The present thesis investigates the music and career of Jeffrey Lewis (born 1942). The thesis is broadly divided into three sections. First is an account of the composer’s life, told mainly through an overview of his works, but also through a sketch of his early years in South Wales, his studies in Cardiff, Darmstadt, Kraków and Paris, his academic career in Leeds and Bangor, and his subsequent early retirement from academia. There follows a more detailed study of six works from the period 1978 – 1985, during which certain features of Lewis’s musical language came to the fore, perhaps most notably a very individual and instantly recognisable use of modal language. After an Epilogue, the thesis concludes with an Appendix in the form of a Catalogue in which all Lewis’s known compositions are listed, together with details of performances, broadcasts and recordings. Lewis’s music often plays with our temporal expectations; the close interrelationship between texture, structure, harmony and melody, and its effect upon our perception of the passage of time, are explored in the main analyses. These are conducted partly by means of comparison with other works by Lewis or his contemporaries. Memoria is examined in relation to a similarly tranquil score, Naaotwá Lalá, by Giles Swayne. The following chapter discusses the extra-musical inspiration for Epitaph for Abelard and Heloise, whose relationship to Tableau is then explored in the next. The difficulties of creating a large-scale structure that unifies the work’s various harmonic elements are also investigated. The analysis of Carmen Paschale considers it in relation to Lewis’s other choral music, whilst the final analytical chapter compares and contrasts two three-movement works, the Piano Trio and the Fantasy for solo piano. Lewis’s melodic writing in the Piano Trio is discussed in relation to that of James MacMillan, and the origins of the first movement of Fantasy in Oliver Knussen’s Sonya’s Lullaby are explored. In the Epilogue, the possible reasons for Lewis’s current neglect are explored, various influences on Lewis’s musical thinking are laid out, and his achievements are assessed.

The study commenced by identifying a theological problem relating to the lack of understanding regarding grass-roots African Pentecostal healing praxis. The empirical-theological approach of Van der Ven was utilised, therefore, to study the healing praxis of an African Pentecostal body, called: The Group‘ Assemblies of God, in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Van der Ven‘s original framework was developed by drawing on the hermeneutic and methodological work of Cartledge. A case study was undertaken on a Group‘ Assembly in rural KwaZulu-Natal. The use of social scientific techniques produced a wide range of results that point to the church‘s ministry of healing as a process, rooted in the Trinity, that can occur through varied channels. These pathways ended in a broad understanding of healing. A dialogue between the qualitative results and the healing literature was used to develop a more precise theological question. Case study categories were conceptualised and then operationalised as a questionnaire. A survey was performed on all Assemblies affiliated to The Group‘ Assemblies of God in KwaZulu-Natal. A significant number of people participated in the survey which produced a wide range of data. It is found that worldview and charismatic experience form an important hermeneutic axis that influences attitudes towards the healing ministry. Conservative biblical belief, ethnicity, education and gender influence attitudes towards healing. A distinct divide exists between positive attitudes towards physical, spiritual, inner healing and deliverance and more negative attitudes towards social and environmental healing. The reflection on these results focuses on the perceived influence of American dispensational fundamentalism. The eschatology formed from these beliefs has a narrowing effect on holistic healing ministry. Moltmann‘s transformational eschatology is suggested, therefore, as a suitable alternative. The methodological evaluation finds that several problems exist with regard to research in a rural African location. The cycle concludes by offering a range of suggestions for further study. / Practical Theology / D. Th. (Practical Theology)

This thesis focuses on the significance of blood and the perception of the body in both learned and popular culture in order to investigate problems of identity and social exclusion in early modern Europe. Starting from the view of blood as a liminal matter, manifesting fertile, positive aspects in conjunction with dangerous, negative ones, I show how it was believed to attract supernatural forces within the natural world. It could empower or pollute, restore health or waste corporeal and spiritual existence. While this theme has been studied in a medieval religious context and by anthropologists, its relevance during the early modern period has not been explored. I argue that, considering the impact of the Reformation on people’s mentalities, studying the way in which ideas regarding blood and the body changed from late medieval times to the eighteenth century can provide new insights about patterns of social and religious tensions, such as the witch-trials and persecutions. In this regard the thesis engages with anthropological theories, comparing the dialectic between blood and body with that between identity and society, demonstrating that they both spread from the conflict of life with death, leading to the social embodiment or to the rejection of an individual. A comparative approach is also employed to analyze blood symbolism in Protestant and Catholic countries, and to discuss how beliefs were influenced by both cultural similarities and religious differences. Combining historical sources, such as witches’ confessions, with appropriate examples from anthropology I also examine a corpus of popular ideas, which resisted to theological and learned notions or slowly merged with them. Blood had different meanings for different sections of society, embodying both the physical struggle for life and the spiritual value of the Christian soul. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 develop the dualism of the fluid in late medieval and early modern ritual murder accusations against Jews, European witchcraft and supernatural beliefs and in the medical and philosophical knowledge, while chapters 5 and 6 focus on blood themes in Protestant England and in Counter-Reformation Italy. Through the examination of blood in these contexts I hope to demonstrate that contrasting feelings, fears and beliefs related to dangerous or extraordinary individuals, such as Jews, witches, and Catholic saints, but also superhuman beings such as fairies, vampires and werewolves, were rooted in the perception of the body as an unstable substance, that was at the base of ethnic, religious and gender stereotypes.

This thesis focuses on a transformational but disregarded period in New Zealand’s twentieth century history, the era from the arrival of the Marines in 1942 to the arrival of Rock Around the Clock in 1956. It examines one of the chief agents in this metamorphosis: the impact of American culture. During this era the crucial conduits of that culture were movies, music and comics. The aims of my thesis are threefold: to explore how New Zealanders responded to this cultural trinity, determine the key features of their reactions and assess their significance. The perceived modernity and alterity of Hollywood movies, musical genres such as swing, and the content and presentation of American comics and ‘pulps’, became the sources of heated debate during the midcentury. Many New Zealanders admired what they perceived as the exuberance, variety and style of such American media. They also applauded the willingness of the cultural triptych to appropriate visual, textual and musical forms and styles without respect for the traditional classifications of cultural merit. Such perceived standards were based on the privileged judgements of cultural arbiters drawn from members of New Zealand’s educational and civic elites. Key figures within these elites insisted that American culture was ‘low’, inferior and commodified, threatening the dominance of a sacrosanct, traditional ‘high’culture. Many of them also maintained that these American cultural imports endangered both the traditionally British nature of our cultural heritage, and New Zealand’s distinctively ‘British’ identity. Many of these complaints enfolded deeper objections to American movies, music and literary forms exemplified by comics and pulps. Significant intellectual and civic figures portrayed these cultural modes as pernicious and malignant, because they were allegedly the product of malignant African-American, Jewish and capitalist sources, which threatened to poison the cultural and social values of New Zealanders, especially the young. In order to justify such attitudes, these influential cultural guardians portrayed the general public as an essentially immature, susceptible, unthinking and puritanical mass. Accordingly, this public, supposedly ignorant of the dangers posed by American culture, required the intervention and protection of members of this elite. Responses to these potent expressions of American culture provide focal points which both illuminate and reflect wider social, political and ideological controversies within midcentury New Zealand. Not only were these reactions part of a process of comprehension and negotiation of new aesthetic styles and media modes. They also represent an arena of public and intellectual contention whose significance has been neglected or under-valued. New Zealanders’ attitudes towards the new cinematic, literary and musical elements of American culture occurred within a rich and revealing socio-political and ideological context. When we comment on that culture we reveal significant features of our own national and cultural selves.

The study commenced by identifying a theological problem relating to the lack of understanding regarding grass-roots African Pentecostal healing praxis. The empirical-theological approach of Van der Ven was utilised, therefore, to study the healing praxis of an African Pentecostal body, called: The Group‘ Assemblies of God, in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Van der Ven‘s original framework was developed by drawing on the hermeneutic and methodological work of Cartledge. A case study was undertaken on a Group‘ Assembly in rural KwaZulu-Natal. The use of social scientific techniques produced a wide range of results that point to the church‘s ministry of healing as a process, rooted in the Trinity, that can occur through varied channels. These pathways ended in a broad understanding of healing. A dialogue between the qualitative results and the healing literature was used to develop a more precise theological question. Case study categories were conceptualised and then operationalised as a questionnaire. A survey was performed on all Assemblies affiliated to The Group‘ Assemblies of God in KwaZulu-Natal. A significant number of people participated in the survey which produced a wide range of data. It is found that worldview and charismatic experience form an important hermeneutic axis that influences attitudes towards the healing ministry. Conservative biblical belief, ethnicity, education and gender influence attitudes towards healing. A distinct divide exists between positive attitudes towards physical, spiritual, inner healing and deliverance and more negative attitudes towards social and environmental healing. The reflection on these results focuses on the perceived influence of American dispensational fundamentalism. The eschatology formed from these beliefs has a narrowing effect on holistic healing ministry. Moltmann‘s transformational eschatology is suggested, therefore, as a suitable alternative. The methodological evaluation finds that several problems exist with regard to research in a rural African location. The cycle concludes by offering a range of suggestions for further study. / Philosophy, Practical and Systematic Theology / D. Th. (Practical Theology)

In broad terms, this thesis is a study of what Protestant theologians in early modern England taught regarding the interdependence between physical health and spirituality. More precisely, it examines the specific and complex doctrines taught regarding health-related issues in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and evaluates the consistency of these messages over time. A component of the controversial Protestant-science hypothesis introduced in the early twentieth century is that advancements in science were driven by the Protestant ethic of needing to control nature and every aspect therein. This thesis challenges this notion. Within the context of health, sickness and death, the doctrine of providence evident in Protestant soteriology emphasised complete submission to God's sovereign will. Rather, this overriding doctrine negated the need to assume any control. Moreover, this thesis affirms that the directives theologians delivered governing physical health remained consistent across this span, despite radical changes taking place in medicine during the same period. This consistency shows the stability and strength of this message. Each chapter offers a comprehensive analysis on what Protestant theologians taught regarding the health of the body as well as the soul. The inclusion of more than one hundred seventy sermons and religious treatises by as many as one hundred twenty different authors spanning more than two hundred years laid a fertile groundwork for this study. The result of this work provides an extensive survey of theological teachings from these religious writers over a large span of time.