Thesis (J.C.L.)--Catholic University of America, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 51-63).

Thesis (J.C.L.)--Catholic University of America, 1987. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 59-61).

The present study was calculated to determine whether or not a congregation with a good percentage increase in membership from a specific date in 1956 to a corresponding date in 1957 would also experience any percentage increase in attendance of members and visitors at the Sunday morning worship services. Likewise, would such a congregation have a large percentage of its assembly in attendance at its Bible classes and at its midweek services?

The aim of the following thesis is to provide a study of the life and music of Benigno Zerafa (1726-1804), a mid-18th-century Maltese composer of sacred music. As a model adopted in this dissertation, research on Benigno Zerafa is divided into four categories which the author chose as important points of evidence in musicology: i) biographical, historical and literary studies (based mainly on official documents, the musical documents, and the informative descriptions of performances at the Cathedral, all housed in the archives of the Cathedral Museum) dealing with the composer's life, the environment in which he was brought up and in which he worked, the liturgy and local religious life, the texts he used for his vocal works, performance practice, the reception of his music, and its performance history; these are given in chapters one, two, three and four; ii) source studies - (i) gathering the sources, (ii) identifying the composer's musical and textual handwriting, (iii) determining the authenticity of works attributed to him - involving documentary or external evidence, provenance, paper studies of handwriting, watermarks and staving (rastrography), methods of dating, etc.: these are discussed in chapter four and the thematic catalogue; iii) style analysis concerned with internal evidence deriving from the music itself, and ultimately confronting questions of eesthetics, the place of the composer in music history and, especially, his influence on the development of the Maltese Baroque style - chapters five, six and seven. Empirical methods involving analysis of motifs, phrase structure, harmony, style characteristics, texture, form and word-painting are all considered. The arguments presented demonstrate how topoi, rhetorical figures and systematic overall planning are essential features of Zerafa's works in general; iv) a thematic catalogue of Zerafa's 148 works - volumes three and four - in chronological order concludes this study; a general preface and various indexes to facilitate quick reference are also included. A critical edition of Zerafa's Z116, Nisi Dominus for soprano solo, is presented as appendix A. Other appendices (B to G) follow as aids to the main text. To the best of my knowledge (as of 31 October 2001), no critical editions, books, papers and theses on the composer have yet been published and are in the process of being published. The present author's critical edition of Z2, Messa a due cori (1743), has appeared as part-fulfilment of requirements for the M. Mus. degree (Liverpool, 1997) in a computerised version, and was performed professionally in four locations in France in 1998 under the direction of French conductor Jean-Marc Labylle . One or two dissertations on Zerafa have now appeared. A doctoral thesis by Franco Bruni (Sorbonne, 1998) entitled La Cappella musicale della Cattedrale di Malta nel diciasettesimo e diciottesimo secolo presents a detailed study of the Cappella Musicale of the Cathedral up to the 18th century; a concise biographical note on Benigno Zerafa and an analysis of watermarks of the manuscript paper used are included. There is also a brief analysis of a small number of works, followed by a general thematic catalogue of the works according to manuscript number. The aims of this thesis and the results achieved lie within the context of . the composer's life and career, and are intended to promote a better understanding of the man and his music.

No description available.

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / This thesis analyzes the Serbian Orthodox Church's place in post-Milosevic Serbian society. Specifically, the thesis explores the nature of the influence the Church sways within Serbia's on-going transformation into a liberal democracy. Leveraging Robert Putnam's work on civil society and social capital and Ashutosh Varshney's work on associational networks, the thesis addresses two main questions. First, what is the nature of the Church's influence - does it seek to build bridges across societal sectors or does it seek to exclude others by bonding together an autonomous societal group, consisting of the Church and its faithful? Second, what are the implications of this behavior for Serbia's integration into Euro-Atlantic institutions? Using a blend of case studies (Croatia, Russia), histiography (Serbia) and textual analysis, this study argues that the Serbian Orthodox Church has exhibited both bridging and bonding tendencies with other sectors of civil society, though bonding behavior prevails. The European Union and others can mitigate these bonding inclinations through actions like granting funds to increase charity work and acknowledging the fact that the Church will continue its role within Serbian society/identity for a long time. These actions should allow the more moderate and bridging elements within the Church to further develop. / Outstanding Thesis / US Air Force (USAF) author.

This thesis argues that Dietrich Bonhoeffer understands the church as a pneumatological and eschatological community in space and time. In understanding the church thus, the thesis contends that Bonhoeffer's ecclesial thought is built on pneumatological and apocalyptically eschatological foundations that give rise to a unique methodological approach to ecclesiological description – an approach that enables Bonhoeffer to proffer a genuinely theological ecclesiological account in which both divine and human agency are held together through an account of God the Holy Spirit: both God's own being and the being of the church's sociohistorical or human empirical form are spoken of appropriately with due concern for appropriate dogmatic ordering and proportionality in ecclesiological description. Critically, the thesis considers this pneumatological and eschatological 'both/and' ecclesiological methodology therapeutic to an endemic 'either/or' problematic present in contemporary approaches to ecclesiological discourse: that of attending in an account of the church either to the sociohistorical or human empirical church-community 'ethnographically', or to the life of God 'dogmatically'; and to each (problematically) at the expense of the other. The thesis suggests, therefore, that Bonhoeffer's ecclesial thought breaks open a necessary 'third way' in ecclesiological description between the Scylla of 'ethnographic' ecclesiology and the Charybdis of 'dogmatic' ecclesiology, and thereby establishes a programmatic theological grammar for ecclesiology per se. To substantiate these claims, chapter 1 diagnoses the endemic 'either/or' problematic in relation to contemporary ecclesiological literature. Chapter 2 then identifies the pneumatological and apocalyptically eschatological foundations of Bonhoeffer's ecclesial thought. Chapter 3 articulates how Bonhoeffer's 'both/and' ecclesiological methodology is built on these pneumatological and apocalyptically eschatological foundations and serves to treat the endemic 'either/or' problematic therapeutically. Chapters 4 and 5 together then outline the way in which Bonhoeffer's pneumatological and eschatological 'both/and' ecclesiological methodology further enables him to account for the socio-historical or human empirical church-community in a genuinely theological way. In both chapters, Bonhoeffer's theological conceptualization of spatio-temporality is explicated to demonstrate how, to account for the church's being in space and time, it is necessary to speak theologically about empirical phenomenology, both in accordance with and as a further exemplification of the 'both/and' ecclesiological methodology of Bonhoeffer's ecclesial thought.

Introduction: The introduction begins by canvassing a popular discussion about the state of the Western church today that serves to locate this project in recent theological discourse. I propose that the contemporary scholar Ephraim Radner remains a significant but over-looked voice in these discussions. I then suggest that the prophet Hosea offers a neglected biblical voice that promises to serve as a constructive anvil on which to assay Radner's various ecclesiological and hermeneutical views. Chapter One: In Chapter One I survey Radner's distinctive hermeneutical method: figural reading. After distinguishing figuralism from allegory and typology, I explicate Radner's presentation of figuralism and its sources, especially Jansenism. Next, I elucidate the metaphysical implications of figural reading and its attendant resistances to supersessionism, in that figural reading entails a nonlinear temporality requiring that the church read the history of biblical Israel as her own. I conclude by summoning insights from Michel Foucault to hone this chapter's running thesis that figural reading sees the body of Christ. Chapter Two: In Chapter Two I continue to expound the relation of figural reading to the body of Christ by detailing Radner's ecclesiology. I suggest that nuptiality serves as the central framework of Radner's ecclesiology, which seeks to understand ecclesial oneness in light of the church's painful experience of division. I then survey his diagnosis and prescription for contemporary ecclesial ills, which he takes to derive primarily from divisiveness unleashed by the Reformation. Next, I critically engage the biblical and theological justifications which Radner deploys to argue that just as Christ released his spirit at his death on the cross, so too the church is now a divided and dead body abandoned by the Holy Spirit. While Radner insists that today's ecclesial members are rendered incapable of any human efforts at reunification and must simply cling to their received denominational forms, I suggest that Radner's account shows signs of inconsistency that leave room for reconfiguration of both his diagnosis and prescription for today's church, especially in its neglect of eschatology. Chapter Three: In Chapter Three, I set out to perform a figural reading of the prophet Hosea with which to hone Radner's ecclesiological account. I suggest that Hosea primarily constitutes a critique of Israel's traditional political and cultic forms. I propose that Hosea indicates that a grammar—which correlates natural forms and cultic ones in order to relay the covenantal knowledge that YHWH is the one who feeds Israel—has broken down. Emblematic of this grammatical breakdown is Hosea's own tortured language. As such, I propose that the book should be read as a portrait of the crumbling temple complex. Because of their semiotic decay, Hosea warns that God will take Israel's institutions away. Yet this stripping of her institutional forms is itself the outward display of God's repentant stance by which he determines not to completely destroy Israel, but to instead grant her the space to repent. The name of this space, characterized by the absence of both natural and institutional forms, is wilderness. In the secularized space of wilderness, language remains the sole recourse by which God's people renew their relationship with him as they await re-entry. Chapter Four: Chapter Four concludes by bringing Hosea's insights back to correct Radner. I suggest that today's prevailing secularism constitutes a wilderness experience for the contemporary Western church, who—like the Israel of Hosea—is experiencing a stripping of her traditional institutional forms. What Hosea proposes is not that God is absent, but that his presence is no longer signaled in the ways it once was. As a result, it is not the language of abandonment but eschatological hope that must dictate the posture of God's people in the wilderness. Hosea suggests that such a posture is inherently poetic. I close by suggesting that the quotidian, the passionate, the imagination, and the ambiguous are four key characteristics of the poetic shape which the church should adopt as she waits in the wilderness for God's reign.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University. / The diverse growth of Protestantism in the United States has stimulated many studies. The underlying theme of these investigations has bee the play of economic forces upon the development of church life. This study was conducted with the belief that the microcosm in which this interplay of economic and denominational forces can best be studied is the local church. The occupation of an individual is the key to his social status, his participation in the life of the church, his support for the church program, and frequently determines the extent to which his family may participate as well. Therefore, this study of occupations and their corollaries is an attempt to analyze the program effectiveness of the church as a social institution. [TRUNCATED]

Thesis (D.Min.)--Liberty Theological Seminary and Graduate School, 2006.