Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis examines Dietrich Bonhoeffer's "turning from the phraseological to the real" during his early journeys abroad as recorded in his diary notes and letters. Our interest in the maps and stories of travels operative in Bonhoeffer's life coincides with a prevalence of metaphors of travel and displacement in contemporary literary and cultural criticism and acknowledges the movements of "powerful" travellers across boundaries and continents in the context of imperialism and colonialism.

Includes bibliographical references. / The aim of this thesis is to propose a multi-layered and interdisciplinary understanding of space by focussing on the courtyard gardens of the Alhambra. By presenting a theoretical conversation on the Sufi notion of the barzakh (an intermediary and relational space) between the premodern Muslim mystic Ibn al-Arabi and contemporary western theorists concerned with space, movement and aesthetics, such as Louis Marin, Henri Lefebvre, Tim Ingold and Martin Seel, this thesis offers an original contribution to the spatial analysis of religion as embodied in the architecture, gardens, and imagination of the Alhambra. Emphasising the barzakh’s role in the interplay between presence and meaning this thesis also draws attention to the dialogue between self as spectator and the garden as spectacle. Through this dialogue, Ibn al-Arabi‘s concept of the barzakh , which he developed in terms of ontology, epistemology and hermeneutics, is investigated and analysed in order to identify a theory of knowledge that relies on the synthesis between experience and imagination. The union of meaning and presence afforded by the intermediary quality of the barzakh is further demonstrated in the physical, imaginative and virtual worlds of the courtyard gardens of the Alhambra. Viewing the Alhambra palaces and gardens in terms of Ibn al-Arabi‘s barzakh, they produce their own language, a showing ‖ of their outer and inner movements, which prompts and provokes the spectator to participate in a poetical and creative encounter. Seen as a barzakh, these gardens put space into movement.

With the use of SRI as an interpretive analytics combined with a gender-critical hermeneutical optic I have traced out some of the ways in which gender is constituted and performed in the discourse of 1 Corinthians. I demonstrate that normative and normalising engendering is operative in the text and that the discourse replicates hegemonic gendered structurings and machinations from the broader social and cultural environment of that milieu. As a result Christian bodies are scripted to perform according to the dominant cultural protocols and engendering praxes. Because Paul is structured by and functions within the larger discourses of the ancient Mediterranean sex and gender system(s), one cannot comprehend the gendered rhetoric of 1 Corinthians without recourse to its interconnections with ancient gender discourses in general. Furthermore, when Paul is engaged in persuasion through the discourse of 1 Corinthians, gender construction(s) and representation(s), because of the nature of gender in the ancient world, is precisely what is at stake. It seems evident that the discourse of 1 Corinthians tendentiously served to maintain and sustain hierarchical gendered relationships between men and women in the church at Corinth that mimicked the normative, androcentric, and kyriarchal power relations from the dominant Graeco-Roman culture. These power dynamics continue to have an effect on many churches today because they understand Scripture to be regulative for Christian practice in our contemporary society in spite of the temporal and cultural separation of our world from that of the world of the New Testament. As a result contemporary churches reproduce gendered power relations that have been established in habitus which in turn enables replicated gendered structurings in society. In this regard the rhetoric of 1 Corinthians may be viewed as a text that functions as discourse in the making and sustaining of gendered and ideological normativities that continue to structure gendered bodies and bodiliness. It should be kept in mind that the structuredness of habitus came into being as the product of reiteration and sedimenting, and its dismantling similarly will come about as a result of reiteration.

Bibliography: pages 393-409. / This case-study of the Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM) in Africa in relation to Church Growth theory covers the period 1908 - 1980. Its geographical scope is South Africa, including the black Homelands. In chapters 1 and 2 we examine the history, origins and development of the AFM in Africa in relation to Pentecostalism and the white AFM. In chapters 3 and 4 we research the contextual issues of racism, apartheid, and the relationship between the AFM, the State, and politics. From chapter 5 to the end our focus is on the church growth of the AFM in Africa. Our study has shown that the AFM in Africa has grown significantly during the period studied. Significant growth factors have been: the prioritization of evangelism accompanied with an emphasis on the supernatural manifestation of the gifts of the Spirit; the active involvement of the laity; their theology of missions revealing a distinctive pneumatology, an eschatological urgency, and a sense of divine destiny; their ecclesiology; their culturally relevant liturgy; and homogeneous groupings of Blacks. Conversely, factors hindering their growth have been the superpaternalistic approach to mission of the white "Mother-church". The endorsement of apartheid and lack of a prophetic witness of the Apostolic Faith Mission towards the State have also harmed their credibility in the black community.

The aim of this project is to provide a theological basis for the practice of discipleship in the world as a form of aesthetic existence. The study is framed by Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s cryptic call for a recovery of Søren Kierkegaard’s notion of aesthetic existence in being Christian, set against the backdrop of their mutual concern for the captivity of the church to Christendom. In addition to the contribution by Kierkegaard (discipleship as poetic living) and Bonhoeffer (Christian living as polyphonous this-worldly celebration of Christological reality), three further key intellectuals have been selected, each of whom contributes an important dimension to understanding everyday aesthetic existence as discipleship. Drawing from contemporary neuropsychological findings, Iain McGilchrist’s research points to the fundamental role that aesthetic existence plays in being human and relating to the world. Graham Ward’s work builds on this by highlighting that embodied and affective engagement with the world both plays a significant role in faith formation and concomitantly frames ethical life by conjoining praxis and poiesis through incarnational living. Aesthetics is not to be disconnected from action, as Nicholas Wolterstorff elucidates, but is best understood in light of social practice, playing a narratival role toward specific teloi, however implicit this may be. Ultimately, this study concludes that a liturgical orientation to all of life rightly orders the formative power of aesthetic existence in service to the Word and world, thereby contributing to discipleship, as opposed to the aestheticized creation and sustenance of virtuality.

Bibliography: pages 255-275. / Our study is an advance as it elucidates the neurobiological aspects of Islamic ritual that is panspecific to all ritual. It reveals that Islamic ritual is remarkably 'structured'to enter what Felicitas Goodman termed 'alternate reality '. The recitals from the Qur'an provide 'sound art' through harmonic triggers for inducing trance

The author submits that none of the approaches including that of the documentary hypothesis, used by scholars to explain the various names for divinity in the Pentateuch, is adequate and he attempts to find and present a more satisfactory explanation for the variant divine names. With this purpose in mind he examines the Pentateuch as one unified whole. He assumes that the writer of the Pentateuch in recording the legends of the forefathers in substance as handed down to him, has in the Genesis writings made available to us the early Hebrew concepts of divinity. When however the writer of the Pentateuch uses the names for divinity both in the Genesis and in the other Pentateuch texts, he employs them in terms of his own concepts of divinity, using each designation to convey a specific meaning. The author examines the different names of God in relation to the texts in which they occur, and the passages containing these names are analysed in the light of the extant information on the background of the Hebrews in Egypt, Canaan and Mesopotamia, to ascertain the concepts of deity held by the patriarchs and to establish the criteria used by the writer in his choice of divine name. These criteria are tested in all the Genesis and Exodus texts in which the names of divinity appear.

Although H. P. Blavatsky (1831-1891), co-founder of the Theosophical Society, has featured prominently in histories of Western esotericism, her engagement with late nineteenth-century comparative religion has not been appreciated. This thesis offers the first sustained analysis of H. P. Blavatsky's theosophical comparative religion. Despite the fact that one of the original goals of the Theosophical Society was advancing comparative religion, H. P. Blavatsky has been excluded from standard accounts of the field. This thesis draws on a range of theoretical resources - Richard Rorty's pragmatic theory of knowledge, Alun Munslow's analysis of narrative in history, Thomas Gieryn's critique of boundary-making in science, and Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's history of objectivity - to argue for the inclusion of H. P. Blavatsky in the history of comparative religion. Substantial chapters analyse H. P. Blavatsky's major works, from Isis Unveiled (1877) to The Secret Doctrine (1888), to uncover the theoretical template that she developed for analysing religion and comparing religions. The thesis highlights H. P. Blavatsky's interpretative strategies in fashioning a theosophical comparative religion. In developing a comparative religion, H. P. Blavatsky referred to leading figures in the emerging field of the academic study of religion, such as F. Max Müller, E. B. Tylor, and Herbert Spencer, in positioning her theosophical comparative religion in the context of late nineteenth-century production of knowledge about religion and religions. This thesis demonstrates that H. P. Blavatsky's comparative religion was reasoned, literary, rhetorical, coherent, and strategic. By analysing H. P. Blavatsky's theoretical work on religion and religions in its late nineteenth-century context, this thesis contributes to the ongoing project of broadening our understanding of the complex and contested history of the study of religion.

Includes abstract. / Scroll down to electronic link to access the thesis. / This thesis investigates the historical intersections between Pentecostalism and Weberian sociology, beginning with the simultaneous publication of Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the emergence of Pentecostal spirituality at the Azusa Street Revival, and culminating in an analysis of recent claims that Pentecostals possess an equivalent to what Max Weber called "an ethic of inner-worldly asceticism", and consequently Pentecostalism may be a positive force for economic growth in developing countries.

In this paper, we will assume that Agnon's writing has, in addition to its aesthetic and artistic value, also a clearly didactic intention, and in the course of this paper we will attempt to verify this assumption. There are therefore two basic assumptions at the heart of this paper. 1. There is a unity in Agnon's writing. 2. Agnon had didactic intention. The object of this paper is to clarify the nature of the unity and the intention: what is a unifying theme in the work, and what does it come to teach? Our thesis is that Agnon deals with the theme of man's struggle and conflict. His attitude to any character is in direct proportion to its willingness to take upon itself a direct confrontation with the . problems which it faces. We will attempt to show that this subject moves throughout Agnon's varied and diversified writings.