Bibliography: pages 393-409. / This case-study of the Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM) in Africa in relation to Church Growth theory covers the period 1908 - 1980. Its geographical scope is South Africa, including the black Homelands. In chapters 1 and 2 we examine the history, origins and development of the AFM in Africa in relation to Pentecostalism and the white AFM. In chapters 3 and 4 we research the contextual issues of racism, apartheid, and the relationship between the AFM, the State, and politics. From chapter 5 to the end our focus is on the church growth of the AFM in Africa. Our study has shown that the AFM in Africa has grown significantly during the period studied. Significant growth factors have been: the prioritization of evangelism accompanied with an emphasis on the supernatural manifestation of the gifts of the Spirit; the active involvement of the laity; their theology of missions revealing a distinctive pneumatology, an eschatological urgency, and a sense of divine destiny; their ecclesiology; their culturally relevant liturgy; and homogeneous groupings of Blacks. Conversely, factors hindering their growth have been the superpaternalistic approach to mission of the white "Mother-church". The endorsement of apartheid and lack of a prophetic witness of the Apostolic Faith Mission towards the State have also harmed their credibility in the black community.

The aim of this project is to provide a theological basis for the practice of discipleship in the world as a form of aesthetic existence. The study is framed by Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s cryptic call for a recovery of Søren Kierkegaard’s notion of aesthetic existence in being Christian, set against the backdrop of their mutual concern for the captivity of the church to Christendom. In addition to the contribution by Kierkegaard (discipleship as poetic living) and Bonhoeffer (Christian living as polyphonous this-worldly celebration of Christological reality), three further key intellectuals have been selected, each of whom contributes an important dimension to understanding everyday aesthetic existence as discipleship. Drawing from contemporary neuropsychological findings, Iain McGilchrist’s research points to the fundamental role that aesthetic existence plays in being human and relating to the world. Graham Ward’s work builds on this by highlighting that embodied and affective engagement with the world both plays a significant role in faith formation and concomitantly frames ethical life by conjoining praxis and poiesis through incarnational living. Aesthetics is not to be disconnected from action, as Nicholas Wolterstorff elucidates, but is best understood in light of social practice, playing a narratival role toward specific teloi, however implicit this may be. Ultimately, this study concludes that a liturgical orientation to all of life rightly orders the formative power of aesthetic existence in service to the Word and world, thereby contributing to discipleship, as opposed to the aestheticized creation and sustenance of virtuality.

Bibliography: pages 255-275. / Our study is an advance as it elucidates the neurobiological aspects of Islamic ritual that is panspecific to all ritual. It reveals that Islamic ritual is remarkably 'structured'to enter what Felicitas Goodman termed 'alternate reality '. The recitals from the Qur'an provide 'sound art' through harmonic triggers for inducing trance

The author submits that none of the approaches including that of the documentary hypothesis, used by scholars to explain the various names for divinity in the Pentateuch, is adequate and he attempts to find and present a more satisfactory explanation for the variant divine names. With this purpose in mind he examines the Pentateuch as one unified whole. He assumes that the writer of the Pentateuch in recording the legends of the forefathers in substance as handed down to him, has in the Genesis writings made available to us the early Hebrew concepts of divinity. When however the writer of the Pentateuch uses the names for divinity both in the Genesis and in the other Pentateuch texts, he employs them in terms of his own concepts of divinity, using each designation to convey a specific meaning. The author examines the different names of God in relation to the texts in which they occur, and the passages containing these names are analysed in the light of the extant information on the background of the Hebrews in Egypt, Canaan and Mesopotamia, to ascertain the concepts of deity held by the patriarchs and to establish the criteria used by the writer in his choice of divine name. These criteria are tested in all the Genesis and Exodus texts in which the names of divinity appear.

Although H. P. Blavatsky (1831-1891), co-founder of the Theosophical Society, has featured prominently in histories of Western esotericism, her engagement with late nineteenth-century comparative religion has not been appreciated. This thesis offers the first sustained analysis of H. P. Blavatsky's theosophical comparative religion. Despite the fact that one of the original goals of the Theosophical Society was advancing comparative religion, H. P. Blavatsky has been excluded from standard accounts of the field. This thesis draws on a range of theoretical resources - Richard Rorty's pragmatic theory of knowledge, Alun Munslow's analysis of narrative in history, Thomas Gieryn's critique of boundary-making in science, and Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's history of objectivity - to argue for the inclusion of H. P. Blavatsky in the history of comparative religion. Substantial chapters analyse H. P. Blavatsky's major works, from Isis Unveiled (1877) to The Secret Doctrine (1888), to uncover the theoretical template that she developed for analysing religion and comparing religions. The thesis highlights H. P. Blavatsky's interpretative strategies in fashioning a theosophical comparative religion. In developing a comparative religion, H. P. Blavatsky referred to leading figures in the emerging field of the academic study of religion, such as F. Max Müller, E. B. Tylor, and Herbert Spencer, in positioning her theosophical comparative religion in the context of late nineteenth-century production of knowledge about religion and religions. This thesis demonstrates that H. P. Blavatsky's comparative religion was reasoned, literary, rhetorical, coherent, and strategic. By analysing H. P. Blavatsky's theoretical work on religion and religions in its late nineteenth-century context, this thesis contributes to the ongoing project of broadening our understanding of the complex and contested history of the study of religion.

Includes abstract. / Scroll down to electronic link to access the thesis. / This thesis investigates the historical intersections between Pentecostalism and Weberian sociology, beginning with the simultaneous publication of Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the emergence of Pentecostal spirituality at the Azusa Street Revival, and culminating in an analysis of recent claims that Pentecostals possess an equivalent to what Max Weber called "an ethic of inner-worldly asceticism", and consequently Pentecostalism may be a positive force for economic growth in developing countries.

In this paper, we will assume that Agnon's writing has, in addition to its aesthetic and artistic value, also a clearly didactic intention, and in the course of this paper we will attempt to verify this assumption. There are therefore two basic assumptions at the heart of this paper. 1. There is a unity in Agnon's writing. 2. Agnon had didactic intention. The object of this paper is to clarify the nature of the unity and the intention: what is a unifying theme in the work, and what does it come to teach? Our thesis is that Agnon deals with the theme of man's struggle and conflict. His attitude to any character is in direct proportion to its willingness to take upon itself a direct confrontation with the . problems which it faces. We will attempt to show that this subject moves throughout Agnon's varied and diversified writings.

Summary in English.||Bibliography: leaves 265-272. / This study demonstrates the flexibility and manipulability of Islamic leadership in a pluralistic situation, and argues that colonial policies and practices concerning Islamic legal practitioners (qadis), their institutions (qadis courts) reflected British prejudices about ethnicity and race. In a broad sense this work first examines how power, politics, ethnicity and colonialism influenced the development of political institutions among Muslims. Secondly, it debates the basis of the authority of the (ulam

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references. / This research argues that public preaching by Muslims and Christians reflects their positions in the public sphere, and indicative of the competition between them. From a perceived marginalized position, Muslims want to prove that Christians err on the basis of Biblical and Qur'anic texts. Pentecostal Christian preachers, on the other hand, extend their religious spaces into the public sphere and invite Kenyans in general, and mainline Christians in particular, to recommit themselves to Jesus. The preaching of both Muslims and Christians has potential and real negative effects for public order.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 242-276). / What kind of economic development trajectory can be expected in cosmopolitan cities that display a high degree of cultural, religious, ethnic and social diversity? Much can be gleaned from examining defined periods in their history that show a rapid transition in religious/cultural and socio-economic terms. Cape Town, a city that prides itself on its deeply rooted diversity and hybridity, and aspires to global status as a creative urban hub after having emerged from the rigidities of apartheid, appears not to be able to manage a breakthrough to sustained long-term development. An examination of the city's transformational period during the early decades of the nineteenth century may explain why this is so. Competitive diversity in religion, culture and business provided the template for a highly individualised development path with a short time horizon. This work uses the analytical tools of human development theory, cultural value analysis, the linkages between religion and economics, rational choice theory, urban development studies, and the study of identity formation and creolisation to construct a lens for the review of religious and socio-economic discourse in Cape Town during the first half of the nineteenth century.