This dissertation examines the ways in which military personnel interacted with religion during World War II. It argues that the challenges of wartime service provided the impetus and the opportunity to improvise religious practices, refine religious beliefs amid new challenges, and broaden religious understanding through interaction with those from other traditions. Methodologically, this dissertation moves beyond existing analyses that focus primarily on institutions and their representatives such as military chaplains. Instead, it explores first-person accounts left by men and women who were not part of the chaplain corps and analyzes ways in which non-chaplains engaged religion. The exigencies of war contributed to religious innovation as soldiers and sailors improvised religious practices. Lay leaders sometimes filled in to lead services as chaplains were often not available. Soldiers and sailors also modified individual religious practices such as diet, fasting, and prayer to fit the context of military service. The challenges of wartime service also led troops to refine previously held religious beliefs as well as to adopt new interpretations based on personal experiences. Soldiers and sailors often clung to whatever religious beliefs or practices they saw as potentially beneficial. Finally, religious mixing combined with social dislocation and stress to create an atmosphere in which troops questioned and reformulated their religious identities. As soldiers and sailors formed bonds with those from other traditions, it became more difficult to maintain previous assumptions rooted in suspicion and rumor about other faiths. Understanding how soldiers and sailors interacted with religion in World War II anticipates significant aspects of what many scholars have described as a religious revival in the two decades following the war. It suggests that many veterans returned to civilian life with more confidence in their own religious agency and with sharpened conceptions of what they considered religious essentials.

Only recently have scholars given particular attention to the development of the racial discourse present in early Christian apologetics. This study is aimed at understanding the Latin and Greek literary antecedents to the development of a Christian discourse on race and identity and examining in detail the apex of this discourse in the work of third century apologist Origen of Alexandria. Origen’s work represented the apex of an evolving discourse that, while continuing to use traditional vocabulary, became increasingly universalizing with the growth of the Roman Empire. By understanding how Christians in the first three centuries shaped their attitudes on race and identity, scholars can better comprehend the place of Christianity within the cultural framework of the Roman Empire.

Hur gick det till när romerna gick med i pingstkyrkan och varför ville pingstkyrkan ha dem med? Pingstkyrkan visste först inte att romerna var kristna och då de upptäckte att så var fallet och att romerna i flera andra europeiska länder var med i de ländernas pingstförsamlingar tyckte de att det var naturligt att de skulle få vara med i Sverige också. Pingstvännerna var ju också en relativt ny rörelse i Sverige och de var öppna för nytänkande. Grunden inom pingstkyrkan är densamma men romerna har burit med sig mycket av sin kultur in i pingstkyrkan. Vissa saker ser de svenska pingstvännerna mellan fingrarna för därför att romerna ändå är en grupp med stark kultur som de inom pingstförsamlingarna inte vill ta ifrån dem och för att det inte direkt strider mot pingstkyrkans praxis. Det viktigaste för romerna som de tagit med sig in i pingstkyrkan är renlighetsreglerna som de håller mycket strikt på. Saker som de svenska pingstvännerna vänder sig emot är spådomskonsten och blodshämnden. Detta kräver pingstkyrkan att man gör avkall på.

This thesis aims to outline the causes, symptoms, and treatments related to leprosy, and how it can be diagnosed in patients and identified in human remains. The thesis also aims to demonstrate the ways in which care for leprosy sufferers developed as the disease became more prevalent and more commonly, and correctly identified. It analyses the social stigmas inflicted upon sufferers, and the medical care and attention provided for them by religious institutions when other groups or organisations shunned those suffering from leprosy. The rationale for this study is to identify trends surrounding the social stigmas attached to leprosy and care from the first identifiable case of strain three of Mycobacterium leprae in the 1st century AD to the late Middle Ages when the number of cases of leprosy appears to begin to decline. Using archaeological evidence, historical records, and the published research of experts in the field, this thesis demonstrates that as leprosy spread throughout the Middle East and Europe, religious organisations often took on the role as care givers for leprosy sufferers through the ideal of religious, often Christian, charity; to look after the poor, sick, and needy. As the trends presented in this study have yet to be published elsewhere in this way, this thesis aims to contribute via an interdisciplinary approach to the fields of religious archaeology, anthropology and bioarchaeology.

This dissertation examines the ideological development of the Catholic University Student (JUC) movements in Cuba and Brazil during the Cold War and their organizational predecessors and intellectual influences in interwar Europe. Transnational Catholicism prioritized the attempt to influence youth and in particular, university students, within the context of Catholic nations within Atlantic civilization in the middle of the twentieth century. This dissertation argues that the Catholic university movements achieved a relatively high level of social and political influence in a number of countries in Latin America and that the experience of the Catholic student activists led them to experience ideological conflict and in some cases, rupture, with the conservative ideology of the Catholic hierarchy. Catholic student movements flourished after World War II in the context of an emerging youth culture. The proliferation of student organizations became part of the ideological battlefield of the Cold War. Catholic university students also played key roles in the Cuban Revolution (1957-1959) and in the attempted political and social reforms in Brazil under President João Goulart (1961-1964). The JUC, under the guidance of the Church hierarchy, attempted to avoid aligning itself with either ideological camp in the Cold War, but rather to chart a Third Way between materialistic capitalism and atheistic socialism. Thousands of students in over 70 nations were intensively trained to think critically about pressing social issues. This paper will to place the Catholic Student movement in Cuba in the larger context of transnational Catholic university movements using archival evidence, newspaper accounts and secondary sources. Despite the hierarchy’s attempt to utilize students as a tool of influence, the actual lived experience of students equipped them to think critically about social issues, and helped lay a foundation for the progressive student politics of the late 1960s and the rise of liberation theology in the1970s.

D. Th. František Norbert Hrachovský, O.Praem (1879-1943) was a regular priest in the Premonstratensian monastery in Nová Říše. He has been covered in the beatification process of Pavel Souček and his fellow-friars from the Premonstratensian monastery in Nová Říše. This work I submit deals with the life and, in particular, the work of this Czech regular priest, philosopher and translator. It is divided into four chapters. The first chapter introduces the sources used while compiling this work. The second chapter presents its critical biography. The third chapter is entitled "Bibliography" and presents an entire list of his work: monographs, translations, contributions to various anthologies, and newspaper articles. The fourth section contains a summary of his bibliography in the time sequence, in which D. Th. František Norbert Hrachovský, O.Praem created his works. This work aims to provide a basis for appreciation of the work and to evaluate the life of this notable member of the Premonstratensian Order.

No single volume of mythological or philological research exists for Hades. In the one moment Hades appears in archaic Greek literature, speaking for only ten lines, Hermes stands nearby. Thus, to understand and journey to Hades is to reckon with Hermes’ close presence. As I synthesize research by writers from several different disciplines, may some light be brought into the depths. May we analyze Hades’ brief appearance in archaic Greek literature, examining how what I define as the “Hermetic” emits from his breath in the one moment he physically appears and speaks.

A parallel can be drawn in intellectual development between ancient Greece and late eighteenth century Europe concerning the secularization of the religious myth. This parallel is illustrated in a literary mode in Greece and in a philosophical mode in Europe. In both historical situations the intellectual development of a society was posited in a delicate balance of religious mythical interpretation of human existence and in a growing assertiveness of the self-consciousness of the individual. A significant point of analogy is the similarity of the Greek tragedians’ attempt to define man in relation to the gods and Hegel’s formulation of a philosophy which suspended in a delicate semantic balance the religious terminology of his Christian heritage and the intellectual developments of the preceding century. It is my thesis that a significant point of analogy is the similarity of the Greek tragedians’ attempt to define man in relation to the gods, and Hegel’s formulation of a philosophy which suspended in a delicate semantic balance the religious terminology of his Christian heritage and the intellectual developments of the preceding century.

Although seventeenth-century New England has been one of the most heavily studied subjects in American history, women's lived experience of Puritan church membership has been incompletely understood. Histories of New England's Puritan churches have often assumed membership to have had universal implications, and studies of New England women either have focused on dissenting women or have neglected women's religious lives altogether despite the centrality of religion to the structure of New England society and culture. This thesis uses pamphlets, sermons, and church records to demonstrate that women's church membership in Massachusetts's Puritan churches differed from men's because women were prohibited from speaking in church or from voting in church government. Despite the Puritan emphasis on spiritual equality, women experienced a modified form of membership stemming from their subordinate place in the social hierarchy.

The history of religion is always a history of translation, too. When spoken words are transcribed, scriptures are created that are considered sacred and universally applicable. Translating holy writings in order to spread one’s own religion poses certain challenges for translators, such as how to bridge the gaps between source and target languages. Sometimes, the original language is no longer spoken or precisely known. In some religious traditions, a particular language is reserved for scriptures and considered untranslatable. And an ability to deal correctly with multiple writing systems and alphabets is also required. Religious texts are full of puzzles and mysteries. Deciphering (i.e. translating) them is also an important part of today’s humanities. Materials from Leipzig University Library spanning two thousand years are a source of knowledge about humans’ efforts to explain their own or other people’s religion in words and images.