This thesis consists of a study of the motivational, cognitive and personality implications of adherence to New Age practices and beliefs. The New Age, unlike traditional Western religion, possesses no church-like structure and is usually characterised as a loose network of self-development practices, with a belief system centred on the spiritual evolution of the individual through successive reincarnations and the idea of a magical interconnectedness between all things. The studies carried out used a series of psychological measures, including self-report scales, analysis of self-concepts, autobiographical episodes and attributions to life events, and experimental visual and semantic tasks. Groups of traditional religious and non-religious individuals were also assessed to serve as contrasts to the New Age group. Following from previous sociological literature on the individualist character of the New Age, the first study dealt with individualist and collectivist motivations. New Age individuals were found to emphasise more individualistic values than Catholics, but still differed from non-religious individuals in that they stressed more self-transcendent universalism values and global-holistic self-concepts. This pattern was labelled as 'holistic individualism' and the second study sought to define it more accurately by focusing on the analysis of agency and communion motivations through the analysis of autobiographical episodes. In this study, the New Age group showed a higher frequency of agency and a lower frequency of communion themes than traditional religious and non-religious participants and, in particular, emphasised life stories of self-empowerment by non-material 'energies' or entities. The last two studies looked more closely at the New Age tendency towards highly abstract cognitions, in particular its sense of connectedness, by focusing on magical thinking and personality traits. New Age individuals were found to attribute events to magical rather than naturalistic causes much more often than the other groups. This cognitive disposition was confirmed in the last study, which found a positive association between the adherence to New Age practices and schizotypal personality traits, emotional hypersensitivity, and cognitive-perceptual looseness. Women were also found to be keener adherents to the New Age than men. Given this set of results, it is suggested that the New Age should be thought of primarily as a magical, rather than a religious, system of practices and beliefs. It is also proposed that an individual may be drawn to the New Age not only because of its modern individualistic appeal, but in virtue of possessing a particular personality and cognitive disposition towards magical ideation and unusual perceptual experiences.

The explosive growth of technology today is causing extensive speculation about the future. These ‘technological futurisms’—especially transhumanism—are often imbued with religious value by their adherents. How should Christians respond to the content of technological futurisms and also the way the future is constructed? In this thesis I argue that Christian eschatology has a more robust understanding of the future than technological futurism, as championed by transhumanism, and can allow for radical hope while also maintaining important humanistic virtues which are ultimately lost in transhumanism. Christian eschatology does not only depend on what is actual to create its future. Rather, it is open to the God of possibility and promise who can bring the radically new in the Kingdom of God. This dissertation is broken into three major sections with an introductory and concluding chapter. The first section provides a history of our technological imagination today by looking at visionary approaches to technology and the future in both technological utopias and science fiction. This history provides the conditions for understanding the proposed future of transhumanism. The second section orients the final response by assessing technology and the future in the eschatologies of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Jacques Ellul. Both Teilhard and Ellul agree that the technological future without appeal to the Christian God is dangerous. The final section looks at the theological and philosophical issues surrounding technology and the future. Heidegger’s works are used to sharpen themes related to technology and the future; in particular, how technology is related to ontology and how the future is related to possibility. The final chapters construct a Christian response to transhumanism around the themes of possibility and promise by utilising the works of Richard Kearney, Eberhard Jüngel and Jürgen Moltmann. A Christian notion of possibility allows for the radically new in a way transhumanism does not and the Christian idea of promise safeguards human virtues by emphasising the interpersonal as ultimate rather than self-transcendence as with transhumanism.

It is the thesis of this paper the the Church possesses traits which are characteristic of the human personality; therefore, her spiritual movement can be understood and dealt with through insights of the Oedipus Complex Theory initially described by Sigmund Freud in his discussion of personality development, greatly elaborated upon by Erich Fromm in his book, The Forgotten Language.

The purpose of this dissertation was to explore how uninstitutionalised female preachers, or dā'iyāt, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia construct authority in a context in which male ulama dominate the production of religious knowledge and represent the apex of the religious and social hierarchy. The study was broad, descriptive, and explanatory and drew primarily on the framework known as ‘accountable ethnography’. Data collection occurred between June and December 2009 and consisted of observations, interviews, and collection of literary artefacts, which were reviewed alongside literature published internationally. A flexible mode of inquiry was employed, partly in response to constraints on public religious discourse imposed in Saudi Arabia after September 11, 2001. The study concludes that the dā'iyāt construct authority predominantly by relying on male ulama as marji'iyya diniyya (religious frame of reference) when issuing fatwas, as pedagogical models, as sources of charismatic inspiration, and as providers of personal recommendations. The dissertation also addresses a set of 'alternate' strategies of authority construction employed by Dr Fāṭima Nasiīf. Almost uniquely, this dā'iyā is found to construct authority that goes beyond reproduction of institutionalised views by developing scholarly arguments to support interpretations of Islamic texts that are responsive to women’s perspectives and needs. In doing so, she expands the parameters of religiously permissible practice while remaining, for her part, within the confines of orthodox practice. Thus, although her society and most researchers perceive knowledge as a masculine attribute in the Saudi religious sphere, in matters relating to women, as well as through active leadership in ritual practice, Dr Fāṭima demonstrates that the dā'iyā can become the authority. Nevertheless, for her and for the other dā'iyāt, the study finds that legitimatising female religious authority depends upon maintaining the established social order, including the hierarchy that places women in a subordinate position to men.

The individual's experience of inner authority takes centre stage in the majority of scholarship on New Ageism, with many writers highlighting this theme as a defnitive characteristic of the spiritual culture. The aim of this thesis is to explore this topic and to ascertain the place of the individual and the collective within two commercial New Age feld sites in London. The qualitative data which lead this investigation were collected from a yoga centre called Shanti and a Suf dance organisation called the Suf Order. From this data, the thesis identifes an individual-collective dialectic, one which manifests in particular forms and with divergent orientations; the result is a multiplicity of types of individualisms which include collective forces. The study makes the case for this argument by focusing on four modes in which, at both sites, the individual and the collective co-produce each other. One, the (collective) class culture of the practitioners informs and is informed by the (individual) ideologies of self that the informants assert. Two, the (collective) capitalist context of the organisations infuence and are perpetuated by the ways the (individual) representatives of those organisations express themselves. Three, (collective) shared principles regarding 'positivity' and 'energy' enforce and are sustained by the (individual) feelings of the student. Four, the (collective) communities of practitioners depend on and contribute to the (individual) set apart status of the teacher. These four manifestations of the individual-collective dynamic appear with different orientations in each feld context; in all versions and in both settings, individual and collective are both present and mutually- constituting forces, but at Shanti the dialectics lean more towards the personal and at the Suf Order, the 'same' dialectics lean more towards the social. Each organisation refects and adds to the intersections, both in their forms and their orientations. In so doing, the two New Age centres present divergent balances of the individual-collective dynamic that correlate with the personal and social dispositions of their respective student bodies.

This thesis examines the Templo Santa Muerte in Los Angeles, a small, loosely organized spiritual group dedicated to the veneration of La Santa Muerte, or the Holy Death. Although originating in the urban barrios (neighborhoods) of Mexico City, Santa Muerte is now venerated in the southwestern United States as well, primarily among working-class Mexican Americans. Although Santa Muerte has been condemned by the Catholic clergy and vilified in mass media and popular culture for its ties to crime and gang violence, my fieldwork at the Templo Santa Muerte demonstrates that not all devotees of Santa Muerte can be characterized in this way. For Templo members, Santa Muerte is foremost a supernatural instrument whose appeal is in large part derived from her singular commitment to satisfying their corporeal needs and material wishes. While this quality is also attributed to many Catholic saints, Santa Muerte is believed to operate independently of Church orthodoxy and is viewed to be more powerful because of this. The Templo Santa Muerte, on the other hand, incorporates some features of formal Catholic liturgy while simultaneously organizing its services around the individual petitions of its members. In doing so, the Templo’s founders maintain an effective balance between liturgical features familiar to their mostly Catholic members and the fundamentally instrumental relationship they have with Santa Muerte. I argue that this balance is central to the appeal of the Templo and to the logic of its founders, who took advantage of the tolerant and diverse cultural atmosphere of Los Angeles to establish a spiritual enterprise that is truly the first of its kind. My methodology and theoretical approach acknowledges this, favoring an ethnographic examination grounded in respondent testimonies, direct observations, and relevant ethnohistorical interpretations of the symbolism and ritual behavior associated with Santa Muerte. At its most general, my analysis of the cult and Templo of Santa Muerte is framed around three separate but mutually interactive and informative dimensions: the instrumental and social manifestations of the cult and Templo, respectively, and the structuring influence that Catholic soteriology and cultural materialism exerts over both.

This thesis examines the intersections of the concept of pilgrimage and the visual imagination in Britain from the years 1790 to 1850. Historically, distinctions between understandings of pilgrimage as motif, metaphor, artistic process, and actual journey have been blurred to varying degrees, resulting in the creation of images that were at once narratives, memorials, and stimuli for contemplative journeys from pictorial space to imagination. In the first half of the nineteenth century, religious architecture, sacred landscapes, and the emblematic figure of the pilgrim with coat, hat, and scrip functioned as temporal reminders of a promised land to come, as mediated through artistic practice. Through a close analysis of a range of interrelated visual sources, I contend that pilgrimage, both in practice and as a form of mental contemplation, helped to shape the religious, literary, and artistic imagination of the period and beyond. This study draws out the various levels at which pilgrimage engaged the visual imagination. In doing so it offers a detailed perspective on the conjunction of content, form, meaning, and process for artists and theorists, as notions of the transfer of ‘spirit’ from sacred space to represented space re-emerged as a key aspect of the theological and artistic discourse of the period. Chapter 1 outlines the antiquarian dissemination of medieval pilgrimage texts and images. I suggest that an awareness of pilgrimage as embodying the real and imagined emerged with the recovery of allegorical texts, histories of actual pilgrimages, and an interest in pilgrimage souvenirs. The discussion moves on to intersections between pilgrimage and religious art in Chapters 2 - 4, including the idea of painting as pilgrimage, as demonstrated through specific case studies, and the refashioning of relics and religious ruins as contemporary sites of pilgrimage (Chapter 5).

This thesis explores how the Rapture fiction and popular prophecy of modern American premillennial dispensationalism shapes the eschatological beliefs of its readership. This will be accomplished through a text-based critical analysis of the anxiety narratives of the Bible study and exegetical guides of the Tim LaHaye Prophecy Library, and its counterpart, the Left Behind fiction series. This thesis represents the first scholarly analysis of the Tim LaHaye Prophecy Library, and the first situation of Left Behind fiction within its theological context. It will be proposed that these two sets of texts shape the eschatological beliefs of their readers through a discursive ‘streamlining’ that is performed in several ways. Firstly, the historical development of the movement will be examined, exploring the evolution of a specific premillennial dispensationalist hermeneutic and its ‘channelling’ through particular cultural institutions. Secondly, an analysis of the Tim LaHaye Prophecy Library and Left Behind fiction will demonstrate that this premillennial dispensationalist hermeneutic is almost exclusively communicated through anxiety narratives which focus on expressions of horror, isolation, powerlessness and paranoia. It will be argued that these narratives serve to explore ‘abjective’ elements of premillennial dispensationalist belief, re-integrating them into the fabric of the faith. Particular attention will be paid to these abjective elements, which include the role of the eschatological body, the nature of individual salvation, and the perpetual deferment of the Rapture. As such, the popular media of premillennial dispensationalism serves as a further channel for the discursive streamlining of the movement’s prophetic scheme. Finally, this thesis proposes that the ‘deprivation’ theory of millennial appeal does not adequately explain the appeal and success of premillennial dispensationalism. As such, the following analysis will suggest that an alternate critical analysis of the movement, concentrating on its tropes of anxiety, serves to better explain the continued appeal of this ideology.

This thesis examines the traces of theological and broader religious discourses in selected works of three major twentieth-century poets. Each of the texts examined in this thesis encodes within its poetics a distinct, theologically derived conception of the ontological status of the self in relation to the Absolute. Yeats primarily envisions the relation as one of essential identity, Jones regards it as defined by alterity, and Eliot depicts it as dialectical and paradoxical. Critics have underestimated the impact on Yeats’s late work of his final and most sustained engagement with Indic traditions, which issued from his friendship and collaboration with Shri Purohit Swami. Though Yeats projected Theosophical notions on the Indic texts and traditions he studied with Purohit, he successfully incorporated principles of Classical Yoga and Tantra into his later poetry. Much of Yeats’s late poetics reflects his struggle to situate the individuated self ontologically in light of traditions that devalue that self in favor of an impersonal, cosmic subjectivity. David Jones’s The Anathemata encodes a religious position opposed to that of Yeats. For Jones, a devout Roman Catholic committed to the bodily, God is Wholly Other. The self is fallen and circumscribed, and must connect with the divine chiefly through the mediation of the sacraments. In The Anathemata, the poet functions as a kind of lay priest attempting sacramentally to recuperate sacred signs. Because, according to Jones’s exoteric theology, the self must love God through fellow creatures, The Anathemata is not only circular, forming a verbal templum around the Cross; it is also built of massive, rich elaborations of creaturely detail, including highly embroidered and historicized voices and discourses. Critics have long noted the influence of Christian mystical texts on Eliot’s Four Quartets, but some have also detected a countercurrent within the later three Quartets, one that resists the timeless even as the poem valorizes transcending time. This tension, central to Four Quartets, reflects Eliot’s engagement with the dialectical theology of Karl Barth. Eliot’s deployment of paradox and negation does not merely echo the apophatic theology of the mystical texts that figure in the poem; it also reflects the discursive strategies of Barth’s theology. The self in Four Quartets is dialectical and paradoxical: suspended between time and eternity, it can transcend its own finitude only by embracing it.