Master thesis Religious circumstances in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century will deal with religio-spiritual situation within czarist Russia since the dawn of 20th century till the rise of Bolshevik regime in 1917. It aims not only to analyse and describe religious circumstances of contemporary Orthodox church, but also reflect those circumstances in "minority" religious communities. It introduces the state at which the Orthodox church was at and enlighten the situation, that was influenced both by Russian course to industrial society and the outbreak of the First world war and revolution at 1917.

Critics and readers often consider Nicholas Sparks’ novel The Notebook to be a romance novel, while Sparks himself considers it a love story. Sparks claims that there are no similarities between the two genres. Therefore, this paper investigates the differences and similarities between the romance genre and the love story genre, while simultaneously exploring The Notebook’s storyline, the characterization, and the marketing surrounding the book in order to understand the novel’s classification. The purpose is to discover if The Notebook can be identified as a romance even if it never was Sparks’ intention. The only aspect that differs between the genres is how the ending is written, other than that there are no remarkable differences. There are also several elements that validates that The Notebook has romantic features. Both of the protagonists have romance characteristics, the cover of the novel is a characteristic romance cover, and the storyline itself is based on a romance structure and it follows all of the essential romance elements. The conclusion of this paper is that The Notebook has romance elements and therefore can be placed in the romance genre even if that never was Sparks’ intention.

This thesis deals with the anthropological thinking of Nicholas of Cusa. The first part presents the fundamental metaphysical motifs that are the basis for this anthropology - above all, it concerns the conception of human as a mind (intellect). This conception is linked with the thinking of the first Principle (God) as the unity that is identical with itself. This unity/oneness of the One descends into the world through number that is one and multiple at the same time (all higher numbers consist of ones). The emphasis on unity of the One and on number as a mean of the creation is the reason, why Cusa's main concern, regarding the understanding of the world, aren't individual substances, but the relations between these substances. And for this kind of metaphysical thinking it is really important to develop also a strong notion of human intellect (mind), but the first philosophical texts to some extent fail to do so. The second part of this thesis deals with the proper anthropology that is developed in the dialogues with the idiota. It is shown what is the role of human mind in the dynamics of descent and ascent of unity of the One - it is the human mind and its intellectual return to its Beginning through which is all creation being made one and being brought to its true nature that is the One. The last...

To provide an annotated bibliography of criticism on the writings of Nathaniel Lee, Thomas Otway and Nicholas Rowe from 1900 to 1974 for students and scholars is the purpose of this study. The bibliography contains brief evaluations of each of the works, which are divided into the following categories: articles, books and chapters in books, and dissertations. An additional chapter includes those works which deal with two or more of the authors. The appendix contains a selected list of foreign language publications that concern the three playwrights.

Thesis (MTh)--Stellenbosch University, 2011. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study is ‘n research proposal for a possible D.Th degree. The research objective is to explore critically the thought and teachings of Nicholas Wolterstorff, a leading Christian philosopher, that there is an inseparable and fundamental link between the celebration of the Sunday liturgy, the concept of justice we believe in, and human rights. I start by discussing how Wolterstorff writes, lives and defends this thought as a conviction of faith and as a philosophical paradigm. The contents of it can be summarised as follows: the holiness of the believer as an imitation of the holiness of God, is not a mere spiritual trait, it has also social implications; holiness presupposes justice; human rights is based upon the Biblical truths of the equal status of all human beings, mankind as the image of God, and the universal love command. The kingdom of God is established through law and justice. This was already confessed by the early church fathers. Love and justice cannot be separated. The worship of God and man’s responsibility towards one another is grounded in the covenant. Protestantism is a world-formative religion. Worship in the presence of injustices, is not worship; it is false religion. The limitation imposed by the liberal state that its citizens cannot use religious reasons in public for the furthering of justice is then discussed. Religion should be allowed and the State should be impartial in its handling of all religions. Therefore Christians need an adequate cognitive framework for moral judgment. This must also be included in the curriculum of students at Tertiary Institutions. To equip the students for their role in life, the staff must teach and model justice, love, forgiveness, prayer and human rights. Students and the youth in church must also be brought face to face with those who suffer because of injustices, lack of love and economic marginalisation. I then go on to motivate the reasons for undertaking this research. The motivation includes a description of the immorality, injustices and human rights violations in and outside South Africa. Then I discuss the opinions of various theologians across the world of whether worship and faith can contribute to the conversion, healing and change of people and institutions. The last chapter is a tentative illustration of the value of this research for the Church, the academy and the broader society. This value is estimated within the interdependence of transformative constitutionalism (juridical) and discipleship as transformation (theological). I conclude with a few closing remarks. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie is ‘n navorsingsvoorstel vir ‘n voorgenome D.Th graad. Die doelstelling is ‘n kritiese ondersoek van Nicholas Wolterstorff, ‘n leidende christelike filosoof, se denke en lering dat daar ‘n onskeidbare en fundamentele verband is tussen die viering van die Sondag liturgie, die geregtigheidskonsep waarin ons glo, en menseregte. Ek begin met ‘n bespreking van hoe Wolterstorff hierdie denke skryf, leef en verdedig as ‘n geloofsoortuiging en as ‘n filosofiese paradigma. Die inhoud daarvan kom kortliks hierop neer: die heiligheid van die gelowige as nabootsing van God se heiligheid is nie net ‘n geestelike eienskap nie, dit het ook sosiale implikasies; heiligheid veronderstel geregtigheid; menseregte is gebaseer op die Bybelse waarhede dat alle mense gelyk in status is as beeld van God, en die universele liefdesgebod. God se koninkryk word gevestig ook deur reg en geregtigheid; hierdie insigte was al so bely deur die vroeë kerkvaders; liefde en geregtigheid sluit mekaar nie uit nie. Die mens se aanbidding van God en sy pligte teenoor ander, is gegrond in die verbond. Protestantisme is ‘n wêreld-transformerende godsdiens. Aanbidding in die erediens terwyl ons ongeregtigheid pleeg of toelaat, is nie aanbidding nie; dit is valse godsdiens. Die beperking deur ‘n liberale staat dat godsdienstige redes nie in publieke debatvoering aangewend mag word vir die bevordering van geregtigheid nie, word bespreek. Godsdiens moet toegelaat word en die Staat moet onpartydig wees in sy behandeling van alle godsdienste. Daarom moet christene beskik oor ‘n toereikende kognitiewe raamwerk vir morele oordeelvorming. Hierdie vereiste van ‘n kognitiewe raamwerk moet ook ingesluit word in die kurrikulum van studente aan Tersiêre Inrigtings. Om hierdie studente toe te rus vir hulle rol in die samelewing moet die dosente deur onderrig en modellering die volgende by hulle inskerp: geregtigheid, liefde, vergifnis, gebed, menseregte. Studente moet in kontak gebring word met die mense wat ly as gevolg van ongeregtigheid, liefdeloosheid en ekonomiese marginalisering. Daarna word gemotiveer waarom hierdie studie onderneem word. Hierdie motivering sluit in ‘n illustrasie van die omvang van immoraliteit, ongeregtighede en skending van menseregte in en buite Suid-Afrika. Ek beweeg dan na ‘n uiteensetting van verskeie teoloë se menings of aanbidding en geloof kan bydra tot bekering, heling en verandering van mense en instellings. Die laaste hoofstuk is ‘n tentatiewe voorstelling van hierdie navorsing se waarde vir die Kerk, die akademie en die breë samelewing. Hierdie waarde word geskat binne die interafhanklikheid van transformerende konstitusionalisme (juridies) en dissipelskap as transformasie (teologies). Ek konkludeer met ‘n paar slotopmerkings.

Juan Luis Segundo (1925-1996) was a Uruguayan Jesuit priest who, I argue, based his liberation theology on his understanding of existentialism. The major contribution of this thesis is the exploration of unknown and unexplored sources in Segundo's work. These sources support my thesis of his basis in existentialism and are corroborated by his mature theology. This thesis is significant because the connection between existentialism and liberation theology has been widely overlooked. My starting point is Segundo's 1948 book, in which he combines existentialism with personalism and develops a transcendental method grounded in love and inter-subjectivity. The following three chapters develop my argument through his engagement with four existentialist thinkers: Berdyaev, Sartre and Camus, and Heidegger. Chapter 3 demonstrates how Segundo follows Berdyaev's primacy of freedom, which allows for human creativity, but Segundo takes it as a "quality of the will" and relates freedom to love. Berdyaev influences Segundo's preference for a methodology yielding consistent growth rather than a systematic approach to theology. Chapter 4 shows how Sartre's and Camus' understanding of freedom and limits influenced Segundo's sense that a person's lived reality must be the starting point for theological reflection (e.g. the hermeneutic circle). In chapter 5, I use an unpublished manuscript to show how Segundo uses the place of tradition in the Christian church and the role of tradition in Heidegger's phenomenological analysis of Dasein in order to build his theology of "liberative human seeking and divine revelation". In the final two chapters, I draw the new sources together with two of Segundo's widely read books: Faith and Ideologies (1982) in chapter 6 and The Liberation of Theology (1975) in chapter 7. In chapter 6, the transcendental method he first wrote about in 1948 returns and he addresses materialism and personalism. Chapter 7 serves as my conclusion and uses Segundo's hermeneutic circle as the fullest manifestation of my argument.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-25T19:20:11Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Sonia Regina Lyra.pdf: 1194972 bytes, checksum: cd5d999e915355075a87996fe9f6f5ae (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-09-29 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / God is the target and the quest of Nicholas of Cusa s theory of knowledge. Disjunction and conjunction constitute the wall of coincidence of opposites beyond which God exists, unlinked of everything that can be said or thought. The daring characteristic of the Cusan proposal is in putting forward the enigma, highly speculative, of seeing the invisible through the created visible things, which is sought in an invisible way especially in his works De Docta Ignorantia (Of Learned Ignorance) and De visione Dei (On the Vision of God). The non-other one of the most accurate names according to Nicholas of Cusa to denominate the unnamable had already been predicted by Dionysius the Areopagite at the end of his De Mystica Theologia (Mystical Theology). Every concept, every definition is, therefore, conjectural about the first principle. Defining is setting limits and, above all, knowing, even though the definition itself cannot be determined by anything due to its anteriority. Once it is the definition that allows the excellence of knowledge, setting limits and determinations, the search for learned ignorance, which accompanies the path of theory, goes on circumscribing knowledge and leaving aside everything that it is not, following a negative theology. Considered as self-defining of itself in its ontological principle, the definition differentiates itself as a statement of reason and as a gnosiological principle. It is then that the discourse allows imposing a conceptual limit in relation to the thing and to what it is not. Being the first principle, intellectual principle, it is not possible to have as an object of thought anything other than itself and, with this, it is the sole principle of being and of knowing - principium essendi et cognoscendi. The mystical dimension of this theory of knowledge can be seen in De visione Dei (On the Vision of God), where Cusa prepares and indicates the path to be traveled from the sensitive point to the transumptive jump beyond the wall of coincidence of opposites. Understood as imago Dei, man has in parallel with the divine mind the humana mens, even though this notion implies in showing the inadequacy of the image in relation to its specimen / Deus é o alvo e a busca da teoria do conhecimento proposta por Nicolau de Cusa. A disjunção e a conjunção constituem o muro da coincidência dos opostos, para além do qual Deus existe desvinculado de tudo aquilo que pode ser dito ou pensado. A ousadia da proposta cusana está em propor o enigma fortemente especulativo, que é ver o invisível, através das coisas criadas visíveis, o qual é buscado de modo invisível especialmente em suas obras De docta ignorantia e A visão de Deus. O não-outro, um dos nomes mais precisos segundo Nicolau de Cusa para denominar o inominável, já tinha sido prenunciado por Dionísio Areopagita no final da sua De mystica theologia. Todo conceito, toda definição é, pois, conjectural em torno do primeiro princípio. Definir é dar limites e acima de tudo, conhecer ainda que a própria definição não possa ser definida por coisa alguma em virtude de sua anterioridade. Uma vez que é a definição que permite a excelência do conhecimento, dando limites e determinações, a busca da douta ignorância que acompanha a tragetória da teoria vai circunscrevendo o conhecimento e deixando de fora tudo aquilo que ele não é, seguindo por uma teologia negativa. Considerada como autodefinidora de si mesma em seu princípio ontológico a definição se diferencia dela mesma enquanto enunciado da razão e como princípio gnoseologico. É então que o discurso permite impor um limite conceitual à respeito da coisa e daquilo que ela não é. Sendo o primeiro princípio, princípio intelectual, não pode ter como objeto do pensamento, outro que não a si mesmo, e, com isso, é princípio único do ser e do conhecer principium essendi et cognoscendi. A dimensão mística dessa teoria do conhecimento pode ser vista no A visão de Deus onde o Cusano prepara e indica a trajetória a ser percorrida desde o sensível até o salto transsumptivo para além do muro da coincidência dos opostos. Entendido como imago Dei o homem tem em paralelo com a mente divina a humana mens ainda que essa noção implique em apontar para a insuficiência da imagem com relação ao seu exemplar

[Truncated abstract] The Ferrars are remembered as exemplars of Anglican piety. The London merchant family quit the city in 1625 and moved to the isolated manor of Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire. There they pursued a life of corporate devotion, supervised by the head of the household, Nicholas Ferrar, until he died in December 1637. To date, the life of the pious deacon Nicholas Ferrar has been the focus of histories of Little Gidding, which are conventionally hagiographical and give little consideration to the experiences of other members of the family, not least the many women in the household. Further, customary representations of the Ferrars have tended to remove them from their seventeenth-century context. Countering the biographical trend that has obscured many details of their communal life, this thesis provides a new, critical reading of the family's years at Little Gidding while Nicholas Ferrar was alive. It examines the Ferrars in terms of their own time, as far as possible using contemporary documents instead of later accounts and confessional mythology. It shows that, while certain aspects of life at Little Gidding were unusual, on the whole the family was less exceptional than traditional histories have implied; certainly the family was not so unified and unworldly as the idealised images have suggested. Moreover, the Ferrars were actively engaged in making those images, for immediate effect and for posterity. The Ferrars' identities, corporate and individual, and their largely textual practices of self-fashioning are central to the study. Other key concerns are the Ferrars' moral and religious ideals and practices, gender in the family, and intra-familial relationships. Evidence for the thesis is drawn from family documents dating from the early years of the seventeenth century to the time of Nicholas Ferrar's death. ... The Little Academy is considered first: in this unique dialogue circle, young women discussed morally edifying historical tales, offering them a textually-mediated experience of the world and working to reinforce conventional gender roles and religious values. The final three chapters pertain to the copious and little-studied family correspondence. A chapter that develops a theory of the functions of the family correspondence network is followed by one studying the affective relationships that the celibate sisters Mary and Anna Collet maintained through their letters with their unmarried uncle and spiritual mentor, Nicholas Ferrar. These chapters consider the identities as single people that all three developed through these relationships, within the maritally-focused framework of the Protestant family. The last chapter also concerns the lives of the unmarried, examining the relationships of single male adults and their roles in the family, focusing on the friendship of Nicholas Ferrar and his cousin Arthur Woodnoth. The thesis closes by reflecting on the fact that returning the Ferrars to their seventeenth-century context reveals their multi-faceted nature, comprising ideals and identities sometimes incongruous with one another, and certainly unaccounted for in the traditional narratives. It thus demonstrates the importance of the overall project of reconceiving the Ferrars? history, which forms an original contribution to the study of the social, cultural and religious history of early seventeenth-century England.

This dissertation examines early modern literary engagements with the rhetorical and ethical dimensions of law reform. One of the most important mechanisms of social regulation in late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean England, law reform was a matter of, first, the “perfection” of the organization and expression of existing laws, legal instruments, and legal processes. However counter-intuitively, these officially-sponsored reforms were calculated to prevent more radical innovations that would generate “inconveniences,” systemic contradictions and uncertainties that threatened the law’s ability to produce just results. Second, law reformers generated a discourse on “execution” that targeted the character of legal representatives. This tradition of character criticism, delivered directly from the Lord Keeper’s mouth or circulated through other legal-political, literary, theatrical, didactic, and religious works, encouraged officers’ conscientious execution of their duties and alerted the English public to the signs of the abuse of authority. Law reform created a distinct critical orientation toward legal and governing activities that was reproduced throughout a system of justice in which an extraordinary number of subjects participated. It was a critical orientation, moreover, that was refracted in literature sensitive to the implications of the socio-political dominance of legal language, traditions, and officers. The principles and practices of law reform—along with the conflicts and anxieties that inspired and sprang from them—were appropriated by amateur and professional writers alike. Close readings reveal that Inns-of-Court revellers, Francis Bacon, John Donne and Shakespeare all engaged deeply with the potential, as well as the ethical and practical limitations, of law reform’s central role in local and national governance. In the Gesta Grayorum and Donne’s “Satyre V,” the reveller and the satiric speaker improvise on legal forms to compensate for the law’s imperfections that threaten the security and prosperity of the English subject. In Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale, the character of the legal-political officer and reformer is tested as he attempts to put policies and principles into practice.

This dissertation examines early modern literary engagements with the rhetorical and ethical dimensions of law reform. One of the most important mechanisms of social regulation in late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean England, law reform was a matter of, first, the “perfection” of the organization and expression of existing laws, legal instruments, and legal processes. However counter-intuitively, these officially-sponsored reforms were calculated to prevent more radical innovations that would generate “inconveniences,” systemic contradictions and uncertainties that threatened the law’s ability to produce just results. Second, law reformers generated a discourse on “execution” that targeted the character of legal representatives. This tradition of character criticism, delivered directly from the Lord Keeper’s mouth or circulated through other legal-political, literary, theatrical, didactic, and religious works, encouraged officers’ conscientious execution of their duties and alerted the English public to the signs of the abuse of authority. Law reform created a distinct critical orientation toward legal and governing activities that was reproduced throughout a system of justice in which an extraordinary number of subjects participated. It was a critical orientation, moreover, that was refracted in literature sensitive to the implications of the socio-political dominance of legal language, traditions, and officers. The principles and practices of law reform—along with the conflicts and anxieties that inspired and sprang from them—were appropriated by amateur and professional writers alike. Close readings reveal that Inns-of-Court revellers, Francis Bacon, John Donne and Shakespeare all engaged deeply with the potential, as well as the ethical and practical limitations, of law reform’s central role in local and national governance. In the Gesta Grayorum and Donne’s “Satyre V,” the reveller and the satiric speaker improvise on legal forms to compensate for the law’s imperfections that threaten the security and prosperity of the English subject. In Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale, the character of the legal-political officer and reformer is tested as he attempts to put policies and principles into practice.