In written history, Joseph Smith's colonizing efforts have been overshadowed by the Mormon settlement of the west. No one has really made a study of Joseph Smith as a colonizer. To this founder of the Mormon way of life, religion was more than a code of Sunday ethics. According to President Smith, man was created as an actual child of God and his Heavenly Father was concerned with providing for all his needs. Therefore, the revealed word of God in addition to listing a spiritual code of ethics, also contained provisions for the physical, social, political, economical, educational, safety needs, and quality of life. Joseph Smith attempted to combine all these principles into a new society he said was patterned after the order of heaven. It was called the Kingdom of God because Christ was its head and it contained the principles of life which he taught.

A man does not always see himself as others see him. John Muir is venerated by several generations of Americans as a man who left a legacy of State and National Parks, State and National Forests, outdoor beauty and untouched wilderness areas which would never have survived has it not been for this dedicated man. He did not plan such a course. He did what he found necessary to be done, without thought of personal gain or public honor. However, during his lifetime there were those who did not view him with such veneration. Countless ranchers, lumberman and politicians must have considered him a formidable foe. The purpose of this paper is to show how involved he was politically. He really became quite an adept politician, although the whole idea would have been extremely distasteful to him if he had heard himself designated as such.

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This thesis advances a claim for the centrality of a politics of peace in early Christianity, with particular focus given to the letters of Paul and the Gospel of Matthew. In brief, I argue that Paul’s task of announcing the gospel to the nations involved calling and equipping assemblies of people whose common life was ordered by a politics (by which I mean, chiefly, a mode of corporate conduct) characterised by peaceableness, and this theological politics was a deliberate participation in the political order announced and inaugurated by Jesus of Nazareth. To this end, there are three main components of the thesis. Chapter Two is focused on the Gospel of Matthew, particularly the way in which violence (and peace) are constructed by the evangelist. Chapter Three bridges the first and third components of the thesis, attending to the important question of the continuity between Jesus and Paul on the issue of non-violence. The third component involves two chapters. Chapter Four attempts to identify the trajectory of violence and peace in Paul’s biography and in the “biography” of his Galatian converts (as he portrays it), and the fifth chapter traces the presence of this non-violent gospel in (arguably) Paul’s earliest letter. The intended effect is to show that a politics of non-violence was an early, central, non-negotiable component of the gospel, that its presence can be detected in a variety of geographical expressions of early Christianity, that this (normally) “ethical” dimension of the gospel has a political aspect as well, and that this political dimension of the gospel stands in stark contrast to the politics of both the contemporary imperial power and those who would seek to replace it through violence.

This dissertation of limited scope traces the attempts by Gorbachev (1985-1991) to reform an economic, political and social system which was in a state of terminal decline. The origins of its demise, it is argued, lay in the ossified command economy inherited from Stalin. The enormous damage inflicted on Soviet agriculture during collectivisation in the 1930s~ when millions of productive peasants died, proved to be a fatal blow to that sector. Tlms, Gorbachev followed a two-fold strategy ofrefonn. Glasnost (openness) was introduced to allow constructive debate on economic and social matters. Despite a hesitant beginning, the right to criticise allowed the emergence of more radical campaigners, such as Yeltsin who demanded greater democracy. Significantly, the revival of ethnic nationalist demands in the republics led to disintegration. Perestroika (restructuring) was intended to modernise and boost living standards. The economy faltered but the market was not yet in place / History / M.A. (History)

Thesis (M.A.)--University of South Africa, 2002.

In this study of A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and Measure for Measure I argue that the surface plots of these comedies point us to a philosophic understanding seldom discussed in either contemporary public discourse or in Shakespearean scholarship. The comedies usually involve questions arising from the conflict between the enforcement of law (whether just or not) and the private longings (whether noble or base) of citizens whose yearnings for happiness tend to be sub- or even supra-political. No regime, it appears, is able to respond to the whole variety of circumstances that it may be called upon to judge. Even the best written laws meet with occasional exceptions and these ulterior instances must be judged by something other than a legal code. When these extra-legal instances do arise, political communities become aware of their reliance on a kind of political judgment that is usually unnoticed in the day-to-day affairs of public life. Further, it is evident that the characters who are able to exercise this political judgment, are the very characters whose presence averts a potentially tragic situation and makes a comedy possible. By presenting examples of how moral and political problems are dealt with by the prudent use of wisdom, Shakespeare is pointing the reader to a standard of judgment that transcends any particular (or actual) political arrangement. Once we see the importance of the prudent use of such a standard, we are in a position to judge what this philosophic wisdom consists of and where it is to be acquired. It is just such an education with which Shakespeare intends to aid his readers.