No description available.

This thesis compares the use of religion by Russian and English monarchies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as the response of the public in each country. It examines official religion in each state, as well as the kinds of toleration each extended to other religions. In both cases, the outlook of the monarchy changed over the course of the period under study; while both monarchies clearly understood the key role religion played in the lives of their subjects and the power it afforded the state and its sovereigns, the “official” use of religion continued in Russia and ultimately dwindled in England in the eighteenth century. The fate of competing religious tendencies in each society also contrasted during these key centuries. Drawing on scholarly literature on religion and politics in Russia and England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this essay argues that the two cases can be usefully contrasted. One country, Russia, focused on changing religious forms of practice, while the other, England, focused more on changing the substance of the religion itself. The Russian monarchy explicitly sought to use religion as a tool, preserving its position in society and the people’s beliefs. The monarchy in England sought to make substantive changes in religious belief and worship, clearing the way for the rise of other popular religions.

No description available.

<p>The purpose of this paper is to interpret two stories of creation and compare them to each other with focus on the gender perspective. The interpretation is generally limited to the creation of mankind and how women are represented in each particular story.  The stories I’m interpreting is the story of creation from the <em>Holy Bible</em>, the so called <em>genesis</em>, and from <em>The Nag Hammadi Library’s</em> story of creation called <em>On the origin of the world. </em>I want to show the difference between these two stories when it comes to the women’s position and in what level she is described. I will go through different parts of these two stories and compare the gender language, and try to find a pattern on how femaleness is expressed in The <em>Holy Bible</em> and in <em>On the origin of the world</em>.</p>

At the height of the Roman Empire, Roman citizens undoubtedly favored wine. As the Empire expanded into surrounding areas, increased exposure to beer even further solidified Romans’ preference for wine, not just as a drink, but as a symbol of Romanitas. Beer, brewed mostly in the provincial regions not climatically suited for grapes and wine, quickly became associated with barbarians and therefore stood in opposition to Roman values. As Roman authority waned in the West through the fifth and sixth centuries, Christianity remained powerful, and Christian sources betray an acceptance of beer, tacitly and later more explicitly. This ecclesiastical presence in the thoroughly Romanized provinces of the West paralleled the disappearance of the “barbarian” stigma from beer. Beer made its way into the culture of western Christendom, and it became an acceptable drink. This eventual acknowledgement of the merits of beer is an important and all-too-often overlooked indicator of the transition from the Roman Empire to the Middle Ages.

The thesis stresses two points regarding mandatory initiation rites where a young person is introduced into adult rights and obligations: first, that a poly-angular approach is necessary to get a fair picture of rites in general and initiation rites in particular, second, that each culture, into which a young person is initiated, contributes in a very special way to the design of the initiation rite. Therefore, a survey of some modes of interpretations is presented, after a description of Australian Aboriginal culture from early contact periods and a summary of recurrent themes in the Aboriginal male initiation rites. The comparative perspective and the secret character of these rites necessitates the use of secondary sources, books and articles published by missionaries, farmers, government officials and anthropologists. Since the early Aboriginal culture was integrated in a hunting-and-gathering economy, one important theme was the value of îwalk-aboutî and orientation in the landscape. This orientation is built up by landmarks believed to be transformations of mythical personages or left by those beings. Besides psychological, social and religious facets of the initiation, the value of orientation in the natural, the social and the mythical environment is the one which makes the rite an Aboriginal one.

No description available.

No description available.

The purpose of this paper is to interpret two stories of creation and compare them to each other with focus on the gender perspective. The interpretation is generally limited to the creation of mankind and how women are represented in each particular story.  The stories I’m interpreting is the story of creation from the Holy Bible, the so called genesis, and from The Nag Hammadi Library’s story of creation called On the origin of the world. I want to show the difference between these two stories when it comes to the women’s position and in what level she is described. I will go through different parts of these two stories and compare the gender language, and try to find a pattern on how femaleness is expressed in The Holy Bible and in On the origin of the world.

<p> In this thesis I examine various statements relating to the Jain lay community in the early &Sacute;vet&amacr;mbara texts. My approach is deliberately and consistently historical. The earliest extant &Sacute;vet&amacr;mbara writing presents an almost exclusively negative view of all non-mendicants. In the context of competition with other religious groups to gain the respect and material support of members of the general population, the &Sacute;vet&amacr;mbara mendicants began to compose positive statements about a lay community. Instead of interpreting the key terms and formulations in these early statements anachronistically on the basis of the later and systematized account of lay Jain religiosity, I attempt to trace how the idea of lay Jainism and its distinctive practices gradually came into being. The more familiar account that is often taken as the basis for understanding earlier sources in fact emerges as the end product of this long history.</p><p> This historical reconstruction poses numerous challenges. There is little reliable historical scholarship to draw from in carrying out this investigation. In the absence of a widely accepted account of the formation of the &Sacute;vet&amacr;mbara canon, the dates of the canonical sources that I examine remain uncertain. I argue that by focusing on key passages relating to the Jain lay community it is possible to establish a relative chronology for the composition of some of these passages and for the compilation of some of the texts in which they appear. We can thus observe development in the strategies employed by the mendicants as part of their effort to establish and maintain relations with a community of householders who respected and regularly supported them. What I offer here is a preliminary but important step toward writing a critical and comprehensive history of lay Jainism. More broadly, scholars of monastic religious traditions may be interested in this account of how one group of ascetics in ancient India garnered lay support and developed a role for non-monastic members of the community.</p>