Magister Philosophiae - MPhil / This research is set out as a narrative analysis of the functioning of church communities in moral formation from the selected congregations in the Diocese of Cape Town of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa (ACSA). The study focussed on three churches in the diocese. The research methodology employed can be described as qualitative and descriptive in nature. The data was collected by means of interviews involving clergy, church wardens, leaders of various organisations/formations, and members of the church who are also community members.

This study centres on Church involvement in community development. The study seeks to demonstrate that the model adopted by the Christian Community Services is a fruitful experiment of church involvement in community development - one that has a tremendous potential to shed theological as well as practical light on church involvement in community development. After offering the statement of the problem and a brief geographical and social analysis of Kirinyaga Diocese, the study traces the genesis, vision and the modus operandi of the Christian Community Services. It then discusses the CCS 'Food Increase Programme' through the organisation's Rural Development Department. The Community Health and Social Services Programmes are presented as some of the CCS's interventions to reduce poverty in the community. The impact of these interventions was evident after the data collection, analysis and interpretation. The study then offers a theological evaluation and reflection of the work of the CCS as a model of church involvement in development activities in the community.The study argues that Christian theology has a particularly significant contribution to make to the debates about community development. In a pluralistic society in a secular age, a special responsibility is laid on the Church to present its distinctive understanding and insights to address the abject poverty among the vast majority of her followers. Without this, her public life is impoverished. Theology of development is the tool of the Church to achieve this vision. Although difficult to define, development is seen as the process of transforming the conditions of life of the people referred to as 'the poor' such that they can lead a more holistic life. The main objective of the CCS development activities is to allow the poor to become the subject, not the object, of development strategies. Given the opportunity to do so, they have shown themselves to be capable of making rational choices regarding their own destinies. In this context, it is hoped that this dissertation will help to contribute to an increased understanding of Church involvement in development from within for, by and with the poor. As a result, therefore, new optimism for the role of the Church in development may emerge from the current pessimism. The study has concluded that the Church's involvement in development is not an 'extra' but a bona fide function of the Church. / Thesis (M.Th)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1999.

The paper studies the degree of engagement in questions of HIV in the local Anglican Church in Ocean View, Cape Town, using a triangulation design combining participant observation, survey results and interviews. Survey results from two other parishes in the Cape Town area and from clergy in the dioceses of Cape Town and False Bay are used to extend the material and to establish wider patterns in an extended case study approach. The findings show that people in the congregation of St Clare of Assisi in Ocean View are generally aware of HIV. The “buzz” around HIV has however subsided. The congregation is not directly engaged in work relating to HIV anymore and HIV is more mentioned than talked about in the church. HIV stigma continues to pose a challenge to the response to HIV at the local level. Conceptualisations of HIV vary markedly among members of the congregation with a majority seeing HIV+ people as living positively. There is also a group that strongly associates HIV with death, dirt and filth. The results are confirmed to hold also in other parishes of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa in the Western Cape. To work towards the prevention of HIV, the local church needs to put HIV back on the agenda and continue to speak about the virus by integrating HIV perspectives into the current framework.

The Church of England was at a crossroads in 1914 as the First World War began. The war was seen as an opportunity to revitalize it and return it to its role of prominence in society. In comparison to other areas of study, the role of the Church of England during this time period is inadequately examined. Primary sources including letters, diaries, contemporary newspaper accounts and pastors' sermons were used. Also secondary sources provided background and analysis about the people, events and movements of the time. A handful of papers and journal articles that specifically dealt with a particular aspect of the research provided some analysis. This thesis examines the Anglican Church as the war began and during the war both domestically and at the front in order to judge the response it made to the war.

The purpose of this research was to discover what meaning adult candidates for Anglican confirmation gave to their confirmation, how they experienced the ritual and what place confirmation had in their continuing faith journey. The research report retells the stories of eight adults. The stories of four are presented as case studies. The baptism/ confirmation stories of all research participants are presented as metaphors, a form of 'systematic thematic analysis' (Plummer 1983). For the study I adopted a life history, case study approach (Jones 1983; Plummer 1983; Minichiello et al. 1995) drawing on the insights of ritual theory (Turner 1969, 1972, 1976) and the concept of transitional phenomena proposed by Winnicott (1965, 1971). Two sets of contextual factors formed the background to the study: the Church's tradition and its debates about confirmation and the attitudes of lay people about their faith and about the Church. The research method involved a grounded theory approach. The principal data creation techniques were in-depth interview and the Faith Autobiography pro forma. Following the initial interviews, each research participant was sent a summary of the research findings (Summary of themes). The Summary gave the metaphors which emerged from the interviews, together with brief notes on the concepts used to interpret the data. Responses from the research participants were incorporated into the final form of the metaphors: Belonging to myself, Returning/ Starting over, Growing up, Joining the family and Making a commitment. Most research participants did not regard baptism/confirmation as joining the Church: rather they saw themselves as belonging to the Church already; neither were they concerned with becoming Anglicans. For the majority, the transition they made in baptism/confirmation paralleled another life transition which was taking place or was expected to take place. Taking part in the research helped form the participants� ideas about baptism/confirmation. While the catechumenal process is able to provide a holding environment in which candidates for baptism/confirmation can explore the transitions in which they are involved, the initiation liturgy should reflect the �return� motif which emphasises incorporation as well as the traditional Exodus motif which emphasises separation.

No description available.

This thesis examines the current relationship between Aboriginal and EuroCanadian Anglicans in the Northwest Territories and the Yukon as they seek to move beyond past hurts into a more positive future. After three field trips to Canada's North, visiting seven communities and interviewing seventy-nine individuals, complemented by archival research, I realized the dominant narrative based on a colonialism process linking residential schools, Christian Churches and federal government in a concerted effort to deliberately destroy Aboriginal peoples, cultures, and nations was not adequate to explain what happened in the North or the relationship that exists today. Two other narratives finally emerged from my research. The dominant narrative on its own represents a simplistic, one-dimensional caricature of Northern history and relationships. The second narrative reveals a more complex and nuanced history of relationships in Canada's North with missionaries and residential school officials sometimes operating out of their ethnocentric and colonialistic worldview to assimilate Aboriginal peoples to the dominant society and sometimes acting to preserve Aboriginal ways, including Aboriginal languages and cultures, and sometimes protesting and challenging colonialist policies geared to destroying Aboriginal self-sufficiency and seizing Aboriginal lands. The third narrative is more subtle but also reflects the most devastating process. It builds on what has already been acknowledged by so many: loss of culture. Instead of seeing culture as only tangible components and traditional ways of living, however, the third narrative focuses on a more deep-seated understanding of culture as the process informing how one organizes and understands the world in which one lives. Even when physical and sexual abuse did not occur, and even when traditional skills were affirmed, the cultural collisions that occurred in Anglican residential schools in Canada's North shattered children's understanding of reality itself. While the Anglican Church is moving beyond colonialism in many ways - affirming Aboriginal values and empowering Aboriginal people within the Anglican community, it nevertheless has yet to deal with the cultural divide that continues to be found in their congregations and continues to affect their relationship in Northern communities where Aboriginal and EuroCanadian people worship together yet remain separate.

This thesis examines the current relationship between Aboriginal and EuroCanadian Anglicans in the Northwest Territories and the Yukon as they seek to move beyond past hurts into a more positive future. After three field trips to Canada's North, visiting seven communities and interviewing seventy-nine individuals, complemented by archival research, I realized the dominant narrative based on a colonialism process linking residential schools, Christian Churches and federal government in a concerted effort to deliberately destroy Aboriginal peoples, cultures, and nations was not adequate to explain what happened in the North or the relationship that exists today. Two other narratives finally emerged from my research. The dominant narrative on its own represents a simplistic, one-dimensional caricature of Northern history and relationships. The second narrative reveals a more complex and nuanced history of relationships in Canada's North with missionaries and residential school officials sometimes operating out of their ethnocentric and colonialistic worldview to assimilate Aboriginal peoples to the dominant society and sometimes acting to preserve Aboriginal ways, including Aboriginal languages and cultures, and sometimes protesting and challenging colonialist policies geared to destroying Aboriginal self-sufficiency and seizing Aboriginal lands. The third narrative is more subtle but also reflects the most devastating process. It builds on what has already been acknowledged by so many: loss of culture. Instead of seeing culture as only tangible components and traditional ways of living, however, the third narrative focuses on a more deep-seated understanding of culture as the process informing how one organizes and understands the world in which one lives. Even when physical and sexual abuse did not occur, and even when traditional skills were affirmed, the cultural collisions that occurred in Anglican residential schools in Canada's North shattered children's understanding of reality itself. While the Anglican Church is moving beyond colonialism in many ways - affirming Aboriginal values and empowering Aboriginal people within the Anglican community, it nevertheless has yet to deal with the cultural divide that continues to be found in their congregations and continues to affect their relationship in Northern communities where Aboriginal and EuroCanadian people worship together yet remain separate.

Thesis (M.A.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2002. / Bibliography: leaves 239-252.

This dissertation explores how architecture is valorized by the cultural artifacts, both visual and text-based, which present and describe it. It examines aspects of the Gothic Revival in early Victorian Britain, to consider the assimilation of models of evolving architectural discourse by one organization with specialized interest in its promotion, and adaptations of that discourse in the realm of popular culture. The dissertation focuses on the ideology of the Cambridge Camden Society, from its inception in 1839 through to 1850. The Society advocated an appreciation of Gothic churches both for aesthetic, and for religious and moral reasons. A key dimension of its mandate, captured in the rhetoric of ecclesiology, was to prioritize an empirical investigation of extant medieval churches. Findings were to be recorded on specially-devised questionnaires, called "church schemes," using a text-based, specially-encoded taxonomy. Given the availability both of extensive documentation by the Society concerning these schemes, and of almost seven hundred completed forms, areas of conformity and divergence between the prescriptive, instructional material, and the descriptive material which indicates the actual reception of the architecture, may be discerned. "Church visiting" hence became the primary means of personal engagement with the architecture, enacted through the elaborate ritual of scripted tourism spelled out by the church schemes and attendant pedagogical documents. The importance, and the implications, of tourism to members of the Cambridge Camden Society are addressed through an evaluation of travel theories and methodologies, developed, especially, since the 1990s. An understanding of ecclesiology in terms of travel theory enables it to be evaluated in a wider context, namely as part of an emerging tourist ethos based on expanding opportunities and incentives to travel through Britain. From this perspective, the Cambridge Camden Society is to be perceived as part of a larger consortium of advocates of tourism to sights of medieval architecture, who employed similar inducements and terminology, and who created such markers of architectural authenticity as travel guides to mediate the traveller's reception of a given sight. As a result, the possibilities of the widespread dissemination of at least the architectural components of ecclesiological ideals, as part of the groundswell of promotional material devoted to all things Gothic, were enhanced.