This is the first attempt at a comparative study in which Judah Halevi's main ideas and teachings as they find expression in his philosophical work "The Kuzari" are compared and contrasted with their treatment in his poetical work. We feel that such a contrasting and comparative study may bring us nearer to a more comprehensive understanding of the creative personality of the author in all its facets and to a fuller understanding of his ideas on various subjects, than the consideration and study of just one aspect of his creative work, either poetry or philosophical thought, would. Poetry and philosophy could complement each other; emotion and poetic expression will in this study complement the intellect and rational ideas, and vice versa.

Bibliography: leaves 249-256.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 195-198). / This thesis is an investigation of the "sense of call" as a potential support factor for Mennonite women missionaries from North America based in Central Africa during the latter half of the twentieth century. The investigation is conducted in two main parts. In the first we investigate the theological-historical distinctives of the Anabaptist/Mennonite tradition; in the second part, through a case study, we examine how a select number of women missionaries interpreted their call in relation to their heritage, how their sense of call functioned as a support factor or otherwise, and whether this was determined in any significant way by the Anabaptist/Mennonite tradition. Central to the study is a pastoral concern for women missionaries as women whose missionary role has placed special burdens on them in situations of cultural dislocation.

The advent of democracy in South Africa ushered in a new paradigm for freedom of religion and freedom of expression. Public broadcasting in general and the South African Broadcasting Corporation in particular constituted critical sites where the material possibilities and impossibilities of these rights were to be defined, negotiated, and regulated. This thesis investigates the role of religion in the history and development of the South African mediascape. Substantial chapters analyse the role of religion in the banning and introduction of television under apartheid, the place of religion in the formulation of new media policy in the democratic era, and the regulatory role of the Broadcasting Complaints Commission of South Africa in dealing with allegations of religious offense, blasphemy, defamation, and incitement to violence. From the television controversy in apartheid South Africa to postapartheid media policy and practice, the thesis uncovers issues of religious legitimation, religious regulation, freedom of expression, and freedom of religion in relation to the multiple configurations of religion, media, and politics. The way that the media industry and its regulatory bodies engage with religion, whether through production, dissemination, or regulation, is expected to be underlined in policy and practice by the constitutional mandate to balance freedom of expression against other rights that might be at stake in the mediasphere. Whereas freedom of expression is considered the defining framework for broadcast media, freedom of religion is subject to regulation. As the first extended study of religion and media in South Africa, this thesis shows that as a result of the deeply rooted Christian national heritage of public broadcasting and the Western Christian orientation of the constitutional democracy, Christian normative sensibilities regarding religion have been sustained within the institutional structures that govern the political economy of religion and public broadcasting.

In the twenty-first century, religious violence has become endemic in our world. Scholars are divided on the true motivations for such violence, however. While some perceive inherent incitements to violence embedded in religion itself, others blame other factors—primarily, competition for resources, which then co-opts religious feeling in order to justify and escalate conflict. This dissertation proposes that more fruitful answers to the riddle of religious violence may lie in the relationship between collective identity and religious allegiance. Identity construction is liminal and, as such, experiential. Hence, this study applies the analytical lens of liminality to explore possible understandings of religious violence. Taking the position that liminal passages are natural and unavoidable aspects of lived experience, it argues that the fixation on doctrinal certainties and religious ideals common among perpetrators of religious violence functions largely to oppose the ambivalence and uncertainty characteristic of liminality. It further posits the hypothetical phenomena of reactive projection and autonomic liminality as reactions to liminal experience, leading to eruptions of violence. The Tibetan Buddhist bardo and Sufi barzakh constitute religiously sanctioned instances of liminality. Although these passages are conventionally perceived as postmortem locales, both systems include broader metaphysical understandings, making their transformative potential profoundly relevant to spiritual practice during this lifetime. I argue that a close reading of the bardo and the barzakh demonstrates the capacity of religious tradition to offer compelling alternatives to the fixation on the extreme views typically implicated in religious violence. I further propose that the nondualistic, inclusive worldview implicit in understandings of the bardo and barzakh may prove useful in promoting a practice of “reflective interiority”—not only in disrupting the rigid mindset of those moved to perpetrate religious violence, but also in shifting the moral fixity sometimes associated with the scholarship on religious violence.

The structure of this study of inter-church relationships abounds with artificialities. First, there is the artificiality of its geographical setting. It is confined to the Cape Colony Which, although permissible during the years when no other conventionally recognized political entity - at least, to Western eyes - existed in South Africa, and justifiable in terms of the jurisdiction of the N.G.K. Cape synod, becomes sheer artificiality so far as the Anglican Church is concerned. For the Church of the Province of South Africa never saw itself as limited by the frontiers of the Cape Colony. One of its earliest dioceses was that of Natal, and by 1910 it was at work throughout southern Africa south of the Zambezi. Despite its diocesan organization, the C.P.S.A. and its members were very aware of the total scope of Anglicanism at the bottom end of the African continent, and would have regarded a study confined to the Cape Colony as not truly representative of Anglican realities. Secondly, there is the artificiality of the chronological periods into which I have divided the study. I have, in fact, used an Anglican yardstick: the episcopate of Robert Gray, and have divided the study into a pre-Gray (1806-1848), a Gray (1848-1872) and a post-Gray (1872-1910) period. This hardly fits the course of events in the N.G.K., for the coming and going of Gray disturbed the sequence of that body's life hardly at all. And yet, perhaps, the division has something to be said for it, for it was pre-episcopal Anglicanism that had to relate to the N.G.K. in its pre-Church Ordinance (1843) days; both laboured and toiled over much the same ground in the 60's; both were caught up in the quickening antagonisms of the latter years of the century. Thirdly, there is the artificiality inherent in describing the inter-relationship of two church bodies as manifested in a purely local setting. Clearly, in dealing with cultural and theological factors, mention will have to be made of the cultural and theological roots of the two denominations, but these will tend to be mere back-ground to their outworking in the Cape scene. It will have to be constantly borne in mind that Anglicans saw themselves within the total context of a Church that was spreading from native England to every continent, spreading as the Empire did, while the N.G.K., conversely, moved away from its traditional moorings in the Netherlands, while strongly maintaining the Reformation principles of its European origins.

Word processed copy. / Includes bibliographical references. / At the heart of this thesis lies the argument that pilgrimage is a universal, longrooted, normal and vital aspect of human behaviour that shows no sign of abating in the modern world; that is is a fluid and flexible process, imbued with a multiplicity of meanings and functions that may fall inside or outside the authentication of large religious traditions and certainly existed before them; that the primary measure of pilgrimage should be that of intent or purpose and therefore pilgrimages can be categorised according to function; and that the inner journey is the most important feature of authentic pilgrimage but does not overrule obligation or traditional practice.

Bibliography: leaves 281-289. / This study seeks, as its primary objective, the formulation of a genuinely ecocentric hermeneutic. It consequently incorporates an argument against those "shallow" schools of ecological philosophy which assess the ecological crisis as simply an issue of enlightened self-interest, or of more effective resource management. More significantly, however, we have sought to deconstruct the mythos of contemporary ecocentric philosophy, itself, in order to demonstrate that its ideological underpinnings are not consistently ecocentric in nature. This polemical task serves to reframe the ecological crisis as, above all, a crisis of affirmation, and comes to yield a threefold problematisation of (ecocentric) meaning: the problem of methodology, or that of the relation between truth and representation; the problem of morality, or that of the relation between truth and value; and the problem of Immanentism, or that of a full-bodied divinity. Such problematisation has been negotiated by the systematic application of ecocentric precepts to an understanding of the relationship between Self, Nature and God. Particular recourse has been made to the category of organic 'interdependence" - or the idea of the profound kinship of the human and the non-human-and the notion of the primacy of "becoming" over "being - or the idea of the fundamental temporality of all existence. The implications of these principles are extracted through a critical dialogue with the thought of Darwin, Freud and Nietzsche- an intellectual lineage which, it is argued, most fully embodies the ecocentric ambition.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 213-225). / The rights to life, liberty, security, shelter, food, integrity, respect, dignity and health care among others are focused in this study on the Budya traditional religion. Aspects that emerge as promoting human rights are examined within an African cultural perspective. Specific aspects examined include: mombe youmai (mother's cow), chiredzwa (child caring appreciation), zunde ra mambo (chief's storehouse as a food security programme), kusungira (taking an expecting mother to her parents to deliver the first baby), kugarwa nhaka (inheriting a deceased's wife), sara pa vana (traditional inheritance of a deceased man's family) and ubuntu (person-hood). The rituals of kupayira (naming of a child), kutsikisa mapota (stepping over protective porridges), makupo (distribution of the deceased's property), mhinza mumba (home bringing ceremony) are discussed.

Bibliography: pages 123-136. / Using a historical materialist model of the rural-urban dialectic, this study is an analysis of the rural-urban articulation in Palestine c. 1200-1020 B.C.E., with particular reference to the aetiology of the conflict between the Israelite tribes and the Canaanites and Philistines. The model of the rural-urban dialectic which is developed in this thesis, posits that the relations between rural societies and urban societies in the ancient Near East were essentially antagonistic. Urban centers were sites of consumption rather than production. They were parasitic upon their rural hinterlands, extracting the produce of the village peasantry by means of enforced tributary relations. This extortion of the surplus product generated the conflict between the inhabitants of the rural areas and the city-dwellers. The resistance to such oppression by the peasantry engendered the class struggle in the ancient Near East, which took the form of conflict between the tribute exacting class, located in the cities, and the agrarian peasant class, located in the villages. The major thesis of this study is that the relations between the Israelite tribes and the Canaanites and Philistines can best be explained in terms of the rural-urban dialectic, which means that the conflict between the Israelite tribes and their urban neighbours was a manifestation of the antagonistic relations between rural and urban societies in the ancient Near East. The Canaanite and the Philistine societies were urban societies which existed as such by virtue of their ability to maintain tribute-extracting relations with the peasantry of their rural hinterlands. The Israelites, a tribal peasant society, were subject to this form of oppression to the extent to which they came under the orbit of Canaanite or Philistine power. The aetiology of the sustained conflict which pre-monarchic Israel experienced with the Canaanites and the Philistines lay in the relations of production imposed on them - relations which belong to the economic base of society - rather than in the realm of the superstructure, which includes the religious, political and ethnic aspects of a society. This conflict was expressed in religious, political and even ethnic terms, but had its source in the economic relations that existed between rural and urban societies in the ancient Near East.