This qualitative study aims to provide a sociological understanding of people who hold minority beliefs about spirituality and religion and to improve our sociological and social-psychological understanding of a-religious and alternatively religious people. Data were collected through indepth interviews with 10 atheist and 11 naturalist respondents. The study examines the religious histories of the respondents, how they left mainstream religion, how they adopted a minority identity with regard to religion/spirituality, and their personal experiences living in a predominately Christian area. I hypothesized that atheists and naturalists would hold minority identities and feel subordinated or oppressed by the dominant group: Christians. Analyses of interviews provided strong support for the idea that the respondents experienced a minority identity in the sociological sense.

Leon Dash and Ted Conover have modeled an ethnographic approach to literary journalism. This approach combines literary journalism's compelling narrative techniques with ethnographic “naturalist-like” (Brewer, 2000) thoroughness and trustworthiness. Rosa Lee: A Mother in Urban America, by Leon Dash, and Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, by Ted Conover, exemplify this painstaking method that skillfully uses the narrative craft, generates trustworthy data, and contributes to an academic body of knowledge as well as exposing findings to the general public. Dash, Conover, and others have demonstrated the synergy and problem-solving potential of merging anthropology with literary journalism, yet there is no typology, no common name and no set of ground rules describing this work. Identifying Dash's and Conover's methods may advance cross-pollination between anthropology and literary journalism, fields that share the role of reporting on contemporary culture. This cross-pollination serves both disciplines. Ethnography stands to increase its numbers of readers by enlisting the writing techniques of literary journalists and by publishing “more public-spirited” (Fillmore, 1987, p. 1) findings in more public venues. Literary journalism stands to be seen and applied as a credible form of qualitative science by enlisting trustworthy naturalistic methods and aiming to contribute to an academic body of knowledge. This thesis explores the promise of ethnographic naturalism in narrative form, as “scholarship for real readers” (S. Olsen, March 2, 2009, personal communication) by examining how practitioners meet rigorous naturalistic criteria for trustworthiness (Lincoln & Guba, 1985) and how they present findings in narrative forms and public venues. This exploration draws on personal interviews with Dash and Conover and analyses of their long-form narrative research texts in the context of other scholars' outlooks. Key findings include the discovery that although Dash and Conover were not consciously using naturalistic criteria for trustworthiness, their work meets these criteria. Another key finding is that while both writers consider themselves primarily journalists, they both have read anthropology extensively. A notable finding is the fact that Dash and Conover rely on time-invested “unfettered inquiry,” (Dash, 1996) the mind-set of insatiable curiosity, caring and the liberty to apply practices of other disciplines to conduct research, free from external controls.

Several psychologists have attempted to articulate a theistic psychology or one consonant with their religious beliefs. Unfortunately, confusion over the concept of theism and a persistent naturalism in the discipline create substantial obstacles towards achieving a serious theistic psychology. It is suggested that these challenges can be overcome through examining alternative philosophies and methodologies for scientific psychology, exploring seminal articulations of God's activity, and providing a practical example of a theistic psychological research program.

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This dissertation argues that Anglophone writers across the nineteenth-century Atlantic World can be seen trying to represent specific natural worlds as intentionally produced by the cultural practices of Indigenous or African Diasporic people. The case studies that support this argument include the work of Anne Wollstonecraft, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Gilbert Wilson, and they respectively travel from the plantation worlds of Matanzas, Cuba amidst the island’s “sugar revolution,” New England river wetlands but especially the unrelenting persistence of swamps, desert island archipelagos in the Pacific just before the Guano Wars, and the upper Missouri River basin beds increasingly enclosed by United States military installations. Reading each writer’s representation of these natural and social worlds through the framework of ‘land management,’ this thesis proposes a way of registering and tracing their shared attempt to discern practices that all center around the reproduction of ‘natural variation.’ It contends that these nineteenth-century attempts to observe, speculate, or imagine instances of natural variation, each as a product of Indigenous or African Diasporic land management practices be read as a form of poetics, which this dissertation defines as the rhetorical appropriation and reconfiguration of previous modes of discourse (as opposed to an idea of raw innovation). Here, Wollstonecraft, Hawthorne, Melville, and Wilson each renegotiate the colonial justification narrative, official orders of natural history, the perspective of the travel log, and early ethnographic anthropology, in order to represent myriad relationships between natural resilience and subaltern ‘survivance,’ the convergence of which this dissertation ultimately names ‘endurance.’ Finally, we might think of each renegotiation as itself a form of ‘management’ by which these writers respectively highlight their understanding of literature’s role in empire, but do so, in the hopes of rerouting this relay so that representations of nature come to include the role of cultural practices of land management. This archive of ‘endurance’ might be read, then, as the result of disparate authors who all nevertheless believe that literary work might actually help restore and sustain cultural and environmental realities.

Une des questions centrales de la métaéthique est celle de savoir si les propriétés morales sont des propriétés naturelles ou non-naturelles. Ce mémoire fait valoir que nous ferions bien de remettre en question une constellation d’arguments en faveur du non-naturalisme moral : l’argument de la question ouverte, l’intuition normative et l’argument du gouffre. L’influent argument de la question ouverte de Moore, d’abord, ne soutient le non-naturalisme que s’il commet une pétition de principe. L’intuition normative commet ou bien le sophisme d’inférer sur la base de sa différence spécifique qu’une chose n’appartient pas à un genre donné, ou bien sous-estime la panoplie de propriétés naturelles qui possèdent les caractéristiques censées être distinctives des propriétés morales et normatives. L’argument du gouffre, quant à lui, sous-estime l’ubiquité du fossé logique et conceptuel censé marquer une discontinuité métaphysique profonde entre les domaines normatif et naturel. / One of the burning questions among metaethical realists is whether moral facts and properties are natural or non-natural. In this thesis, I argue that we should treat a family of arguments for non-naturalism with considerable scepticism: the Open Question Argument, the Normative Intuition, and the argument from the Is-Ought Gap. Moore’s famous Open Question Argument only supports moral non-naturalism if it begs the question against the modest (non-reductionist) naturalist. As for the Normative Intuition, it either commits the fallacy of inferring on the basis of a thing’s specific difference that it does not belong to the genus it putatively belongs to, or it underestimates the breadth of natural properties that possess the features which non-naturalists allege are distinctive of moral and normative properties. The argument from the Is-Ought Gap, for its part, underestimates the ubiquity of the logical and conceptual gap that allegedly marks a deep metaphysical discontinuity between the normative and natural domains.

The purpose of this essay is to discuss what kind of normativity can be considered acceptable in academic theology today in Sweden. This I do by critically and comparatively analyze two debates. The first debate is from Sweden and has its origin in the book Den okände Jesus written by Cecilia Wassén och Tobias Hägerland. The second debate is an international debate about Joseph Ratzingers or Benedict XVI book Jesus of Nazareth. For the purpose of comparison I am working with three analytical questions. I am asking the different texts whether the author express any ontological assumptions or if he or she argumenting at a epistemological level, what enables intersubjective verifiability according to the author and what kind of methods does the author see as acceptable to reach historical knowledge? This questions works as a methodological cluster and the answers indicate what the authors think about acceptable normativity in academic theology. After that I identify similarities and divergences and I ́m comparing different positions and arguments. Finally I evaluate the reasonability of these positions and argument. The reader will be lead to the conclusion that intersubjective verifiability in academic theology and exegetic doesn ́t demand naturalistic or empirical points of departure but rather transparency and cognitive understandable argument which includes theological normative arguments and research. An attitude I name as methodological reciprocity.