This study seeks to articulate how and to what extent the religious-education programs, faith formation, and spiritual ethos in Catholic schools can cultivate dialogue about and foster experiences of religion and God in light of the diversity of faith traditions present in the student population. The methodology involves demographic and document inquiry, participant observation, and individual, semistructured interviews using an analytical framework inspired by Thomas Groome’s seminal work on a shared Christian praxis. Research was conducted between November 2004 and March 2005. One school in Canada, one school in the United States, and two schools in India were observed, and 15 interviews were completed. What was demonstrated most clearly is that specific dialogue about religion and God is not a primary focus in any of the schools. Rather, their approaches seek to foster character development and religious tolerance based on the principles of moral and values education that are rooted in the experiences of the students. This study is useful for schools that desire to stimulate religious expression and dialogue that are rooted in, but not limited to, the narrow language of a single faith tradition. / May 2005

Thesis (D. Min.)--Columbia International University, 2008. / Typescript. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 169-174).

Sometime in the first half of the second millennium, the Pañjāb witnessed a literary transformation. This historical process enabled the people of the region to self-consciously augment and even supplant forms of knowledge that emerged out of Sanskritic and Persianate cultural practices with regional ones, a complex phenomenon that varied tremendously, based largely on the religious identity of the writers. The elite of Sikh, Islamic, and Hindu communities drove this innovation: all literary activity in the Pañjāb was supported almost exclusively by the centers of religion, rather than the royal court. This work stands in sharp contrast to the view that religion played no significant role in South Asia’s so-called “vernacularization.” The confluence of three major religious communities—and the distinct literary cultures that they produced—makes the Pañjāb an ideal ground to examine the complex nature of this literary transformation. While this work engages with premodern literary cultures broadly to understand the larger trends in literary production, the arguments presented are ultimately based on a careful reading of the literary worlds represented in four near-contemporaneous texts that are specific to each religious community—the shabads of the Sikh Gurū Nānak (1469-1539); the kāfīs attributed to the Muslim Ṣūfī Shāh Ḥusain (1538-99); the Hanumān Nāṭak (1623) of the Hirdai Rām Bhallā and the vāṇī of Bābā Lāl Dayāl (17th c.), both Hindū Vaiṣṇavas. The work highlights similarities and dramatic differences in literary production and circulation of discourses within material cultures that were shaped by self-conscious religious communities.

We wanted to know how the subject HIV/AIDS was handled in the Indian newspaper The Hindu, which is written in English, during a period of 16 days (30 October-14 November) in 2005 compared to the corresponding period during 2007. Because we liked to study what kind of differences there were in the reporting between these two years. In addition we also wanted to learn how people living with HIV and AIDS are represented in pictures and text. To find out this was the purpose with this investigation. The study is made from the theory of stigma, semiotics and from a professional model of the normative theory. The articles about HIV/AIDS were quantitatively analyzed with help of a schedule of codes and we performed a qualitative analysis on several articles, four from 2005 and four from 2007. We also did four research interviews based on how people infected with HIV thought about journalists’ reporting in general and also one specific article that was written about HIV/AIDS. A journalist at The Hindu was interviewed so that we could learn more about how the editorial staff on a newspaper work and what they should have in mind when they write about the subject. He told us that the newspaper didn’t have any written guidelines to follow when they made an article about HIV/AIDS. The result of our study was that The Hindu wrote more about HIV/AIDS 2007 compared to 2005 and the articles were larger and had more pictures. In the qualitative text analysis we found out that the articles from 2005 often were about the disease, while the articles from 2007 were more about the HIV-positives and the problems they sometimes face with discrimination and stigmatisation. 2005 journalists used doctors and experts as sources, two years later the journalists talked more with ordinary people. These results are similar to earlier research in the same subject. We could also see that children living with HIV/AIDS now could be found in the articles, they were the ones who got least space in the media before. Even though the media are starting to talk more with people living with HIV/AIDS, we found out during our research interviews with PLWHA in India that it may be hard to get someone to openly talk about the subject, because it’s taboo. And one man we interviewed said he would commit suicide if a journalist revealed his status. The PLWHA are less stereotyped in the paper nowadays, but the fear and the discrimination in the society still seem to be there.

No abstract available. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Durban-Westville, 1975.

Tradition and modernity are often viewed as strong yet opposing influences on the lives of Indian women living in Canada. In particular, the customs and religion of the homeland are assumed to conflict with the modern aspirations of these women. This study utilizes standpoint theory as a framework to question and push against this popular portrayal, and examines how Indian (Hindu) values influence, challenge and contribute to the educational and professional advancement of diasporic women. By analyzing qualitative interviews conducted with recently immigrated and second-generation Indian (Hindu) women, this study reveals that these women take on the role of an ideal amalgamation of Eastern and Western practices and navigate through their educational and professional choices in a manner that accommodates both. Traditional values and modernity are not always mutually exclusive, as evidenced by my participants who mobilize both in order to achieve particular sites of classed and ethnic empowerment.

Recent work in anthropology has translated systemic disjuncture to individual subjectivity, under the premise that "disordered" political economies cause "disordered" identities. However this work underplays the role of affect in "gathering" subjectivity amidst external transformation. The following thesis proposes a concept of "mood" as a set of conjoined, low-level affects that provides continuity in contexts of neoliberalism and change. It investigates women's "moods" in an urbanizing region of Uttarakhand, India. Drawing from ethnographic interviews in a village, and a migrant community, mood is shown to involve components of capitalist anxiety that articulate with attitudes of docility and duty. Experiences typically described as "postmodern" including "incompleteness", "estrangement" and "alienation", are common to, and produce "classical" gendered affects in both rural and urban settings. Although anxiety can be destabilizing, it joins paradoxically with these affects to lubricate women's sense of "belonging" in a place.

Tradition and modernity are often viewed as strong yet opposing influences on the lives of Indian women living in Canada. In particular, the customs and religion of the homeland are assumed to conflict with the modern aspirations of these women. This study utilizes standpoint theory as a framework to question and push against this popular portrayal, and examines how Indian (Hindu) values influence, challenge and contribute to the educational and professional advancement of diasporic women. By analyzing qualitative interviews conducted with recently immigrated and second-generation Indian (Hindu) women, this study reveals that these women take on the role of an ideal amalgamation of Eastern and Western practices and navigate through their educational and professional choices in a manner that accommodates both. Traditional values and modernity are not always mutually exclusive, as evidenced by my participants who mobilize both in order to achieve particular sites of classed and ethnic empowerment.

The research literature documents the relative disadvantage of widows in coping with grief, both in a greater vulnerability themselves for mortality or ill health, but also for a sudden loss of resources from losing a spouse. Moreover, widowhood in the Canadian cultural communities may be an additional burden if met with service from mainstream care professionals and agencies at variance with their culturally-appropriate grieving practices and assumptions. Specifically, the meaning(s) of bereavement and grief for Hindu-Canadian widows are not well understood, and the goal of this study is to enhance transcultural understanding of this population in counselling and beyond. An inductive, descriptive qualitative method focusing on the subjective, lived experience of key co-researchers, using selective and nonprobability sampling was utilized to maximize the relatively small sample size typical of a phenomenological approach. This was used to describe and explain the meanings and experiences of grief for five older Hindu-Canadian widows within the context of their own cultural setting and world view. Data were collected from five female members of the Hindu- Canadian communities. An additional triangulation method of a general class of culmraUy-informed co-researchers was used to help corroborate the obtained themes. The co-researcher's responses were the data for this study, and a method of "constant comparative analysis" (I^ininger, 1985) was utilized in a search for themes through a process of higher abstraction. Data analysis of the verbatim transcripts occurred simultaneously with data collection and, guided by Leininger's (1990) 'Thases of Analysis for Qualitative Data," the process unfolded with: (a) collecting and documenting raw data; (b) identification of descriptors; (c) pattern analysis; and (d) theme formulation. Ultimately six themes were abstracted from forty-five sub-categories as a portrait of the meanings and experiences of widowhood for this group of Hindu-Canadian widows. Themes for this group of key co-researchers are as follows: First, status transition from wife to widow meant resignation to the husband's death, rather than acceptance through discrete stages of recovery: Second, meanings and expressions of grief centered on beliefs about the enduring and eternal quality of the husband's life force as intrinsic and essential to the widow's own lifeways: Third, the transition from wife to widow entailed a double affliction in status loss as well as in the personal domain of intimacy and partnership: Fourth, the meanings and expressions of both grief phenomena and status transition reflect an ethic of collective good and duty-based interpersonal morality, but with acculturation causing a nascent and generational transition in such moral orientation: Fifth, status transition can entail a degree of liminality, out of bicultural dislocation and transformational variables such as education: Finally, a fundamental meaning of their Hindu-Canadian widowhood experience is its spiritual opportunity. Despite some diversity in their Hindu diaspora and sect, the explicated themes illustrate a common experience and meaning attendant on widowhood for the co-researchers. This study investigated a portion of the underlying cultural logic of widowhood and grief phenomena for these constituents of Hinduism, and highlighted their cultural constructions of meaning and experience, allowing us to improve our transcultural knowledge and understanding of the unique needs of this population in the field of Counselling and beyond. As a phenomenological study, themes and suppositions abstracted from this relatively small sample are limited beyond the precisely-defined context of its five co-researchers. Nevertheless, a counsellor might well benefit from the potential offered here for finer-grained assessments and therapeutic relationships with widows in our Hindu communities.

This thesis examines the complex interplay between colonial modernity and Sakta (goddess-centered) devotion in the context of an elite family of zamindars (landholders) in Bengal. One consequence of colonialism in Bengal was the efflorescence of overt Sakta religiosity among Bengal's elite. Religious practice, supposedly "protected" by the colonial order, became the site where indigenous elites expressed political will and, to an extent, resisted foreign domination. I argue that the zamindars of Bansberia in the Hugli district of Bengal were creative agents, engaging and resisting the various cultural ruptures represented by colonial rule in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Employing analyses of archival material, contemporary ethnography, and architectural style, this thesis is an ethnohistory of a modern zamindari-kingdom that locates its political voice in an emblematic Sakta-Tantric temple. It demonstrates the powerful relationship between religion and politics in colonial Bengal and discusses the implications of this strong association in the contemporary context.