This study addresses how ‘Spiritual Healing’ is administered in two Christian churches with similar doctrine but a different approach to how that doctrine is understood and practised. The divergence in eschatologies of the two different denominational congregations influences the way they integrate healing into their worship. There are also cultural differences in worship between them; the Black majority congregation engages in an animated charismatic style while the White majority practises in a more sedate and what may appear to an outsider to be a more passive style of worship. The study also examines the activities of prayer, laying on of hands and the use of music in the delivery of healing and as health promotion. The methodology used is an ethnographic approach. Qualitative data was collected using participant and non-participant observation, and semi-structured interviews. This data is a result of the systematic ‘immersion’ of the researcher in the culture in a different way to simply attending church as she experienced prior to the beginning of the research. Observations were conducted in services on different sites including a convention at the parent church for the Black majority Pentecostal church. The participants in the interviews were selected from the main research congregations with the support of their ministers as ‘gatekeepers’. The study compares and contrasts the theology and practice of the two congregations and their understanding of spiritual healing. It is also shown that spiritual healing can be part of and complementary to the approach that medical and nursing professionals utilise in their practice. Recipients of spiritual healing whose health seeking behaviour straddles the medical and the spiritual approach may or may not use medicine as prescribed by health professionals. In the UK, people usually have access to both, unlike people in Developing countries who have limited access to modern medicine and have no choice but to make the best use of folk medicine, and faith healers in their health seeking behaviour practices. The study recommends that more mutual understanding may facilitate the support of faith groups for the work of the NHS recommended by recent government policy.

The incorporation of religion and spirituality in psychotherapy has been a long-standing debate. Using in-depth qualitative interviews, this study aimed to explore psychological counsellors’ experiences of how they respond to clients’ religious and spiritual issues and the process by which they manage these responses. Researchers have mostly focussed on what psychological practitioners do to work with their client’s religious beliefs, but not on how psychological practitioners interpret their own therapeutic responses and how the meaning they attribute to these interpretations affects the process of managing their own responses. Grounded theory was used to analyse data from thirteen practicing psychological counsellors, in the UK, with varying religious and spiritual affiliations and an average of 15 practice years. Four main categories emerged from the data: Attunement, Seeing What Is Heard; Boundaried Distancing, Seeing But Not Perceiving; Impasse Distancing, Hearing But Not Seeing; Closing the Gap in Understanding and Working Through Dilemmas To Attunement. One core category surrounded all of the categories: Spanning the Gulf Between ‘Doing’ and ‘Being’, Self-reflection as Integral to Therapists’ Responses. The complex categories related to one another in a way that demonstrated how working with clients who have a similar outlook on religion to themselves, or not, existential questions can emerge which can disrupt beliefs previously accepted by the practitioner. When reflective and attuned, practitioners are motivated to ‘be’ with their clients and sometimes have to acknowledge their own inabilities and limitations. Some practitioners working with clients religious beliefs readily grappled with their own existential uncertainty, using their own experiences as a means to deepen their therapeutic contact with their client and cultivating an openness to the ineffable. Distancing strategies, such as “bracketing” were also, implicitly used, often unrecognized because practitioners had explicit preferred professional identities they wanted to maintain, with an emphasis on doing evidence-based therapy regardless of how well this fitted the client’s presenting issue. A theoretical account was developed to explain this process. Findings are discussed further in relation to the importance of practitioner competence, self-awareness, training, supervision as it relates to religion and spirituality. Recommendations for the practice of counselling psychology focus on how practitioners can manage religious therapeutic misattunement, by acknowledging their own doubts and fears and opening themselves to the quest for deep attunement between therapist and client.

Background: Over recent decades there has been increasing interest in the importance of spirituality and its impact on the well-being of mental health service users. Nurses have a professional obligation to care for patients holistically and this includes assessing and caring for spiritual needs. However, there is little research regarding the specific issues faced by many mental health nurses. The aim of this study was to explore mental health nurses’ understanding of the spiritual needs of service users and how they reported responding to these needs. Methods: This qualitative study used semi-structured interviews as the method of data collection. Seventeen participants took part which included ten female and seven male participants across a wide range of working-age brackets. The data were subsequently transcribed and analysed thematically using Template Analysis (King, 2012). Findings: Four key themes were identified from the data in relation to personal and professional influences on understanding spirituality and caring for spiritual need; different approaches to nursing spiritually; and ‘fear and anxiety’ which permeated participants’ talk on the research topic in many ways. The findings presented show the complex influences that affected participants’ reported understandings and subsequent responses. Conclusion and recommendations: Mental health nurses experienced anxieties around misinterpreting spiritual need as mental disorder, particularly in service users who experience psychosis and other complex mental health issues. Strategies for engaging with mental health service users who express spiritual and religious beliefs could therefore be a focus for future research. This thesis adds to the wider body of knowledge and may usefully contribute to the development of future practice and policy guidelines so that mental health nurses are better able to confidently and competently understand and respond to spiritual need in service users.

This thesis identifies processes of ‘spiritual transformation’ amongst boys from prison in the Philippines. It is a qualitative study for which data were collected largely by means of interviews and observation in jails and rehabilitation centres in the Philippines. The thesis argues that boys who suffer deprivation at home, on the streets and in jail become alienated from society. When events lead to an experience of spiritual awakening, the subsequent treatment they receive can either lead them to make changes in their lives or it can thwart them from doing so. With encouragement, boys are able to consolidate positive life changes and reach a lasting condition of spiritual transformation. The thesis demonstrates how some programmes of rehabilitation in the Philippines allow deprived children to experience and develop constructive relationships of trust, reliance, attachment and commitment, and how this assists the development of faith that is a significant component of spiritual transformation. The thesis shows how such programmes catalyse and nurture this spiritual transformation. This thesis makes an original contribution to knowledge in the area of rehabilitation of Children in Conflict with the Law and the spiritual aspects of rehabilitation. It builds upon previous research in the field of faith development and adds to this body of scholarship. Findings gained from this research can be applied to policy elsewhere.

Maude Petre is a somewhat neglected figure mentioned today chiefly in regard to her association with the Catholic Modernist, George Tyrrell. The aim of the thesis will be to strive to retrieve her from this neglect by showing that she was a significant figure in her own right with a substantial body of published work. Attention will be given in particular to her writings in the later years of her life in which little interest has hitherto been shown. The thesis will endeavour to trace her main ideas as expressed in her published works and see how they developed over the course of her long life. The issue of authority and liberty in Church and society will be highlighted as one of the dominant themes of her writing. Her life and thought will be placed in the context of her age and its many changes both in Church and society and her writings will be related to the events of her own life as recorded in her own diaries. An attempt will be made in conclusion to evaluate the wider significance of her life and thought.

On the basis of my experience as a U.S. national living as a missionary in Brazil from 2003-2010, this thesis explores cultural, political, and ethical questions related to Christian mission, by reappropriating the life and thought of Ivan Illich. This thesis is an exercise in doing theology with and after Illich. One of the aims of my thesis is to respond to a ‘research gap’ in relation to Illich in the field of theology. In reappropriating Illich for contemporary theology, my thesis is two-fold. First, I bring his explicitly theological commentary (focused on the Incarnation) together with his earlier social criticism (focused on conviviality)" arguing that they operate in tandem as expressions of “Incarnational Christianity.” Second, I show that he offers a compelling contribution to contemporary accounts of Christian mission, with practical implications for incarnational mission. Illich’s three-fold contribution, I argue, relates to: his understanding of the incarnational basis of mission; his diagnosis of the social conditions which undermine and corrupt this incarnational movement; his insights regarding the cultivation of conviviality as a response to wider social concerns, such as economic and ecological crises, as a means for reclaiming the freedom of living in hope and of “prolonging the Incarnation.

This thesis explores the topic of eschatological violence in the Pentecostal tradition through an intertextual literary analysis of Ezekiel 36:16—39:29 and Revelation 19:11—21 and 20:7—10 by investigating primarily how the intentional literary placement of the ‘Two Sticks’ oracle (Ezek 37:15—28) between the ‘Dry Bones’ vision (Ezek 37:1—14) and the ‘Gog of Magog’ war (Ezek 38:1—39:29) informs the reader’s theological understanding of the message of Ezekiel 36:16—39:29 as a whole. Secondarily, this thesis considers how the allusion to Ezek 38—39 in Rev 19:11—21 and 20:7—10 enhances the reader’s theological understanding of Ezek 36:16—39:29, yielding an intertextual reading that challenges the way these texts have long been understood in popular Pentecostal contexts. By reviewing historical Pentecostal interpretations of these texts, specifically considering how dispensationalism has influenced Pentecostal eschatology and ensuing textual interpretations, this thesis offers a fresh perspective that aligns with the eschatology of early Pentecostals and contemporary Pentecostal scholars—both of whom generally depart from dispensationalism. This intertextual literary analysis builds a case for envisioning a hopeful and proleptic eschatology that promotes peace and reconciliation, potentially transforming Pentecostal ethics, politics and mission.

This project was responsible for developing the Virtual Manuscript Room Collaborative Research Environment (VMR CRE), which offers a facility for the critical editing workflow from raw data collection, through processing, to publication, within an open and online collaborative framework for the Institut für Neutestamentliche Textforschung (INTF) and their global partners while editing the Editio Critica Maior (ECM)-- the paramount critical edition of the Greek New Testament which analyses over 5600 Greek witnesses and includes a comprehensive apparatus of chosen manuscripts, weighted by quotations and early translations. Additionally, this project produced the first digital edition of the ECM. This case study, transitioning the workflow at the INTF to an online collaborative research environment, seeks to convey successful methods and lessons learned through describing a professional software engineer’s foray into the world of academic digital humanities. It compares development roles and practices in the software industry with the academic environment and offers insights to how this software engineer found a software team therein, suggests how a fledgling online community can successfully achieve critical mass, provides an outsider’s perspective on what a digital critical scholarly edition might be, and hopes to offer useful software, datasets, and a thriving online community for manuscript researchers.

Methodological naturalists generally believe that science is the best and only method for discovering the properties of reality and what exists. A central tenet of methodological naturalism is that science is limited to evaluating only natural things. Science cannot allow for the possibility of supernatural objects because doing so would irreparably damage the scientific method. Or, it may be that evaluating the supernatural is beyond the capabilities of science. In this thesis, I challenge these assumptions. I defend a form of naturalism known as Provisory Methodological Naturalism which holds that science can, at least theoretically, evaluate supernatural claims. Provisory methodological naturalists believe the notion that science only evaluates natural things is provisional and subject to being overruled. Should supernatural objects exist, science would be able to observe them.

In 1930, Ras Tafari was crowned Emperor of Ethiopia, assuming the title of Haile Selassie I. This coronation had an impact on African-Caribbean people who began to identify the Emperor of Ethiopia as a symbolic figure for African consciousness, redemption and unity. RastafarI emerged as a socio-political and anti-colonial movement of the Caribbean, and then later progressively expanded as a trans-cultural and religious phenomenon across the world. RastafarI is a new religious movement which traces its roots to Ethiopia, but it is also a liberative-resistant movement for people who live in subalternity and still face the effects of colonialism. This study has three goals. The first and primary one is to develop reflection. How is RastafarI connected to Ethiopia? Ethiopia with its cultural and religious traditions, symbols and rituals is the perfect place for a new deification of King-God (human-divine) for RastafarI. The second is to rehabilitate RastafarI to its original vision as an Afrocentric, liberative and postcolonial movement of the Caribbean. A third related goal is to identify the theme of emancipation and gender through the key figure of a female leader, the Queen of Sheba, who had a significant impact on Ethiopian and Rasta self-consciousness (autocoscienza).