Title: Hymns - a way to simplicity and beauty. The purpose of this paper is to study what makes hymns appreciated. In a questionnaire, 42 individuals responded to questions concerning lyrics, music, the hymn as a whole, their personal relationship to hymns and their church commitment. They also stated their gender and age. My aim has been to discover whether there are similarities and differences in the given responses and to study the influence of church connections and gender.

The purpose of this essay is to shed light upon the ecumenical work that has been done between the Church of Sweden and the Mission Covenant Church of Sweden. The recent years of work have led to a recommendation for a certain degree of fellowship to be established between those churches. This proposal as well as other documents are analysed in the essay from an ecclesio-logical point of view, to find out how the Church of Sweden looks upon itself in meeting another church.To structure the material, the essay has been subdivided into seven parts that is related to ecclesiology. In those seven chapters the positions of the Church of Sweden and the Mission Covenant Church of Sweden are given individually as well as in common. Questions like the im-portance of dioceses, local congregations or parishes and the national level are described.

AbstractTitle: The picture of the Swedish church - Young peoples image of the organization in comparison with the organizations profile (Bilden av Svenska kyrkan ? Unga människors image av organisationen i jämförelse med organisationens profil)Number of pages: 55 (57 including enclosures)Author: Ebba GöranzonTutor: Göran SvenssonCourse: Media and Communication Studies CPeriod: Fall 2006University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science, Uppsala UniversityAim: The aim of this essay is to study the external communication of the Swedish Church, and how they want young people (16-18 years old) to perceive them. Further I would like to compare that information with how young people actually perceive the Swedish church. Do the both pictures agree?Method/Material: Together with literature studies, a qualitive method has been used and four focus group interviews with a total of 16 informants have been conducted.

The Church of Sweden has in recent years offered activities such as Christian deep medita-tion, mindfulness and health days. This may be a way for the Church of Sweden to reach the modern man who would not otherwise have come to the church, but there are critics who argue that new spirituality has made its entry in the Church of Sweden. The phenomenon of Christian deep meditation has become increasingly common in the Church of Sweden. In order to satisfy my curiosity about what a Christian deep meditation is, I decided to write an essay about this. My question is as follows: How important is Christian deep meditation as a religious practice in the Church of Sweden? This essay is a qualitative study and I have cho-sen to perform eight pieces of interviews, two of them are recorded.

For almost a century the debate about women as ordained servants in the Church of Sweden has raged on and on. The decision to open up the priesthood for both genders in 1958 was a milestone in the women?s liberation movement as well as it marks an important time in the church history. The debate has mainly been about how to interpret scripture, who has the right to do so, and so on. Feminist theology has become one way in recent decades to paint a wider and more nuanced picture of history and how to interpret the texts often used to repress women.This essay surveys some of the steps towards that decision, as well as it paints a rough picture of what leadership among women in the church could involve before ordination became an option.

The aim of this essay is to investigate the murals in the church of Arbrå, what they portrait and how they can be linked to medieval typology as described in Biblia Pauperum (BP), the Poor Man?s Bible. The aim is also to find out what the purpose was to paint medieval churches and what the function of the paintings was. Arbrå Church was painted around 1520-1530, and almost all of the motifs from the Old Testament can be directly traced back to BP as can one motif from the New Testament. Together these paintings represent most of the important events which make out the foundation of the Christian Cult.

This study deals with questions about male and female, power and church, related to the Mariologies of three prominent leaders in the Church of Sweden in the last century: Erling Eidem, Paulina Mariadotter and Cristina Grenholm. The mentioned topics are important for conservative High Church people as well as for radical feminists, and they are therefore necessary to address in the context of discussions about the church´s identity and the search of greater unity.Each Mariology is related to contemporary ideas about the relations between male and female, and to the tradition of the church as the leaders themselves see it. During the years 1920-2010 the relations between the sexes changed a lot as a result of the impact of modernity, which also affected how people perceived the relationship between the individual and the tradition/authorities. The present study concludes that there is a connection between Mariology and contemporary ideas about male and female. However, the Mariologist´s attitude to the tradition of the church seems to decide which perspective is allowed to dominate.

This study discloses the responsibility of social work for the Swedish welfare state respective deacons in the Swedish protestant church, which roll the Swedish protestant church have in the existent welfare and also if deacons experience any expectations and how these expectations in that case are expressed.The aim of this study was to investigate the relationbetween deacons working within the Swedish protestant church and social work, as it appears for professional deacons. The method of investigating the questions raised by the aim of this study has been qualitative analysis of answers derived from six deacons working in different workplaces. The data derived from these interviews was then analysed through the theory of Gösta Esping-Andersen about welfare states and also through background research and earlier science research about the social work within the Swedish protestant church and other social work. The result of the study show that the welfare state in Sweden has the comprehensive responsibility for the citizens. Deacons working within the Swedish protestant church does not have the same responsibility.

This essay is about Skelleftea church town which is named Bonnstan and refers to the city for farmers. Originally, its mission was to function as temporary residence for long distance travelers of the villages, during weekends intended for religious gatherings. Bonnstan have furthermore periodically and in lesser extent been used as permanently abode for domestic workers. Nowadays the area consists of 114 cottages with nearly 400 chambers.The earliest known documentation of Skelleftea church town's existence is from the 17th century even though it may have its origin from the Middle Ages. These early church cottages burnt down in 1835 and were restored two years after the accident.

The aim of this paper is to take a critical look at retouching of medieval mural paintings inSweden. This is done by firstly examining the different methods of retouching, including thematerials used. Secondary it tries to answer the question of which intentions have guided theconservator?s decisions dealing with the retouching. The medieval mural paintings in Swedishchurches have three major functions today.

Within this essay a study is made of an LGBTQ-orientated Christian service in Stockholm called Queer Service. The following questions seek to be answered: What reasons does an individual set for his/hers participation in Queer Service? Which aspects of a queer service highlight the participants as important to them?As a method to answer these questions, the author has observed a number of queer church services in autumn of 2012. Moreover communication within the group of the assembly on the social media page Facebook has been followed and five individuals from the Queer Service congregation have been interviewed. As a background to the study, the European religious climate seen from Grace Davies eyes is depicted.  The reader also learns of how the Swedish church has handled questions about homosexuality and bisexuality and what liberation theology is.

Through the lenses of religion?s role in society, the purpose of this thesis is to examine, the role of the Church of Sweden in providing support to people at the end of life. Questions asked are:  "What types of spiritual support is offered by the Church of Sweden during terminal care provided in patients' homes and how is this support expressed in church orders, assembly instructions, plans of operations and congregation letters?" and " How can the work of the Church of Sweden be understood, based on theories of religion's role in society? The method used is a content analysis of the Church Order, assembly instructions, plans of operations and congregation letters in 17 different congregations within the diocese of Lund. I then engage in a discussion with theories on differentiation and the privatization of religion as a means to interpret my results.

Archbishop KG Hammar has attracted attention for his liberal position in theology. His view on the role of language and communication is central in several books and articles he has published as leader of the Church of Sweden. One of his main theses is the fact that meaning is created in the encounter between text and reader. He often reiterates: God is relation. This non-traditional dynamic stance has a broad impact not only on theology.

The Purpose of this essay is to seek an answer to whether or not a conflict exists between priests of the Assyrian Church, the Syrian Orthodox Church and the Coptic Church in contemporary Swedish society, as well as to examine the environment between the three. The theological dissimilarities will be studied (from a historical standpoint), along with the interviewed participants views on the division in Christianity which will be presented also. I choose to interview six priests/chorbishops who live and work in Sweden, and the result was analyzed according to the senior professor of peace- and conflict, Peter Wallensteen?s theories on conflict and conflict resolution, where important issues are laid out to identify the core problem, and theological differences are discussed and compared from a union perspective.The result of the interviews illustrate a clear response that the participants experience a lack of functioning collaborations (from the Assyrians Church view, a collaboration is absent from the Syrian Orthodox Church and the Coptic Church, and vice versa) and most of the participants experience negative consequences from the divide in churches, as they strive for unity in Christianity as a whole. The theological differences between the churches proves not to be as significant as expected, the actual predicament lies partly in language-and phrase division along with a general rejection of each other?s interpretations.

In this study, we looked at how balanced the various christian denominations in Sweden were raised in the news, on the basis of the requirement for balanced reporting. To measure the balance, we utilized Harcup and O'Neill?s news values and studied to what degree these values occurs in association with news articles that address the various denominations. The following denominations were selected for this study; Word of Life, the Pentecostal Church, Jehovah's witnesses, the Catholic Church, the Salvation Army and the Swedish Church. These denominations were then studied on the basis of news values in four of Sweden?s largest news organisations, in terms of audience numbers.