In this study I compare the donor portraits on wallpaintings in Scanian churches from the 12th and the 15th century and relate them to medieval society.I find that women were equally capable of owning and donating land during the entire period. The image of the ideal woman changed during the 14th century from a married woman to the unreachable mistress of the chivalrous culture and the holy virgin. Women had a natural place beside their husbands in 12th century donor portraits, while single male donors are more frequent in the 15th century. While 12th century donors were supposed to show their position in society by offering plentiful donations directly to God, donors in the 14th century instead strived to present themselves as humble and pious. The individualisation of late medieval society meant that people had to depend on themselves to achieve salvation..

In this essay the renewal of the modern sacred art has been examined through the creation of three works of art from the art project ?Kyrkorummet?. The aim has been to show that renewal of the modern sacred art is best accomplished by the combination of the artist history and Bible knowledge and the open mindness of the beholder towards the new and creative, in order to communicate the gospel in modern time.The large extend of the art project demanded a selection of the art works. Therefore, three were chosen and they show the last supper and the baptism in a renewal way including both symbolism and creativity. To complete and facilitate the analyses, a theme, light and water, have been used as well as relevant theories in art history with Kandinsky as main art critic.Through the art project and it?s teaching, history in combination with present time through visits in different and modern Churches, thoughts have been stimulated and the result has been new works of art that speaks of our time.

In 2010 the Church of Sweden initiated a project to elaborate a new handbook for church services and church documents. This handbook draft was ready to be tested in 2012. The first Sunday of Advent 2012 the church launched an extensive trial for the draft for the new handbook; this handbook draft will now be tested in a selected variety of Swedish parishes until Judgment Sunday 2013. Upon which the Church of Sweden will evaluate and respond to the comments and reactions from the Swedish congregations in terms of the handbooks proposal. My main goal with this paper is that I?m hoping to be able to examine where the need for a new handbook for church services originates.

This thesis deals with the Jewish motifs of the medieval mural paintings in Denmark and Sweden; the presences of the motifs are of interest considering that no Jews were allowed entry into Scandinavia at the time. The purpose of the thesis is to study the Europeaninfluences in the medieval depiction of Jews and Judaism in the Danish and Swedish churches and the purpose for the production of the paintings. To this end, the Danish and Swedish mural paintings ? as well as the medieval texts and motifs of Jews and Judaismthat were used as source material ? are studied with respect to the attitudes conveyed. The Danish and Swedish mural paintings are unevenly distributed both within the groups of motifs as wells as its chronological and geographical spread.

The aim of this thesis was to study financial support within the Church of Sweden and the view of the church?s diaconal work. This was done with a quantitative method where a survey sent to a number of churches containing questions about financial support within the church and how they, the respondents, looked at the church?s role as a welfare agent. Of the almost 200 congregations only 23 congregations responded.

The purpose of this thesis is to describe and analyse the road towards a modern library in the southern archipelago of Gothenburg between the years 1943 and 1976. The archipelago consists of about thirty smaller and larger islands, of which seven are inhabited throughout the year. Styrsö and the surrounding islands composed a municipality of their own until 1973. In January 1974 it became a part of the municipality of Gothenburg, this is also the year when the only bridge in the archipelago was ready to be taken into use, between Donsö and Styrsö. There is no bridge between the mainland and the islands.

Our understanding is that responsibility is shifting from the community towards the individual within the field of social work. This resulted in our essay, which aims to study how the representatives within social service assistance and churches in Helsingborg work with personal power. Our aim is also to illustrate how these representatives view the boundaries of responsibility between the individual and the community. Our questions are: How do the representatives work with personal power from a micro and macro perspective? How do the representatives look upon their position as representatives? What do the representatives consider as responsibility of the individual respective the community? And; Are there preventing factors from individual responsibility? We obtained our empirical material from a qualitative method consisting of interviews.

The purpose of this paper is to explore to what extent some Swedish bishops (1972-2014), mainly archbishops, were influenced by postmodernity as described by Lyotard in his report La Condition postmoderne (1979).This report had a tremendous impact on the western cultural and philosophical debate in general during the very end of the twentieth century. I am trying to find out if this impact could also be observed in the religious sphere and particularly in the Church of Sweden. My theory used, is mainly based on the ideas presented in La Condition postmoderne and my method is a hermeneutical reading of eight pastoral letters. These letters were written during the time that the Church of Sweden transformed from being an officially recognized national church to a free church among other free churches and in this respect ended to be a part of the official governmental power. The terms postmodernism or post-modernity were scarcely used at all in the pastoral letters but on the other hand the bishops seemed to share many of the ideas that Lyotard presented, such as the view on the metahistory/metanarrative and the connection of knowledge to power, the necessity of dialogue and openness and the importance and the role of creating and maintaining language games..

This Master?s thesis concerns the information behaviour of pastors in nonconformist churches (especially new evangelical and Baptist church communions) in Sweden in their spiritual service to the local parish. The thesis also looks into how the information flow functions in the pastors? context and why the information need appears as it does. The theory used in this study is contextual analysis based on Buckland?s, Weber?s and Patrick Wilson?s theories on authority and power structures.

The study focuses the evil within human beings and evil actions against other humans and the human kind. The evil is defined as evil actions such as murder and actions in war. The questions asked is whether the evil has a face and if it is possible in that case to paint that kind of face. The medieval mural paintings in old churches include Cain murdering his brother Abel based on the Bible. The study also includes reliefs, sculptures in stone describing Cains´s murder of Abel and sculptures with the Massacre of the Innocents in Bethlehem according to the Bible.

This is a study of American Methodist Mission in Sweden and how this mission eventually formed the Methodist Church in Sweden 1876. The mission began as a consequence of returning Swedish emigrants and sailors who had encountered Methodism in America, mainly through the works of Swedish-American missionary Olof Gustaf Hedström on the Bethel ship in New York. During the 1850?s Methodist missionaries were sent to Scandinavia by the American Missions Society. The first to come to Sweden was Johan Peter Larsson, who spent two years in Sweden in 1854 before he was transferred to Norway.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify and understand the difference between Brunius?, Zettervall's and Graebe's valueing of a historical building, the cathedral of Lund. Between 1833 and 1963 the cathedral of Lund went through three larger restorations. The character of the restorations however differs a lot between the three church architects, Brunius, Zettervall and Graebe. In a time of low interest for the Middle Ages and of many demolitions of churches in the countryside, Brunius stood out as a researcher and an enthusiast of that special time.

The aim of this study is to analyze the construction of "Christian masculinity" during the modern era. This is made in opposition to earlier research that has claimed that masculinity could not be constructed religiously, that is, without at the same time being constructed as effeminate or anti-masculine.Using a wide variety of theoretical concepts - such as discourse analysis, class, secularisation, masculinity as constructed from countertypes, and finally masculinity as a homosocial construction - I analyze a free church in Sweden, the Scanian Missionary Society (Skånes Missionssällskap), during the period of ca 1939-1945 (the society was a district of the Swedish Covenant Church, or Svenska Missionsförbundet), in order to argue for the standpoint that masculinity, in fact, could be constructed religiously. The primary source is the society's weekly journal Sydposten.The main results in this study can be summarized as follows: 1) The leading men in the Scanian Missionary Society did, in fact, construct a Christian masculinity, i. e. a masculinity whose core values and ideals were Christian, e.g.

The overall purpose of the essay is to initiate a survey and highlight, on the basis of sufficiently material, the dealings between Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a member of the resistance and the Swedish Church and/or its representatives. The purpose of the survey is to structure Dietrich Bonhoeffers activities in Sweden and highlight its implications.The following research questions have been used:1: What was Dietrich Bonhoeffer doing in Sweden and what persons did he meet?2: What was the role of the Swedish Church during the Second World War? 3: What was the impact of Dietrich Bonhoeffers visits to Sweden?In conclusion, this study of the contacts between Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Swedish Church has shown: Dietrich Bonhoeffer was in Sweden on two occasions. He met representatives of the Swedish Church, which was engaged in issues related to ecumenism, resistance and peacework. Although the persons he met were representatives of the Swedish Church they sometimes acted as individuals with a Christian philosophy.

The present memorandum outlines the structure, theoretical starting points and disposition of a thesis about the activities of Finnish immigrants in a Swedish local community, more specifically their political integration. The intention is to study the municipality of Katrineholm in the years 1944 to 1991.Previous research about the actorship of immigrants in spheres such as politics, labour unions, immigrant associations, educational associations and mass-education, as well as churches and religion, is presented to give an overview of possible areas connected to political integration that can be studied. The overview of previous research also covers local immigrant politics.The intended theoretical starting points for the proposed thesis are political economy and hegemony. The latter is intended to be investigated through its expression in the social relations class, gender, ethnicity, nationality and generation. It is suggested in this memorandum that hegemonies and social relations within a local political economy can be operationalised fruitfully in a study of political integration.