Organized in the nineteenth century, the General Conference of German Baptists was primarily a North American denominational body that adopted the polity of the American Baptists to build religious communities of converts of German ethnic background. From 1851 to 1920, the General Conference of German Baptists resisted institutional unity with the larger English-speaking bodies. Instead, it developed an ethnic mission with the financial aid of the American Baptist Home Mission Society. With time the German church membership became more Americanized in language and habits. The external pressure to assimilate increased. Yet, the German Baptist leadership moved away from complete Americanization of the churches and sought to preserve the distinct Pietist theological basis and ethnic mission of the Conference. The General Conference of German Baptists embraced institutional independence beginning in 1920 with the dissolution of the Cooperative Agreement that bound the mission of the German Baptists, the ABHMS, and the Baptist Union of Western Canada.

Shayk Tabarsi was a Shiite scholar, the only Shiite theologian of importance in the twelfth century A.D. He produced a commentary on the Qur'an which scholars, both Shiite and Sunnite, have acclaimed as the leading work in the field of tafsir. No Western scholar has done any study on Tabarsi or on any of his works. This dissertation is therefore, the first work in a Western language to be devoted to this important Muslim scholer and theologian.

This thesis is an attempt to define and analyse Razi's position towards Ibn Sina's metaphysics with special reference to the problem of God's existence. The whole analysis is undertaken within the frameworK of Ghazali's presentation of the conflict between philosophy and religion in Islam.

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This thesis attempts to give a sketch of the life of Bishop Mandlenkhosi Zwane (1932-1980) who was bishop of Manzini for only four years. His enemies thought that he was magnificently prevaricating, his friends saw him as plain-dealing and bound by invisible power. Being the first Catholic African Bishop in Swaziland, he brought many changes in the life of the Church. Consecrated to the episcopate when the diocese of Manzini and the Southern Africa Catholic Bishops' Conference urgently needed a leader who would challenge injustice and the lack of authentic African spirituality, Zwane felt compelled to fight for justice and promote inculturation thus building the church. Though at a certain stage he was declared persona non grata by the South African Government; he did not stop helping the victims of injustice, in fact later on in our discussion we will find that Zwane had been at a certain stage branded a politician. He was not interested in political leadership, but he was interested in spiritual leadership. Since he was also interested in social justice some governments in the Southern Africa region felt threatened by his presence. Let us look briefly at the method. For many years Catholics in Swaziland have felt the need for a biography of Bishop Zwane. Surprisingly, no one has yet written the biography of Zwane. Since very little has been written on Zwane, in an endeavour to write his biography I felt compelled to conduct many interviews with some of the people who knew him. This means that for our knowledge of the life and the episcopate of Zwane, we are almost entirely depended upon interviews conducted fourteen years after his tragic death. A tape-recorder and questionnaires have been used. Other people who should have been interviewed have been unintentionally missed. We have made an effort to screen out errors and discrepancies. By far the most important written source for the life of Bishop Zwane is the collections of speeches and writings compiled and published by the Catholic Institute for International Relations. The oral and written sources provide new insight into Zwane's character and philosophy. They also throw certain aspects of his life into new perspective, in particular Zwane's feeling towards the poor whom he adored unequivocally. Our discussion is divided into three chapters. The first chapter deals with inculturation, which seems now to have attracted many people in Africa especially these days when the Church is preparing to enter into the third millennium. Also in that chapter, we shall try to understand how the Church looks at inculturation. Some documents of the Second Vatican and Post-Vatican Council will be used. Our reflection on inculturation will be reintroduced in the third chapter where we will be looking at Bishop Zwane's life. The inculturation we discuss in the first chapter is designed to help the reader understand how the church locks at inculturation. The second chapter looks at the Catholic Church and evangelization in Swaziland. That chapter will help us to understand how the church in Swaziland has carried out the work of evangelization amongst the Swazis. We are going to look briefly at how different religious congregations that engaged themselves in the work of evangelization established themselves in the country. When religious congregations arrived in Swaziland they discovered that there were many social problems. It will be interesting to look how they tried to address these issues as foreign missionaries. That discussion will certainly prepare us to see how Zwane who was the first African Bishop addressed similar problems. After one has understood the different approaches she or he will not hesitate to call Zwane a pioneer. Zwane tried to lay the foundations for the encounter between the Swazi culture and the Gospel. The principal aim of chapter three is to throw light on the life and the episcopate of Zwane. This chapter will consist of a careful study of some of the main issues discussed in the previous chapters such as inculturation, relations between Church and State, and other issues. Also in that chapter we shall see that the Church is one of the institutions that have a strong sense of social responsibility. The Church concern for justice was obvious in many conferences which were held during Zwane's episcopate. Our study on Zwane will enable us to learn how to build a prophetic Church. Finally; we shall be looking at the mysterious death of Bishop Zwane. Many questions have been raised about his death. / Thesis (M.Th.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1996.

This exploratory study examines the question of Mariology in the Anglican Church in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. It focuses on how Anglican women priests relate to the Virgin Mary within the patriarchal structures and African context of the Anglican Diocese of Natal. It aims to ascertain the perceptions of the Virgin Mary held by a sample group of ordained, doctrinally informed, Anglican women. The premise is that because the Anglican Church is closer to Roman Catholicism than other Protestant churches, these clerics might be more open to the dogmas of Mariology as proclaimed by the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church. The depths of the subjects‘ knowledge of Marian dogma are ascertained, as well as the extent to which their spirituality and devotions are affected by this. An attempt is made to establish the potential advantages of an enhanced Marian presence in The Anglican Church in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. This study is intended not merely to establish the dogmatic similarities in the Anglican and Roman Catholic traditions and underscore those issues which inhibit Marian veneration among local ordained Anglican women. Its intention is to elicit the effects of dogma on spirituality and worship, and to discern whether the subjects feel an affinity with Catholic Marian dogma and see any possibility of ecumenical progress between the two Churches. Roman Catholic Marian dogma is elucidated and examined. The four main dogmas are presented: the Theotokos, her Perpetual Virginity, her Immaculate Conception and her Assumption into Heaven. The Protestant and Anglican reservations regarding these dogmas are examined, and ecumenical dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and Protestant Churches is discussed, including the bilateral ARCIC discussions with the Anglican Communion. Nine Anglican priests are interviewed, and the data and its implications for Anglican-Roman Catholic ecumenism are examined. The findings indicate that the subjects do not subscribe to Roman Catholic dogma and praxis on Mary. It is proposed that Marian dogma per se is not a hindrance to ecumenism, but the fact of the dogmas reflecting the teachings on more fundamental theological issues such as the nature of sacraments, the trinity, the nature of grace and eschatology in the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2012.

This study has been motivated by the observation made in urban centres of Cameroon, that many Catholics are getting involved in divine, faith or spiritual healing ministry; something that has not been the case few years ago. A closer look at this phenomenon revealed that, not only the people were committing to the ministry, but the influence was external to the Catholic Church. With the gradual expansion of Pentecostalism in the cities and towns of the country, with its emphasis on healing, healing ministry became more of a necessity for other churches. The Roman Catholic Church having neglected this ministry over centuries is at the crossroad. And the question is to know how Catholic healing ministers can improve their healing ministry with elements borrowed from Pentecostal churches. In a fieldwork in Cameroonian city of Yaoundé, 20 interviews were conducted: 10 from the catholic side and 10 from the Pentecostal side represented by The Apostolic Church Cameroon. These data were analysed by the Thematic Analysis method. The analysis and the reflection that followed brought to light that there are different types of healing ministers operating in our cities but not all of them are actually doing what needs to be done. At this, Jesus Christ is presented as the model of healing for ministers to imitate; because Jesus did not heal for his own glory and interest rather for the infinite glory of God and for the salvation of the vulnerable people. The study states that ecumenism between Catholics and Pentecostal can well be initiated from healing ministry through a set of identified recommendations. KEY WORDS: Roman Catholic Church, Faith Healing, Healing ministry, Pentecostalism and Charismatic Churches. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2012.

This thesis aims to restore the balance of modern investigations into Christian asceticism and anthropology by reading the texts of Sts. Irenaeus and Clement within their theological perspectives, and thereby examine the presuppositions determining how we think about sexual difference. In the Introduction I examine the projects of M. Foucault and P. Brown, arguing that they do not remain faithful to the concerns of the texts which they treat. In Part One, I show how asceticism, for Irenaeus, is the expression of the human living the life of God in the body, that which is most characteristically human and the image of God. Sexuality is fundamental to human existence, forming a permanent part of the framework within which humans grow towards God. This growth results from humans acting responsively to the creative activity of God. That God is the source of the life which is lived by humans, demands an openness on their part towards God. Any attempt to avoid the reality of their created nature, for instance, through a self-imposed continence, overturns the basic structure of this relationship. In Part Two, I consider the asceticism proposed by Clement, which strives, through human effort, to achieve a godlike life, buttressing the rational mind, that which is properly human and in the image of God, by the exercise of virtues, so protecting it from disturbances, especially those arising from the body and the vulnerability of dependency. Whilst Clement has a vivid sense of the new life granted in baptism, and praises marriage, this desire for a divine life leads inexorably to the restriction of human sexuality to the function of procreation and its redundancy thereafter. After summarizing, I indicate possible lines for further investigation, and suggest that only within the Irenaean perspective can the issue of sexual difference be raised meaningfully.

Early American Pentecostalism had an ambiguous social witness, which contained both radical and conservative elements. The millennarian-restorationist core of the Pentecostal belief system was prophetic and counter-cultural in that it inspired adherents to denounce the injustices of the status quo and announce the justice of the soon-coming Kingdom of God. Consequently, in the earliest years of the American movement, many Pentecostals, professed and practiced (1) racial equality, (2) gender equality, (3) pacifism, and (4) anti-capitalism. However, this prophetic social witness co-existed, from the very beginning, with a strong conservative ethos, which defended the norms, beliefs, and values of nineteenth-century 'Evangelical America' against the apparent religious and cultural 'anarchy' of modern society. As Pentecostal groups (especially white Pentecostal groups such as the Assemblies of God) organised, institutionalised, and rose in socioeconomic status, the prophetic voices of early Pentecostalism were increasingly ignored, and the conservative ethos grew to dominate Pentecostal social concerns.

Trip planning is a well cited problem for which various solutions have been reported in the literature. This problem has been typically addressed, to a large extent, as a shortest distance path planning problem. In some scenarios, the concept of shortest path is extended to reflect temporal objectives and/or constraints. This work takes an alternative perspective to the trip planning problem in the sense it being situation aware. Thus, allowing multitudes of traveler centric objectives and constraints, as well as aspects of the environment as they pertain to the trip and the traveler. The work in this thesis introduces TSADA (Traveler Situation Awareness and Decision Aid) system. TSADA is designed as a modular system that combines linguistic situation assessment with user-centric decision-making. The trip planning problem is modeled as a graph G. The objective is to find a route with the minimum cost. Both hard and soft objective/attributes are incorporated. Soft objective/attributes such as safety, speed and driving comfortability are described using a linguistic framework and processed using hierarchical fuzzy inference engine. A user centric situation assessment is used to compute feasible routes and map them into route recommendation scheme: recommended, marginally recommended, and not recommended. In this work, we introduce traveler's doctrines concept. This concept is proposed to make the process of situation assessment user centric by being driven by the doctrine that synthesizes the user's specific demands. Hard attributes/objectives, such as the time window and trip monitory allowances, are included in the process of determining the final decision about the trip. We present the underline mathematical formulation for this system and explain the working of the proposed system to achieve optimal performance. Results are introduced to show how the system performs under a wide range of scenarios. The thesis is concluded with a discussion on findings and recommendations for future work.