamb, in his logos or reason of the strongest, despite its ostensible weakness as a diminutive animal. I explore this further by turning to the scene of Revelation 17 in which the Lamb is at war with the Beast and the woman riding it. Developing Derrida’s allusions to sexual difference as it relates to the question of the animal, I explore how Revelation 17 denigrates both animals and women by characterising them as the figure of evil: Rome. The logic of the animal representations sets up the divine as the good on the side of the weak in the figure of the suffering Lamb. But as the Lamb becomes a beast-like indivisible sovereignty that asserts its reason of the strongest, the figures of “evil” become the vulnerable weak victims – the animal others. Another image of Rome emerges, then, as a deconstructed sovereignty in the subjects that stand as powerless figures in the political order, namely the animals of the Roman arenas and the prostitutes of the Roman Empire. The four texts I examine abide in the ambiguous tensions of an archive that can in the end neither be presented as animal-friendly nor as straightforwardly anthropocentric. The biblical archive is a complex compendium fraught with tensions that can, with its animals, only be held in abeyance. There can be no final “ownership” proclaimed of this archive and its animals, nor can any interpretive act dis-suspend them from such an ambivalent state. These very different texts do, however, provide the material and momentum to show central and crucial instances of how the biblical archive characterises its humans, animals and gods. My analysis reveals that the very same spaces in which these characterisations might be fixed as detrimental to animal life, are where the possibilities of seeing animals radically otherwise lie.

In this thesis the figure of the colonial Christian missionary is put forward as a translator - in terms of both interlingual translation (translation proper) and a more metaphorical and intercultural translation process (mission-translation). It takes the example of SMEP (Société des Missions Évangéliques de Paris) missionary, François Coillard (1834-1904), his wife, Christina, and indigenous missionaries such as Asser Sehahabane and Aaron Mayoro, and posits these historical individuals and their translation practices as sources which shed new light on current understandings of the nature of translation and the ontology of the translator. Through the discussion of the famous French protestant missionary, it deconstructs the (in)visibility binary in translation studies as well as the singularity of the translator, and puts forward a spectral collaborative translator-presence. From this point on, the thesis demonstrates that translation proper is an incarnational, bodily act which goes far beyond ink on a page. As it considers François’ wife, Christina Coillard née Mackintosh, and other female missionaries, it re-evaluates the site of the domestic as vital in translation, posits hospitality as a multidirectional facet of translation, and completion as the goal of translation. Indigenous missionary involvement then reveals translation to be made up of relationships of trust and of multiple movements. And Coillard’s photographs, seen as and in translation, demonstrate the many layers of context and significance at work in translation. Whilst colonial missionaries are overlooked translator-figures in studies of missiology, colonial history, and translation, in this thesis, a closer look at mission-translation reveals that these individuals are significant sources for the expansion of notions of both mission and translation.

The aim of this thesis is to explore the cultural background of Matthew’s dream narratives and in particular to try and establish whether the literary practice underlying them is closer to that of OT or Graeco-Roman literature. This will be done by looking at the ways in which the dreams were remembered and transmitted, analysing the text in search of “memory patterns”, devices used in oral and semi-literate societies with the aim of helping people remember a poem or a narrative. Many of these techniques use sound (e.g. alliteration, assonance and rhythm), but some engage with the structure of the material; occasionally an image might be applied to aid memory. Thereafter dream reports from a variety of other ancient sources will be analysed to reveal the memory patterns which underlie them. Subsequently the results will be compared, with attention focused on the few devices which are culturally specific and elsewhere noting the frequency with which devices are used as authors typically express themselves. The outcome will be to identify the cultural background within which the Matthean dream narratives emerge. The thesis will take the following shape. After an introductory chapter, there will be the literature review, followed by a chapter on methodology. The method used in the analysis of dream narratives is new and will provide a novel interpretive approach to this section of Matthew. Chapters on memory, orality and rhetoric, Matthew, and a comparison of his text with dream narratives in other literature will follow. Finally there will be a conclusion. In this thesis I argue that the Matthean narratives have greater affinity to Jewish material and OT in particular than to Graeco-Roman literature. The data gathered in the course of research also allows for other comparisons. Of particular interest are comparisons between the writers of OT and those of Hellenistic background and between Josephus and both the groups just mentioned. Several contributions are made to scholarship. Arguably the greatest of these is the methodology employed in the thesis. I also introduce the concept of ‘translation distortion’, which affects memory where an account of the past is originally expressed in a different language. I introduce comparison of Matthew’s use of oral sources with similar use in Herodotus and Pausanias, the latter living in the second century CE and his work rarely applied to NT studies.

The research is a hermeneutic-cum-semiotic approach to the study of the translatability of religious language in a secular play, using The Merchant of Venice in China as a reference. Under the ”power turn” or “political turn” in translation studies, omissions and untranslatability of religious material are often seen as the product of censorship or self-censorship in the prevalent socio-political context. But the theology of each individual translating agent is often neglected as an important contributing factor to such untranslatability. This thesis offers a comprehensive approach in tracing the hermeneutical process of the translators/directors as a reader and the situational process and semiotics of theatre translation, which altogether gives rise to the image of translated literature which in turn influences audience reception. This interdisciplinary study thus traverses the disciplines of translation studies, hermeneutics, theatre studies, and sociology. In this thesis I argue that while translation theorists under the current “sociological turn” view social factors as the overarching factors in determining translation activities and strategies, I will show how the interaction between the translator’s or the dramatist’s theology and religious values interact with the socio-cultural milieu to carve out a unique drama production. Often, as one can see from my case studies, it is the religious values of the translating agents that become the overarching factor in determining the translation product, rather than social factors. This thesis further argues that the translatability of religious discourse should be understood in a broader sense according to the seven dimensions proposed by Ninian Smart, rather than merely focusing on untranslatability as a result of semantic and linguistic differences.

An examination of the spiritual and temporal roles of Catholic chaplains in WW1 in France and Belgium. All the formative influences at home are assessed from religious, political, social, and geographic perspectives. The roles of the bishops in England and Ireland are reviewed and how their post war ambitions were interpreted at the Front are explained. Lancashire's traditional Catholic strength makes it a significant contributor, not least as the fulcrum between Irish and English catholics.