This study deals with the historical development around the arguments for women's eligibility for the priesthood in the Church of Sweden between the years 1923-1950. Based on two government investigations in 1923 and 1950, I present the argument that emerges and how this relates to the gender order and social structures of the time. My purpose of the study is to provide an insight into the multifaceted debate that this issue gave rise to. My questions are: what arguments for or against the female priesthood were put forward in these investigations and how were these related to understandings of male and female? I will methodically use a qualitative text analysis based on the hermeneutic spiral and take as a starting point the gender theories of previous research to answer these questions. The study shows how the presented arguments in several ways formed a distinction between men and women. The argument was also developed during these years and the study shows how it is connected with an overall changed gender order and societal structures.

Debatten kring jakt är alltjämt relevant ur en samtida svensk kontext där olika värden såsom biologisk mångfald, jordbruket med sina ekonomiska, kulturella och djuretiska aspekter, omsorg om vilda djur samt jaktformers kulturhistoriska arv bland lokalbefolkningen företräds. I Sverige finns yrkesjägare, jaktkritiker, fritidsjägare, människor som vuxit upp med jakt och människor som inte har någon egentlig relation till eller medvetenhet om jakt samt det mesta däremellan. Denna uppsats genomför en innehållsmässig idéanalys av Jägareförbundets utbildningsmaterial för jägarexamen Jägarskolan utifrån etiska och miljöetiska teorier med syfte att tolka vilka idéer om värde och moraliska skyldigheter som görs i materialet. Uppsatsen finner att materialet kan anses uttrycka en svagt ekocentrisk dygdetik där arter och ekosystem samt i viss mån icke-mänskliga djur kan anses ha ett egenvärde samt att odlandet av vissa egenskaper och färdigheter är nödvändiga för en etiskt korrekt förståelse och handlande.

Recently, Kant's concept of aesthetic disinterestedness has been called into question (see Nehamas 2007, Riggle 2016). Both texts provide insight into the ways in which experiences of beauty are interested. That said, the precise relationship between beauty and the desires, which is at the core of aesthetic interest as a concept, remains elusive. I have therefore developed a theoretical account of how desires are integral to how people experience beauty. Central to my thesis is the rejection of the idea that people experience beauty as a mere sensation, as I argue from the position that beauty is experienced as a fully fledged emotion. I build my theory on the foundation of Jenefer Robinson’s paper “Emotion, Judgement, and Desire” which, like my thesis, is specifically concerned with the evaluative component of emotions. Her suggestion is that people’s emotional evaluations are shaped by desires that are held by them prior to their emotional experiences. I expand her thesis by suggesting that such desires initiate a second distinct type of desire that is also part of the evaluative component of emotions. I argue that the distinction I make between primary desires and response desires explains how people engage with beautiful objects in an interested manner. Primary desires are defined by me as deeply held desires that are directed, in terms of their intentionality, towards the subject’s life and self-affirming values, as explored by Riggle (2021). I argue that people are predisposed to seek out experiences of beauty because of their primary desires. The reason being that the perceptual properties of beautiful objects reflect the life and self-affirming values against which primary desires are directed. I then suggest that response desires are in experiences of beauty initiated by the subject recognising beautiful objects as “speaking to” their primary desires. As in, when someone perceives qualities that reflect their life and self-affirming values, they respond by developing response desires towards the object. I argue that such response desires, in so far as beauty is concerned, is manifested in a want to prolong one’s emotional experiences of beauty. Moreover, I suggest that by satisfying them, the subject continuously develops new response desires towards the beautiful object; making response desires an essential part of how people assert the values they recognise in beautiful objects.

The idea of sects has been something observed from a distance, which creates a mystery regarding what occurs in these selective religious groups. In today's media cults is often depicted as mystic groups, but is that a correct portrayal of cults, or is in fact misleading? The purpose of this thesis is to create an overview regarding the mental health by former sect members by the usage of Heider Fritz interpretation of attribution theory. The issue that will be leading this thesis is “How can attribution theory be used to understand sect defectors regarding their mental health?”. This work will be analysed with thematic analysis, due to it being more fitting, regarding to the material based on peoples own stories about their experiences, as well as the usage of theory functioning like framework while reading and later analysing the material. The theory that will function as a base for the work is as mentioned, Attribution theory describe people under the impression that events outside of logical explanation is caused by God. In a religious perspective the roles between God and humans are mentioned several times throughout the Bible. The result of this thesis shows that people in Swedish sects develop mental illness due to the strict image of God and the pressure put on members by parish leaders, that functions as a form om degradation. Although it is important to underline that one cannot generalize the members of a sect, due to the complex individuality prerequisites that each person obtain. The prerequisites vary from person to person and therefore establish the psyche of every individual and the risk of developing a mental illness. / <p>På grund av Covid-19 har opponeringen av uppsatsen skett utanför universitetes lokaler, via Zoom</p>

In pharaonic times, religion, magic and medicine had little distinction between each other due to the commonly held belief that all parts of life were influenced and even controlled by divinity and the supernatural. To navigate life easier, and in true Egyptian fashion, a large corpus of text was composed of magic, medicine and religion. The latter includes the arguably most well-known work, the Egyptian Book of the dead, the religious scripture that would help the deceased navigate the netherworld in the hopes for eternal life. The papyri depict numerous plants and remedies as well as spell and healing methods accompanied by magical incorporation such as incantation or invocation of a god or goddess. These can be considered a basis for the fundamental ideas of religion and daily life of ancient Egypt, always consisting of divine involvement. This essay will deal with a symbol that the ancient Egyptians saw as synonymous with life, and immortality: The narcotic blue water lily, Nymphaea Caerulea. The study will be a work on the human religious experience with a plant that I will theorize as having been used for an entheogenic effect in order to connect with the divine by asking some key questions: How and why was the lily used? How is the flowers depiction on art, in texts, and different iconography indicative to a usage in religious experience and through the mythology produced in the civilisation?

We are used to regarding aesthetic experience from the point of view of a spectator, rather than something we actively provide and give. It is not common in the aesthetic debate to analyse what it is like to offer an aesthetic experience, but it is rather the opposite. Philosophers and aestheticians tend to study and focus on how the experience is perceived by someone, not on how it unfolds for the one who provides it. I believe that the experience of giving - especially when we give ourselves to others - is an aesthetic experience in itself. By "giving ouselves to others" I mean opening ourselves to others through acts of generous and disinterested service. In fact, it seems that we are truly and fully happy when we are willing to give ourselves to others in this way. Accordingly, the questions I am going to answer in this research are: why can we be happy by giving ourselves to another person? Can we be "gifts" for others without expecting something back? Is this experience aesthetic? I argue that love and disinterestedness are two key-concepts which help us understand how it is possible to selflessly give ourselves. In addition to that, I claim that such an act is aesthetic because we judge it as "beautiful" and not only as "good". The experience of self-giving is aeshetic because we invoke aesthetic concepts when we describe it.

My research is focused on the relation between the foreign policy vector and national identity as projected by Armenia’s Prime Minister (PM) Nikol Pashinyan in the public sphere. This study is a search for expressions of ‘sameness’ and allegiance in the geopolitical balancing and reconstruction of Armenia’s foreign policy narrative, ideology and identity.  The work entails an exploration of how Armenia’s relations to the EU, France, Iran, Russia, and the US are being projected through the Prime Minister’s Twitter account from 2018 through 2022. A quantitative and qualitative (discourse) analysis of PM Pashinyan’s tweets through these five years indicated that references to Russia predominantly have contents and direct contextual links to the sphere of security and defence. There is an absence of positive tonality toward Russia following Armenia’s war with Azerbaijan in 2020 and the Russia-brokered ceasefire agreement. In contrast, during the whole five-year period France stands out as receiving unanimously positive remarks with content on various subjects. France stands out as being referred to the most in values and ideology. The EU, US and Iran all feature less than Russia and France. Posts with the US mentioned are in the sphere of external relations and in connection with the Armenian diaspora. The Armenian communities in Iran are also subject of a number of tweets. Many Twitter posts referring to Armenian-Iranian state relations include references to shared history and heritage. In summary, my analysis illustrates a foreign policy engagement towards the West from PM Pashinyan. However, his tweets also acknowledge the strong ties to Russia in security and defence and the deep heritage shared with Iran.

No description available.

Today Sweden is one of the most secularized countries in the world and almost nowhere do so few believe that traditional religion plays a role in their lives. The purpose of this study is to investigate and analyze how secularization is portrayed in nine selected textbooks intended for middle school education and also to analyze how this result can be understood from two perspectives: secularization and modernization.  To clarify this purpose through a specific inquiry, two research questions have been formulated: How is secularization presented in the different textbooks? and How can the production of educational materials be understood in terms of secularization and modernization?. The aim is also to achieve this by using pre-selected analytical questions that will help answer the research question along with the selected excerpts in the material. The theory used in this study consists of the definitions of secularization and modernization presented and discussed in Bruce (2002, 2011) and Davie (2013). Bruce (2002, 2011) discusses the role of modernization in the decline of religion in society and the emergence of the secular society, where rationality, science, and technology became increasingly important. The discussion also assumes that the rise of secularization is a development of modernization. Davie (2013) initially discusses how modernization and the separation of church and state created a society that no longer relied on religious thinking but instead on empirical and ethical approaches.  Since the essay aims to study how textbooks present a concept, a content analysis of qualitative significance has been conducted to select and analyze what the author intends to convey through their portrayal of secularization. To structure the presented material, a coding process has been conducted to identify the context in which secularization is portrayed and presented in the different textbooks. The coding categories are as follows: "Secularization as the main part of the context," "Secularization as a part alternatively labeled in the context," and "Secularization not presented." Based on these codes, a thematization of the material has been carried out to use the analytical questions that have been employed to answer the research question. The themes are as follows: 'secularization,' 'modernization,' 'micro-level,' and 'macro-level.' The conclusions that this study has been able to identify and establish are that secularization can be portrayed and presented in several different ways. It is up to the author to focus on which perspective, starting point, or societal level secularization should be used.

No description available.