The religion of Manichaeism emerged from third-century Persian Mesopotamia from the self styled prophet and apostle of Christ, Mani. Through missionary endeavours, Manichaeism proliferated throughout the Roman Empire, Asia and China between the third and eighth centuries, before succumbing to persecution from rival faiths. Mani’s dramatic cosmological mythology forms the core of Manichaean practice and soteriology. This thesis explores the constructions of gender in Mani’s mythology and its development in subsequent Manichaean literature. The analysis considers constructions of gender embedded in six portraits of Manichaean cosmological figures. Gendered roles, attributes and epithets are explored, revealing hierarchical systems of roles and relations.

Interpreting culture as symbols, stories, rituals and values, the thesis explores the culture of a Jewish and a Catholic secondary school in a dialogical way. The survey of the literature in Chapter 1 identifies relevant school-based research and locates the chosen case-study schools within the context of the British 'dual system'. Chapter 2 draws on the theoretical and methodological literatures of inter-faith dialogue and ethnography to develop and defend a paradigm for the research defined as open-inclusivist and constructivist. The main body of the thesis (Chapters 3-5), based on field-work undertaken in 1996 and 1997, presents the two schools in parallel with each other. Chapter 3 describes the details of the case studies at 'St. Margaret's' and 'Mount Sinai' and my developing research relationship with each school. In Chapter 4 many different voices from each school are woven into two 'tales' about the schools' cultures. This central chapter has a deliberately narrative style. Chapter 5 amplifies the cultural tales through the analysis of broadly quantitative data gained from an extensive questionnaire administered to a sample of senior students in each school. It is the only place in the thesis where views and values from the two schools are directly compared. The final two chapters widen the horizon of the study. Chapter 6 presents voices which were not part of the original case studies but which relate, in different ways, to the culture of the two schools. Chapter 7, with theoretical ideas about Jewish schools and education, and Catholic schools and education, provides resources for further dialogue about culture within Judaism and Catholicism and for Jewish-Christian dialogue. The thesis ends with some reflections on possible implications of the two cultures for discussions about the common good in education.

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From Preface: The Church has been divided from its very earliest days, when Christians of Jewish origin found it hard to accept that uncircumcised Gentiles might be Christians too. (See Acts 15, Galatians 2, etc.) It has since then known division into East and West, into Roman Catholic and Protestant, and into the hundreds and even thousands of denominations and sects which we know today, not to speak of the schisms between 'modernism' and 'fundamentalism', between Calvinism and Arminianism, and between 'High' and 'Low' churchmanship. We are, however, being reminded more and more by the Ecumenical Movement that the Church of Christ is ONE. Jesus said: "On this rock I will build my Church" (not churches) - Matt. 16:18.

Supersession is the theory of one idea supplanting the other. In both Christianity and Islam, this idea is commonplace. In Christianity, the message of Jesus creates a New Covenant for both Jews and Gentiles, while in Islam, the revelation of Muhammad restores the original religion that God intended from the beginning. Christianity and Islam both supersede Judaism in very similar ways. In regards to the use of Abraham in particular, each religion inherits him by appealing to Jewish scripture or their oral tradition, using him to prove their truth claims, and claiming that their religion is originally the religion of Abraham.

Although historians generally view early Mormonism as a movement focused on restoring Christianity to its pristine New Testament state, in the Mormon movement’s first phase (1827-28) it was actually focused on restoring Judaism to its pristine “Old Testament” state and reconstituting the Jewish nation as it had existed before the Exile. Mormonism’s first scripture, “the Book of Lehi” (the first part of the Book of Mormon), disappeared shortly after its manuscript was produced. But evidence about its contents shows it to have had restoring Judaism and the Jewish nation to their pre-Exilic condition to have been one of its major themes. And statements by early Mormons at the time the Book of Lehi manuscript was produced show they were focused on “confirming the Old Testament” and “gathering” the Jews to an American New Jerusalem. This Judaic emphasis in earliest Mormonism appears to have been shaped by a set of movements in the same time and place (New York State in the 1820s) that I am calling “American proto-Zionism,” which aimed to colonize Jews in the United States. The early Mormon movement can be considered part of American proto-Zionism and was influenced by developments in early nineteenth century American Judaism.

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