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This thesis uses a practical theological approach to explore concerns regarding black young men (BYM) labelled ‘problematic’, involved in crime and gang-associated activities. Their over-representation in the criminal justice system, also their deaths at each other’s hands, has been the subject of studies and debates in the USA and the UK. Responses and interventions to these concerns have been numerous and varied. This work is rooted in the author’s role as a black Pentecostal pastor in Birmingham and offers a framework from which Black Majority Churches (BMCs) might be able to develop more effective responses to these concerns also exploring the interests and needs of BYM. It addresses the key question: how might the narratives of BYM influence BMCs in shaping more effective theological and pastoral responses to the situation of these men? The research question is explored using a version of the Pastoral Cycle (PC), allowing for the use of interdisciplinary approaches to understand the situation of BYM in Birmingham. Through literature review and empirical investigation of fourteen BYM regarding how they understand their situation and what would help them, conclusions were drawn. The study then explores possible responses of BMCs, using New Testament Church of God (NTCG) as a case study for discussion. It is from these sources that some theoretical, theological and practical prescriptions and conclusions emerge, suggesting that BYM and BMC leaders are prepared to engage in some initial dialogue about the situations facing BYM in Birmingham. This thesis provides new empirically based knowledge about BYM’s perceptions about themselves and their involvement in criminality, and also BMC’s response to their situation. It offers insights into practical theology, sociology and criminology regarding BYM within an urban context.

This thesis undertakes an interdisciplinary analysis of new Church of England liturgies (Common Worship) from an ecotheological point of view: making use of reader response theory, literary analysis, a social scientific survey, liberation theology, environmental and political ethics and liturgical theology. Chapter 1 considers the theological, political and sociological influences on liturgical reform, which include, inculturation, the expression of ethics in the prayer of the Church, liberation theologies, technology, and agrarianism. Chapter 2 considers methods of liturgical change and the scope for making creation visible in liturgy. Chapter 3 finds justification in reader response theory for determining ecotheological priorities for critiquing liturgy. Analysis of Common Worship texts occurs: in Chapter 4, using literary analysis; in Chapter 5 via social scientific survey of clergy using Common Worship; Chapter 6 looks in details at Collects and Post Communions and undertakes an ecotheological rewriting of 9 sample texts. Chapter 7 identifies lessons for liturgical revision in general and for eco-liturgical reform in particular, paying particular attention to the dissonant creation theologies unearthed in Common Worship, the necessity for future revisions, and the importance and implication of technological change for liturgical writers and commentators.

Representations of the Holy Trinity have increasingly come under scrutiny, exposing two competing paradigms at opposite ends of the theological spectrum: the legitimacy and the illegitimacy of imaging the Triune God with focus on the invisible Father who was imaged as an individual from Late Antiquity and beyond. An overview of these two conflicting views has unveiled a number of inconsistencies in how the Early Christian iconography of God the Father and the Trinity has been interpreted. This thesis provides a unique re-evaluation of the surviving Trinitarian visual material between c.300 to c.730. Primarily, this study collates pictorial evidence preserved in the mediums of sarcophagi, catacomb frescoes, mosaics, illuminated manuscripts and an icon that depicts Divinity. It proceeds to critique modern misconceptions of the identity, form, meaning, function and reception of the depictions. The thesis traces the visual shift amid overt and covert images of Divinity by decoding important artworks such as the Ashburnham Pentateuch and the Codex Amiatinus; Christians visualised explicitly the ' invisibility' of God but created an unprecedented invention, the depiction of the Father through Christ's image. The innovative depiction heralded future visual formulas of Divinity echoing the complexities of Trinitarian material culture of the Mediterranean world.

This thesis represents the most detailed investigation into English royal funeral ceremonies 1570-1625 yet undertaken. It builds on earlier scholarship dealing with the French royal funeral and with the social history of death and burial in early modern England. When gathering my source material I consulted manuscript and early printed material at the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the Library of Westminster Abbey, the College of Arms and the Bibliothèque Nationale. My approach is to consider royal funeral rituals in terms of performance. I endeavour to place each of the royal funerals in its immediate performance and broader cultural context. The evidence is analysed using an approach which seeks to take account of both the political and affective implications of ritual. Preliminary chapters establish the form of the English heraldic funeral and the French royal funeral, and assess the impact of the English Reformation on funeral ritual. I go on to discuss the funerals of Mary Stuart, Elizabeth I, Prince Henry Stuart, Anne of Denmark and James I respectively. Included is a bridging chapter which briefly summarises the religious and cultural changes which took place under James I and their impact on funeral ritual. Royal funerals are seen as flexible rather than fixed. They were modified to meet changing political needs but such modifications were always in accord with broader cultural trends. My thesis demonstrates that royal funeral rituals were highly dependent on their performance and cultural contexts. The Epilogue looks at the implications my research has for readings of stage representations of funeral ritual and funeral symbolism in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. I show that royal funerals formed an important aspect of playhouse audience experience. Dramatists exploited that experience to show the operative nature of funeral ritual performance and the potency of its symbols for political propaganda.

The Quaker community is committed to conflict resolution; it might be expected that the community itself is conflict free. This study explores this proposition and presents a counter narrative: conflict does exist among Quakers, with its roots in the culture of the organization. An ethnographic case study was undertaken in a context of observing participation, where the researcher was also actively responsible inside the organization. The project included: 39 semi-structured interviews with Key Informants, Grassroots Quakers and Edge Quakers; a collaborative inquiry workshop with 20 self-selected participants; recording of reflections over six months with a final workshop. The study finds a dominant community narrative telling how the Quaker task is to 'mend the world' and live in a'peaceable kingdom'. This is achieved by ignoring conflict within the organization, defensively following the maxim 'don't ask, don't tell, don't even think about it'. A distinctive pattern of conflict handling is revealed; aversion precedes avoidance, relationship is privileged above outcome, and moderation and restraint are required. Conflict which does surface and persists focuses on the interpretation of Quaker identity. The culture of aversion from conflict makes it difficult for Quakers to articulate conflict experience; they lack confidence and are hesitant. Counter narratives and personal narratives are not made public. Consequently there are very few collectively articulated stories about Quaker conflict handling. A constructivist narrative framework acknowledges the power in the internalised collective narrative. As proud individual nonconformists, Quakers minimise the coercive power of the collective narrative, which positions them as stultified in conflict, with their agency neutralized. It is argued that one way of creating radical change is to encourage the telling of more stories of Quaker conflict, providing new parts in the play.

This thesis investigates Dalí’s adoption of religious iconography to help represent themes that he had conceptualised through Surrealism, psychoanalysis and other thought systems. His selective use of sources was closely bound to his life circumstances, and I integrate biographical details in my analysis of his paintings. I identify unexpected sources of Dalí's images, and demonstrate how alert he was to the psychological motivations of traditional art. I find he made especial use of the iconography of martyrdom – and the perceptual and cognitive mechanics of the contemplation of death – that foreground the problem of the sexual and mortal self. Part I examines the period 1925-7, when Dalí developed an aesthetic outlook in dialogue with Lorca, formulated in his text, 'Sant Sebastià'. Representations of Sebastian and other martyr saints provided patterns for Dalí's exposition of the generative and degenerating self. In three chapters, based on three paintings, I plot the shift in Dalí's focus from the surface of the physical body – wilfully resistant to emotional engagement, and with classical statuary as a model – to its problematic interior, vulnerable to forces of desire and corruption. This section shows how Dalí's engagement with religious art paradoxically brought him into alignment with Surrealism. In Part II, I contend that many of the familiar images of Dalí’s Surrealist period – in which he considered the self as a fundamentally psychic rather than physical entity – can be traced to the iconography of contemplative saints, particularly Jerome. Through the prism of this re-interpretation, I consider Jerome's task of transcribing Biblical meaning in the context of psychoanalytical theories of cultural production. In Part III, I show how Dalí's later, overt use of religious imagery evolved from within his Surrealism. I trace a condensed, personalised life-narrative through Dalí’s paintings of 1948-52, based on Biblical mythology, but compatible with psychoanalytical theory: from birth to death to an ideal return to the mother's body.

The thesis attempts to address Orthodox Church concerns about the Protestant nature and ethos of the ecumenical movement, as it is encountered in the World Council of Churches, by examining Orthodox theological contributions to ecclesiology. This preliminary work is undertaken, as a first step, to establish points of dialogue with the theology of liberation and wider critical theories, in the search for a liberating ecumenism. At the same time, and in a second step (to follow the epistemology of the theology of liberation), this Orthodox theology is placed in a critical dialogue with the theology of liberation in the search for liberating ecclesiological perspectives that can contribute to the movement in ecumenism. This uneasy dialogue helps to recover absent epistemologies from ongoing ecumenical dialogues by re-reading orthodoxies, both ecumenical and ecclesiological, from a liberationist paradigm, and sets ecclesiology within the wider framework of contributions from critical theory. This dialogue between Orthodox theology and the theology of liberation helps to construct an ecclesiology that liberates ecumenism by setting ecclesiology and the ecumenical movement in the wider context of social movements. This thesis calls the ecumenical movement to ‘another possible world’ influenced by people-centred ecclesiologies, which transgresses the canonical boundaries in the ecumenical movement. To be ecumenical implies an Orthodox content to ecclesiology, otherwise the ecumenical movement is open to charges of pan-Protestantism. It is by embracing Orthodoxy that the ecumenical movement can move beyond hegemonic colonial projects and find a liberating praxis. This thesis proposes a dialogue that reflects the structure of the Final Report of the Special Commission on Orthodox Participation in the World Council of Churches. However, it engages with Orthodox ecclesiology and ecumenical histories from the perspective of the theology of liberation in the search for a liberating ecumenism and proposes a praxis that develops movement in the ecumenical and the ecclesiological through developing an ecclesiology from different peripheries of the Church.

The primary objective of this thesis is to identify why sectarianism has declined in Liverpool. In doing, it is necessary to identify what sectarianism was in a Liverpool context, whilst also outlining its development. In relation to this, the part played by nineteenth century Irish immigration, the Orange Order, and the Roman Catholic Church will be analysed. Although assessed, it is not the intention of this work to concentrate primarily on the sectarian violence that gripped the city, nor the complex relationship between sectarianism and politics in Liverpool: the latter having already been expertly covered by Waller (1981) and the former by Neal (1988). Nonetheless, in analysing the degeneration of denominational antagonism both the reduction in sectarian violence and the rapidity of its political disintegration will be considered. For a period spanning two centuries the sectarian divide in Liverpool soured relations between its residents. Indeed, the city’s political representatives were often elected on the basis of their ethno-religious pedigree. Politics continued to be influenced by religion until the mid-1970s. Weakening sectarianism, in the limited existing studies, is attributed largely to post-war slum clearance, but this thesis asserts that causality is much more complex. There are a range of factors that have contributed to the decline. As this thesis demonstrates, the downfall of sectarianism coincided with the creation of a collective identity; an identity based not on ethno-religious affiliations, but on a commonality, an acknowledgment that principles which united were more significant than factors which divided. Importantly, the success of the city’s two football teams, Everton FC and Liverpool FC, gave the city a new focus based upon a healthy sporting rivalry rather than sectarian vehemence. A complex interplay of secularism and ecumenism, the economic misfortunes of Liverpool and their political impact in terms of class politics, the growth of a collective city identity and the omnipotence of (non-religiously derived) football affiliations combined to diminish Liverpool’s once acute sectarian fault-line. This thesis examines how and why.

From the aftermath of Suez to the Kosovo campaign, Britain lost most of its colonies and ended up taking a moral interventionist stance on the world stage with the US its major ally. Against that contextual background, this thesis considers the attitudes in Britain towards its Armed Forces and war from 1960 to 2000. Using a range of lenses, the paper highlights the complexity of change. Homosexuality was a scandalous issue for society in the 1960s, such that the 1967 Act which decriminalised it was not really widely accepted. For the Armed Forces, searches for homosexuals increased on grounds of security. The Act of Remembrance, as recorded in churches, shows the mixed approach of the clergy to war, particularly dependent on their own experience, and also the change in mood from a religious service to a secular one. In the notable campaigns that did take place over the period, Borneo, the Falklands, Bosnia, Kosovo and the Gulf War, a methodical view is taken of opinion polls, press coverage, and letters pages to establish trends at the political, elite and public levels. The media has been used as a reference throughout the thesis as a measure of opinion, but here is analysed for its own biases and approaches, since it has a clear effect on people’s opinions, both from fiction and fact. Overall, the thesis paints a complex web of declining interest in defence issues, greater self-interest amongst many, increasing secularisation, and greater tolerance, yet conversely, points to underlying themes of pride in individual servicemen and the institution of the Armed Forces.