No description available.

No description available.

The researcher is a diocesan adviser for Children’s Ministry, charged with promoting the importance of children for the Church, and the study examines issues arising from this professional responsibility. Children’s advocates often suggest that adults have much to learn from them in the Church. It is commonly assumed that this learning will derive from their presumed characteristics such as ‘innocence’, or ‘playfulness’. However, these characteristics are not exclusive to or universal among children. The aim of this study is to investigate the ‘specialness’ of children and discover if there is something peculiar to childhood that would merit Jesus placing a child in the midst of his disciples as a signpost to the kingdom of heaven. The primary data source is the researcher’s journal of his experience as a member of a multi-generational church group, and the study employs a qualitative methodology drawing on Grounded Theory and some of the practices of autoethnography. The importance of a relationship between experience and theology for Practical Theology is noted and the influence of experience on theologians explored with reference to Schleiermacher, Miller-McLemore and the theological reflection of ‘ordinary’ Christians. The analysis of the researcher’s journal is developed as an example of experience-grounded personal theological reflection. The results achieved by the study show that the most powerful personal effects of the multi-generational group on the researcher did not reflect the children’s attributes per se but rather his own characteristics as revealed in relationship with the children. Interviews with the other adult members of the group, and Christian adults who work with children in contrasting situations, support the view that the effect of children on adults is influenced by the individuals concerned. The personal factors influencing the adults’ experience are thematised, and the questions these themes evoke are seen as indicating the theological potential of reflection on the adult/child interface. The study concludes that one aspect of the ‘specialness’ of children arises from their vulnerability and the nature of the relationship this creates with adults. The ‘special value’ of children to the life of the Church, it is suggested, includes the opportunity they give adults to view their own ‘being’ as God-given ‘gift’ by exploring how it can serve God’s purposes in promoting the flourishing of the vulnerable. The possibility of promoting such exploration among individual Christians and Church communities is considered. The findings of the study are seen as having implications for a less romanticised portrayal of children’s importance in the Church; for promoting better intergenerational relationships; for grounded theological conversation within and beyond the Church; for recruitment to Children’s Ministry; and for the researcher’s professional practice.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

England is home to a distinctive vernacular dance called Morris dance. One of the reasons that it is unique is because it is a secular dance that is displayed rather than performed as a medium for socializing. Questions often arise from audiences when they try to decode its symbolism and the purpose of its presentation. Several interpretations have emerged since Morris dance was revived by successive waves of enthusiasts. After reviewing the study and culture of pre-modern and modern Morris dance and its cultural milieu and its principal venue, Whitsuntide(also known as May Day), a potential interpretation is proposed — misrule. The title of my dissertation recalls the famous essay on the theatrical display of misrule by E.P. Thompson titled "Rough Music" (1993). Using the research that has emerged from the study of carnival behaviour by Mikhail Bakhtin and liminality by Victor Turner, the basic conditions of misrule are reviewed and illuminated. Then the symbols and behaviour of modern and premodern Morris dance are subjected to comparison and contrast with the result that modern Morris dance will be shown to have departed significantly from the premodern template of misrule. This departure may help to explain the dilemma of the current popular criticisms leveled at Morris dance today. However, a complication is raised in which the new misrule interpretation may not prove usefu lafter all because it cannot be applied to the Morris dance culture as it currently exists.

At the turn of the fourteenth century, the Hollands were a knightly family of no great import in Lancashire. In 1475, Henry Holland died as the Lancastrian claimant to the throne. Such a transformation, in itself, deserves explanation. This will reveal the dramatic rise of a family through the beneficence of noble and then royal patronage and, even more so, through the fortune of a good marriage being compounded by a conbination of fortuitous heirless deaths and a significant remarriage to bring an inheritance and royal kinship. That was the means of ascension through the ranks of the nobility, and it was sustained by consistent service to the crown at court and in the field. The Hollands were not a family of local power who built on this to thrust themselves into the nobility; their local basis almost verged on the nomadic and it is within the context of the court that they must be viewed, they were curialist nobility. Therefore, the absence of family and estate papers is not such a blow to their study as the records of central administration have much to reveal of their activities and their estates were not of such concern to them as they were for other families. This chronological survey of their rise, significance and disappearance provides something of a commentary on the political, and military, events of later medieval England. It helps further to fill in our picture of England's nobility, confirming its great individuality and providing an example of how a rapid rise through its ranks was possible.