No description available.

The Purbeck Review of Schools, initiated by Dorset County Council in 2008, resulted in the closure of the middle school in Swanage, leaving the town bereft of secondary education by July 2013. A community-led group, Education Swanage, founded a new school in the town, which opened in September 2013 as a free school, with a humanscale ethos. Although there was controversy about free schools at the time, there is no research to date about how personal values influence the founding of such a school. This research answers the question how did values influence the founding of The Swanage School? This inductive research was informed by literature on the conceptualization of ‘values’ and the ‘sacred’ and delimited by theoretical insights from practical theology, living theory and human-scale education. The action research strategy, set within a paradigm of praxis, addressed how values influenced action in founding the school. Semistructured interviews, an online survey and a validation group were used to discover how values influenced practice. The data revealed a variety of interpretations of the term ‘values’, which were most commonly alluded to as being central in guiding and informing everyday interaction in the world and relating to how humans respond to others whilst also being a reflection of personal identity. The research identified areas of practice where the interplay of intrinsic and extrinsic values was influential when operating in contradiction and congruence to affect change. Analysis of the findings enabled conclusions and propositions to be developed, which focused on how values influenced the process of moving from contradiction to congruence in order to enact change. Values were a significant influence in the founding of The Swanage School. When values were contradicted they acted as standards of judgement and formed the basis of conversations which led to problems being solved and decisions being made. Concepts from the wider literature and the field of practical theology provided insight into how values can be defined and how their influence on action can be interpreted as an encounter with the sacred. The conclusion of this study and its contribution to knowledge is the explanation of how values influenced the founding of The Swanage School in the form of a living educational theory.

While some composers at the beginning of the twentieth century drifted away from tonal hierarchical structures, Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams sought ways of integrating tonal ideas with new materials. By analyzing the music of Holst and Vaughan Williams using a technique expressly designed for the analysis of tonal musical structure—Schenkerian Analysis—this study looks at ways in which the composers combined old and new techniques and what that means with regards to our understanding of their music. To do this, the current study focuses on the sacred choral repertory because it can form a stylistic bridge between nineteenth-century tonality and the composers’ more experimental works. This repertory also provides an opportunity for interpreting text-music connections that help us understand the music at a deeper level. In order to establish groundwork for the analytical methodology, I begin the study with background information on the composers and previous research done on their music, after which I summarize their most pertinent stylistic features (including their use of diatonic modes and other pitch collections, their harmonic, melodic, and contrapuntal techniques, and their formal structures). I then discuss how an analyst can determine prolongational structure in Holst’s and Vaughan Williams’s music by establishing the tonic or pitch-class center, establishing the context for harmonic and melodic stability, and following predictable formal patterns. Finally, I apply the analytical methodology in detail to Vaughan Williams’s Benedicite and Holst’s The Hymn of Jesus, two substantial single-movement choral works that represent both the conservative (Benedicite) and experimental (The Hymn of Jesus) sides of the composers’ style. I also compare the analyses with the texts and show how the composers portrayed religious ideas, even at deeper levels of the prolongational structure. The modified Schenkerian analytical techniques used in these analyses show that even though Holst and Vaughan Williams used a number of twentieth-century compositional techniques, their prolongational structures still follow expected patterns and closely resemble traditional structures.

Thesis (M.M.)--Boston University

Fingarette thinks what is sacred in Confucianism is the element of human civilization modeled upon holy rite. Eno claims the holiness of Confucian ritual consist in its coherence with cosmic reality, Heaven. But both of them didn't think metaphysics is one intellectual focus for early Confucianism. Nevertheless, we think only in reference to a Confucian metaphysics which provides a sufficient exposition of the most generic features of cosmic reality, what is sacred in Confucianism can be fully clarified. Due to his unflinchingly sociological methodology, Berger's concept of religion as sacred canopy is partial and limited. His concept of "chaos" can't encompass all the cases in world religions, and his understanding of the holy as "the wholly other" deviates from its original expression in Rudolf Otto. Contributing to the innovation of Berger's idea of sacred canopy, Neville thinks religion is human engagement with ultimacy, and one of the most important functions of sacred canopy is cognitive, to know ultimate reality. Keeping to Neville's understanding of sacred canopy, we will analyze two key texts of classical Confucian metaphysics, Yijing and its "Great Treatise"(系辞), to try to illustrate what a Confucian sacred canopy is. Traditionally, shengsheng (生生) is understood as ceaseless creative advance into novelty, a most generic description of cosmic reality in Confucian metaphysics, but this understanding can't include the ultimate ontological creation of the world from nothing by ultimate polarity, which is also enunciated by Great Treatise. In relation to the Decision of Hexagram Qian, we can furthermore parse out four possible ways to understand shengsheng: to create creatures, to create this and to create that, this creates and that creates, and creatures create. They correspond to the four characters in the decision: initiation (元), permeation (亨), harmonization (利) and integration (贞), and indicate early Confucians' reflections about the ontological traits of ultimate reality: Heaven is the initiative, permeative, harmonious and integral creation. Heaven creates being from non-being, initiates the world as a ceaseless creative process; it creates everything, imparts creativity and form into every creature; and then every formed creature itself strives for being and creation in a dynamical relationship with each other. Based upon such a "cosmontology", a Confucian sacred canopy will be finally outlined and the importance of ritual in reference to that canopy will also be illuminated.

This thesis offers an exploration of how one brings a Tibetan sacred text to being - and to voice - in the unfamiliar, and perhaps unlikely, landscape of Northern California. Through 16 months' fieldwork with a Nyingma Buddhist community based in Berkeley, California I ask how the production of the sacred is undertaken here by American volunteers who are largely neophytes to Tibetan Buddhism. Against a backdrop of the history of Tibetan textual production - largely populated by masters, monastics, and artisans - I explore what kind of work (both physical and imaginative) American volunteers must undertake in order to render themselves effective creators of the sacred in this American industrial setting. Drawing on current research that explores the adaptive capacities of Tibetan Buddhist traditional practices, I will offer a new facet to this flexibility through an investigation of the ways these texts and their surrounding practices are creatively deployed to meet the needs of their American makers. In this work I follow the sacred objects through their entangled physical and social creation in the various branches of this California community, from the construction of spaces ripe for sacred work, through fundraising, printing, and finally to the distribution of texts to the Tibetan monastic community in Bodh Gaya, India. In the conclusion I return to the question of how an American volunteer becomes an effective creator of a Tibetan Buddhist sacred text in Berkeley California, contributing a unique and rich case to the study of diasporic Tibetan text production. Ultimately, I will demonstrate that the very practice of creating and deploying Tibetan sacred texts offers a frame through which volunteers come to re-interpret and re-shape their spatial and temporal landscape. This dissertation seeks to bridge often disparate fields of study, allowing encounters between (and contributions to) such bodies of work as: the anthropological study of making, craft, and innovation; media and religious practice; the affective temporality of sacred relics; and the cross-culturally unique, agentive qualities of books.

Thesis (M.M.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-01

No description available.

In 1926, after rejoining the Russian Orthodox Church, Igor Stravinsky began composing religious music. These religious works provided a creative outlet for Stravinsky’s personal interest in religion and religious philosophy and also revealed Stravinsky’s professional exploration of a new musical genre. His personal religiosity played an integral role in the composition of these pieces by originally inspiring the subject of the works, and later providing intellectual stimulation during the composition process. This thesis will examine three of Stravinsky’s religious works from his Neo-Classical period, including Otche Nash, Symphony of Psalms, / Thesis / Master

"February 2000" Bibliography: leaves 235-239. "Several key questions are considered in this thesis. Is it possible that sacred places had a design philosophy or theory that was used to establish and develop them? How do various natural forms influence and/or structure existence of sacred places? This thesis considers specifically the role of nature in sacred places and not sacred places as a whole." -- abstract.