The aim of this essay is to study diaries and letters from Swedish soldiers during the Great Nordic War, more specifically those written during the campaign 1707-1721 against Russia, in search of religious coping and religious parables. The theoretic framework is evolved around Kenneth Pargament’s theory about religious coping, and Ana-Maria Rizzuto’s theory about object relations. The method used can be described as hermeneutic. The questions at hand were: - How did Swedish soldiers during the war against Russia relate to God, and express image of God and religious concepts? - Did the soldiers express themselves in terms of spiritual coping and in that case to what extent? The conclusions were that the soldiers used religious coping as a method of survival. They used all methods as stated by Pargament, except the method that involves cooperation with God, unless you count being God’s humble servant as a way of cooperation.Several diaries features songs and poems and many expresses prayers and faith in God. The soldiers express themselves with parables to the Old Testament, for ex-ample to the Babylonian captivity. The language of the diaries changes after the defeat of Poltava 1709, to a richer one full of religious parables. Keywords: Spiritual coping, soldiers, Great Nordic War, Charles the XII, Kenneth Pargament.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-226746 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Björkander, Thomas |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Religionspsykologi |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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