This thesis provides an analysis of the unique nature of the community living in Lincoln Cathedral close in the late fifteenth century. The medieval cathedral close is an important unit of study which has been overlooked in existing historiography. This research draws attention to a hitherto neglected area. Testamentary evidence from inhabitants of the close is used, in conjunction with other sources, to analyse the individuals who constituted the close community, particularly their priorities and concerns prior to death. The first chapter outlines the structure of the cathedral hierarchy and analyses archaeological and architectural evidence for the nature of housing available to close inhabitants. The second chapter examines the identities of the close inhabitants and uses evidence of personal wealth extracted from testamentary bequests to delineate social status. The geographical origins and connections of a number of the close inhabitants are evaluated by identifying the locations to which testamentary bequests were made. Evidence for the education, careers and cultural interests of the close inhabitants are also explored. The third chapter surveys relationships within and without the close. It investigates case studies of testamentary legacies made to fellow close inhabitants, friends and family, as well as the executors chosen. The final chapter considers evidence for the different testamentary strategies employed in the pious, commemorative and charitable provision of the clergy, laywomen and laymen living in the close. It also explores the nature of local and communal pieties expressed by the community. The outcome of this study is to shed light on the character of the community inhabiting Lincoln Cathedral close c.1450-1500, which consisted of a high proportion of laypeople and clergy, mainly local to the city and diocese and largely from the lower ranks of society. As this study emphasises, a small proportion of higher clergy attended university and valued this education, with book ownership indicating in particular the scholarly interests of the close inhabitants. In addition to this, the specific housing arrangements meant that there was a high level of integration between the close inhabitants, whilst reinforcing social hierarchy there. Strong relationships also developed between the chapter clergy, whilst family relationships and friendships were more important for the laity. Lincoln Cathedral was a central concern of the close inhabitants' pious devotions, with different groups of testators adopting different approaches to commemoration and charity, reflecting their distinct roles within medieval urban society.

This study is concerned with the significance of Jungian and post-Jungian theory to the development of the contemporary Western Goddess Movement, which includes the various self-identified nature-based, Pagan, Goddess Feminism, Goddess Consciousness, Goddess Spirituality, Wicca, and Goddess-centred faith traditions that have seen a combined increase in Western adherents over the past five decades and share a common goal to claim Goddess as an active part of Western consciousness and faith traditions. The Western Goddess Movement has been strongly influenced by Jung’s thought, and by feminist revisions of Jungian Theory, sometimes interpreted idiosyncratically, but presented as a route to personal and spiritual transformation. The analysis examines ways in which women encounter Goddess through a process of Jungian Individuation and traces the development of Jungian and post-Jungian theories by identifying the key thinkers and central ideas that helped to shape the development of the Western Goddess Movement. It does so through a close reading and analysis of five biographical ‘rebirth’ memoirs published between 1981 and 1998: Christine Downing’s (1981) The Goddess: Mythological Images of the Feminine; Jean Shinoda Bolen’s (1994) Crossing to Avalon: A Woman’s Midlife Pilgrimage; Sue Monk Kidd’s (1996) The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman’s Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine; Margaret Starbird’s (1998) The Goddess in the Gospels: Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine; and Phyllis Curott’s (1998) Book of Shadows: A Modern Woman’s Journey into the Wisdom of Witchcraft and the Magic of the Goddess. These five memoirs reflect the diversity of the faith traditions in the Western Goddess Movement. The enquiry centres upon two parallel and complementary research threads: 1) critically examining the content of the memoirs in order to determine their contribution to the development of the Goddess Movement and 2) charting and sourcing the development of the major Jungian and post-Jungian theories championed in the memoirs in order to evaluate the significance of Jungian and post-Jungian thought in the Movement. The aim of this study was to gain a better understanding of the original research question: what is the significance of Jungian and post-Jungian theory for the development of the Western Goddess Movement? Each memoir is subjected to critical review of its intended audiences, its achievements, its functions and strengths, and its theoretical frameworks. Research results offered more than the experiences of five Western women, it also provided evidence to analyse the significance of Jungian and post-Jungian theory to the development of the Western Goddess Movement. The findings demonstrate the vital contributions of the analytical psychology of Carl Jung, and post-Jungians M Esther Harding, Erich Neumann, Christine Downing, E.C. Whitmont, and Jean Shinoda Bolen; the additional contributions of Sue Monk Kidd, Margaret Starbird, and Phyllis Curott, and exhibit Jungian and post-Jungian pathways to Goddess. Through a variety of approaches to Jungian categories, these memoirs constitute a literature of Individuation for the Western Goddess Movement.

This thesis presents an argument for the development of a catechumenate for the Church of Scotland. It does so first by drawing attention to the wide discrepancy between the assumptions of the secular culture and those of the church, specifically the Church of Scotland, with a view to understanding the substantial differences in the beliefs of those baptised and the beliefs of the church. It argues that the church has yet to come to terms with this discrepancy and consequently has weakened its distinctive baptismal witness. Secondly, the thesis considers in depth the development and reception of two major studies on the subject of baptism conducted by the Church of Scotland in the last sixty years. It indicates that both remain largely unknown quantities within the church and have subsequently failed to provide practical guidance to the church in its practice of baptism. This thesis considers the experience and practice of adult baptism in contemporary Scotland and concludes with an extended argument justifying the need for a fully developed catechumenate.

A Critical Evaluation of the Evangelistic Preaching of Martyn Lloyd-Jones with Special Reference to his ‘Acts’ Series of Sermons and its Relevance for UK Pastors Today Abstract The ministry of David Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899-1981), a leading British preacher within the Reformed tradition, has been a subject of research in the decades since his death. In spite of the importance he himself attached to evangelistic preaching, however, no significant study has been conducted of his own evangelistic preaching. This dissertation explores his weekly evangelistic ministry based on the Book of Acts in the 1960s, his closing years at Westminster Chapel, London. The purpose is to consider the ongoing usefulness, if any, of his practice and method for ministers who stand in the same theological tradition today. The work examines, first, the convictions that drove Lloyd-Jones’ practice, using his published addresses as primary source material. Beyond a summary of his career and his influence (Chapter One), consideration is given to the religious and social context at the time of the Acts sermons, and to its significance for the approach Lloyd-Jones successfully adopted (Chapter Two). Chapter Three presents a detailed analysis of his sermons on the Acts of the Apostles and identifies a number of their characteristics. Having established the historical groundwork, the dissertation goes on in Chapter Four to focus on my own preaching in the context of the church of which I am a minister, serving within the Reformed tradition and following the approach modeled by Lloyd-Jones. Using questionnaires derived from the analysis of his sermons, surveys were undertaken of first, the church leaders and secondly, the Young People’s group. Their goal was to provide feedback that would serve to identify strengths and weaknesses in my own evangelistic preaching at the same time as to evaluate the appropriateness of maintaining Lloyd-Jones’ approach in the changed context of the early 21st century. The conclusion reached is that while changes in society today require some adaptation in terms of presentation and style, the essential characteristics of Lloyd-Jones’ preaching continue to be meaningful, because they arise from fundamental theological convictions that are unaffected by changes in human behaviour or thinking. Finally, Chapter Five asks how this study may be developed further, applying it in a wider context as well as in local-church ministry.

In this ethnography, writing as both practitioner and researcher, I represent and analyse the opinions and reflections of Anglican chaplains in English and Welsh prisons in order to locate their self - perception of role and identity. The Anglican chaplain has been a statutory appointment in every prison since 1779 and was a central figure in penal practice throughout the first half of the 19th century. Several chaplains wrote at length about their ministry and its significance; this conscious utterance in the public domain dwindled sharply from the 1860s onwards. My research presents current chaplains’ perspectives on their role and identity, configured by a social context which is perceived to be secular and in which other world faiths have a strong presence. Four main areas of focus emerge from the data: working with prisoners, working with staff, the apparently contradictory, ritual nature of secular and religious engagement, and issues of gendered interaction. These data are contextualised by respondents’ perceptions of prisons as parishes, the construction of Anglican chaplains’ identity by events within and outwith prisons and churches, and perceived relations with the Church of England and the Church in Wales. Having recognised other models of prison ministry, the thesis ends by identifying modes of potential, structured cooperation between church and chaplaincy. The epistemological con text derives from Goffman’s theory of total institutions but recognises subsequent reinterpretations of his work. The methodological reference points are Turner’s theory of liminality, Bell’s theory of ritual - like activities and Foucault’s heterotopia of deviance. The thesis offers a perspective on a traditional public form of ministry, that of the chaplains themselves, unexplored and not analysed for over a century. It is submitted as a further development in the growing discourse around practical theology and religious ministry in prisons.

In spite of the realities of an increasingly post-ecclesial world, sacrament continues to appear as a theme in contemporary culture, often in places least expected. What it means to describe something – a text, ritual, experience, etc – as “sacramental” derives from the unique yet complex conception of sacrament as practiced (liturgy) and theorized (theology) within the Christian tradition. Indeed, whilst simultaneously upheld as the “constitutive” action and foundational sacrament of Christ's Body called church, the Eucharist has confounded the Christian faith throughout its history. Its symbolism points to the paradox of the incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth, and his sacrificial death on Calvary, which St. Paul describes as a stumbling-block (skandalon) and foolishness (1 Cor. 1:23). And yet this scandalous quality of sacramentality, not only illustrated by but enacted in the Eucharist, has not been sufficiently accounted for in the ecclesiologies and sacramental theologies of the Christian tradition. Following the image from the Fourth gospel of “the word made flesh,” this interdisciplinary study examines the scandal of sacramentality along the two-pronged thematic of the scandal of language (word) and the scandal of the body (flesh). While sacred theology can think through this scandal only at significant risk to its own stability, the fictional discourses of literature and the arts are free to explore this scandal in a manner that simultaneously augments and challenges notions of sacrament and sacramentality, and by extension, what it means to describe the Church as a “eucharistic community.” Our aim is less a reassertion of the vitality of traditional sacramental rituals even within contemporary culture and more an effort to understand why the notion of sacrament and sacramentality has held such staying power, despite significant cultural shifts and movement away from the traditional practices of the Christian faith. Why do novelists, artists, theologians, philosophers and religious communities continue to make use of and draw upon the language and evocation of ‘sacrament’? Our thesis is that it is precisely the scandalous, subversive power of the eucharistic mystery, the thematic and symbolic tensions and destabilizing effect inherent to sacramentality, that make it such a fertile trope for artists and writers, especially within a postmodern context preoccupied with the themes of language, embodiment, presence/absence, immanence/transcendence, and so on.

This thesis asks the question: what does it mean to “discern the body” (1 Cor. 11:29)? Answering this begins with the question’s origin in the sacramental context of a particular Christian community’s attempt to observe what became known as the Eucharist. In their physicality, sacraments act as reminders that theological concepts, while they systematise experience and knowledge, can never be simply abstract; theology must never forget the particular, discrete nature of human beings, the separation of creatures, the otherness that allows true plurality and mutuality. My thesis is divided in three parts, to address bodies and their stories in theory, literary art, and sacramental liturgy. The first part of the thesis offers a critical reading of various theologies of body and story, applying to them insights from feminist epistemology concerning situated knowledge. The critique examines the work of Graham Ward, Stanley Hauerwas, Marcella Althaus-Reid, and Paul Ricoeur, looking at the way that even their attempts to take the body into account tend to downplay the concreteness of particular people and their stories. The second part of the thesis explores the way that literature handles the problems of particularity and universality, looking at specific stories in specific novels, and examining the way they treat bodies and the meeting of bodies. I address five novels. In conversation with Anil’s Ghost, by Michael Ondaatje, I discuss the importance of touch in defining meaning. With A Map of Glass, by Jane Urquhart, I look at bodies as tactile maps and geographies of memory. Fugitive Pieces, by Anne Michaels, leads me to a discussion of the place of artistic form in the determination of meaning both for the body and for literature. The Man on a Donkey, by H. F. M. Prescott, leads to reflections upon disjunctions in bodies as various narratives make claims upon them. The discussion of Godric, by Frederick Buechner, centres upon personal identity being constructed physically, artistically and relationally through proximity with others. The third part investigates the nature of sacraments and sacramental theology as a place of attending to both the abstract and the particular, to the person—seeking a geography of love. To do this, I begin with a discussion of the search for a normative liturgical pattern as exemplified by Dom Gregory Dix’s The Shape of the Liturgy, focusing on the consequences for acknowledging the unruliness of the materiality of bodies. I then examine the approach of Gordon W. Lathrop, who uses the image of the map for describing liturgy. But his use of this metaphor construes the liturgical map as a given, turning away from interactive, creative possibilities. As a response, I look to the theologian Charles Winquist, who writes about the particularity of love. Finally, I bring together my reflections from the first two parts of the thesis to make suggestions about the liturgical body: that it is discerned by paying attention to the stories that the body carries, to the relationships in which bodies are implicated and to their locations, and to the vulnerabilities manifested by love and grief, by care.

A Spiritual Assessment Tool (SAT) for use with a child by a healthcare chaplain, requires a clear conceptual construct in order to convey a child’s spiritual profile to other professionals. The design of the tool, allied to the manner in which a chaplain engages with a patient, allows a child to easily share information which can be interpreted in terms of this construct. This thesis creates a new and accessible conceptual framework to describe the spirituality of children in a paediatric setting. It achieves this through the design and development of a portfolio of sorting cards and storyboards, referred to as a Spiritual Assessment Tool (SAT). The SAT encourages children to share information about their healthcare journey which is then interpreted in terms of the new framework. In addition, it identifies the competences required by a healthcare professional to obtain and interpret this information. In doing so, it necessarily discusses the wider implications of the theological insights which arise. The research involved the filming of interviews conducted with children aged between 6 and 13 years old in an acute paediatric healthcare setting. During these interviews sorting cards depicting different aspects of the children’s lives were used in conjunction with storyboards, in order to discover how the children described their lives while in hospital. The design of the SAT developed through two distinct stages before reaching a final model that achieved the goals of this thesis In order to describe and share the information expressed with other healthcare staff, a framework was developed to enable interpretation of how a child constructs meaning. This framework required a terminology that could clearly communicate the complexities of how children understand the meaning of their lives in the context of the hospital setting. By engaging with child development theory and the data gathered from the interviews, the term “connectedness” was adopted to better encapsulate the conceptual construct of what had, in the past, been described as “childhood spirituality”. The term draws four dimensions from the field of child development which help professionals to profile a child’s perspective of their lives while in hospital:; the momentum of connectedness; the awareness of connectedness; the resilience of connectedness; and the evaluative nature of connectedness. These dimensions take account of the contextual disruption experienced by the children and the way in which their level of development contributes to the perspective of their lives while in hospital. The theological implications the concept of ‘connectedness’ and the methodology of its application underline the dynamics of the competences involved. These can be applied in integrated theological reflective practice. The “Zone of Proximal Connectedness” (ZPC) is used to describe the space of an encounter between a healthcare professional and a paediatric patient when four features are present; hospitality, liminality, the significant other, and the co-construction of meaning. The ZPC forms the foundation for gathering information that serves as the basis for better spiritual care. The research findings provide insight into the dynamics required for a healthcare chaplain to relate to a child and to engage in integrated theological reflective practice which relates to the ZPC. The nature of the encounter outlined in this thesis, requires the quality of ‘mutuality’ to be present between assessor and child. The nature of the encounter outlined in this thesis between an assessor and a child requires the quality of ‘mutuality’. The presence of the quality of mutuality in this context, reveals that inThe implications of mutuality reveal that in the Christian Faith our concept of God’s nature involves a greater sense of mutuality. The wider implications of this reflection for the Christian faith and our understanding of God, Jesus and the Church are identified as an area for future theological exploration.

This thesis reports on an extensive qualitative study of women ministers in the Church of Scotland. It examines the literature in relation to women clergy in other denominations in the UK and the USA and considers ways in which the Church of Scotland clergy are similar and dissimilar to their counterparts. The research included a quantitative survey, the examination of data from the Church of Scotland Yearbook and thirty one ‘ministry-story’ interviews. The Survey and the Yearbook produced basic demographic data about women ministers in the Kirk showing an increasing age profile and a shortage of younger women ministers. The survey also found that women ministers considered themselves to be different from male ministers most especially in the fields of collaboration and leadership style. The interviews considered factors in the path to ministry, women ministers in the exercise of their ministry, relationships with congregations, colleagues and the institutional Church. Whilst there was considerable progress in terms of the acceptance of women’s ministry by congregations and the wider community, there was also evidence of a lack of acceptance from some male ministers and an unwillingness to confront the issue on the part of the institution. Women ministers consider there to have been some progress towards integration of women’s ministry within the Church of Scotland but are also uncertain about the future and whether a backlash against women will be experienced. Although women have been ordained to ministry of word and sacrament within the Church of Scotland since 1968, this represents the first major study of women ministers within the Kirk and will provide a background for further study and exploration.

This thesis demonstrates that friendship has particular relevance for postmodern ecclesiology and offers the basis for a relationally, rather than structurally conceived, understanding. It argues that friendship can be foundational for the Church community in contemporary times, as a means of self-understanding and as a basis for its mission. In doing this, it progressively explores friendship by means of an ongoing conversation with a variety of thinkers and theologians who have contributed to the subject. Each reveals, in a variety of disciplines, differing facets of friendship which ultimately contribute to a fresh understanding of ecclesial identity. This understanding shows the Church to be well placed to have friendship as its locus; in hospitality, a commitment to community, and the centrality of the Eucharistic meal. Friendship is shown to have a significant pedigree in philosophical thought, which has in turn influenced Christian theology. The thesis describes the paucity of incisive commentary on friendship in New Testament scholarship, and outlines the ambiguity surrounding friendship in postmodern culture, suggesting friendship's untapped potential as an ecclesial basis. Friendship's philosophical treatment in the classical era, particularly through Plato, Aristotle and Cicero provides a basis for its influence in Christian theology, as revealed by Augustine and Aquinas. The importance of friendship for personhood is explored through considering the nature of the self, specifically in conversation with Descartes and his challengers, particularly Nietzsche and Derrida. Applying this to the nature of the self in community, Bauman, Habermas, Derrida and Lyotard are amongst those who offer insights. This foundation allows a consideration of friendship as a particular instantiation of love, which sharpens the Christian principle of love for all people. From the insights of monasticism and Queer Theology, friendship's potential for a relationally rooted ecclesiology emerge: here the contribution of Aelred, Newman, Rudy and Stuart are significant. The Trinitarian theology of Zizioulas forms the basis for describing a communio ecclesiology, informed by Barth, Bonhoeffer, McFarland and Gunton, amongst others. This allows the Church as a community of friends, characterised by hospitality and centred on the Eucharist to be envisaged. The work of Derrida and Caputo on hospitality and 'the impossible' contribute useful insights into how this community might be resourced as it operates as the 'friends of Christ'.