According to the directives of Lgr11, learning about Christianity should be an important part of religious education in secondary school (7th-9th grade) in Sweden. A school teacher must therefore have good knowledge of the field and of different aspects of the beliefs of the various Christian traditions.This essay is about how salvation is conceived of by two members of the laity in each of three different Christian traditions: the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of Sweden (which is Lutheran). As a theoretical perspective for my analysis, I have chosen the official views of salvation of these three churches. That is to say, views of the members of the laity have been compared with the official views of the respective churches. It is thus a very limited qualitative study aiming at finding out how the views of the laity conform to the official creed concerning salvation and whether there are any differences here between the churches.

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.

AbstractThe aim of this study is to examine how individuals, part of a rural Christian parish,express their religiosity and beliefs in a Swedish context. Furthermore this study seeksto understand these religious expressions through different views on social construction,secularization and the privatization perspective, such as lived religion, in particular. Byusing qualitative interviews with 8 individuals analyzed with the theories mentionedabove my results show that secularization has provided many individuals with aChristian identity, however, not necessarily a Christian faith. Instead several of theparticipants show a self-developed religious expression not automatically connectedwith Christian religious practices. One of the participants has, despite a Christiansocialization, developed a non-religious identity.

The aim of this study is to describe and analyze the history and the current situation of the Church of Sweden. The renovation of Skalljö church in Lerum municipality has been used as an example to enlighten the common changes in the church buildings. The long history of the Church of Sweden as the state church has resulted in the fact that it carries a remarkable part of the Swedish cultural heritage. The reason why the Heritage Conservation Act (1988:950) was altered in January 2000 was due to the change of relations between the State and the Church of Sweden. According to the Act, all church sites owned or managed by the Church of Sweden shall be maintained in such a way that their cultural historic value is not diminished and their appearance and character are not violated.Sweden is today considered to be a secularised country where religion is an individuals? private matter.

Den här uppsatsen handlar om de 15 konfirmandböckerna som utgavs mellan 1920-25. Vad böckerna innehåller, hur de är strukturerade och vilka referenser/hänvisningar som författarna gör. Uppsatsen går också igenom 1917 års kyrkohandboks två konfirmationsgudstjänster, deras bakgrund och innehåll. Slutligen jämförs böckernas innehåll med gudstjänstens innehåll..

The purpose of this essay was to find out if it is possible to:? Detect different groups of gender among children in grave materiel and church art and if that was the case, in what way?? What different groups of children can be seen in these two categories?? What does the material say about children's position in society? The time span is from early Christian time to 17-th century and the geographical region is Sweden and Denmark. I got my information from published literature and different pages on the Internet. The conclusions were that gender among children can be detected in both types of material but different groups were not ?visible? to the same degree.

AbstractAim: The aim of this essay has been to study how the Swedish church has created the image of their religious activity through media. This has been by studying the three commercial campaigns launched by the Swedish church during the years 2000, 2001 and 2003. Questions asked are: How has the Swedish church chosen to profile it self? Which discourses can be recognized in the campaigns? Which messages has been communicated through the campaigns? How has these discourses created the image of the Swedish church?Method: The methodological framework is critical discourse analysis inspired by Norman Faircloughs? three-dimensional model. Thirteen images all part of the campaigns are analysed using a semiotic method.

This essay revolves around the Christianisation of the Danish kingdom during the middle ages. Issues like; the length of the Christianisation process and the influence it had on thevillages? structural appearance in the Danish kingdom. A special case study of the villages Kyrkheddinge and Fjälkinge, Scania, is an essential part of the essay. Through writtenmaterial and excavation reports from the both villages the study enlightens the structural appearance of the village and the hierarchy of the farms in the village.

This essay examines the using of consensus method for decision making within the World Council of Churches (WCC) and the process that led to the decision to adopt its usage. The main question of my essay is why the method was introduced to the WCC and what motives lay behind its introduction. Other questions are how the consensus method works; both in theory and in practice, and what the predecessors and prototypes for the method are.The consensus method belongs to a broad Christian tradition of spiritual discernment and spiritual decision making. The New Testament, in particular Acts, gives examples of decision making in the early church which show that discerning God's will was considered essential. However the most influential model for the consensus method have been the decision making process of the Religious Society of Friends or Quakers, and also the consensus model of the Uniting Church in Australia.

AbstractThis essay examines the idea of unity in the early church, based on Psalm 133:1. My interest in this was awakened during a seminar with the scholar Sr. Dr. Michaela Puzicha OSB, who proposed that St. Benedict of Nursia in his Rule, RB 42, alludes to Ps.

Unlike previous research, this thesis considers the possibility of regarding the morning prayers in Swedish schools as preaching, rather than teaching. 28 morning prayers, delivered in the church of S:t Johannes in the city of Malmö during 1939-1954 by the religious teacher Astri Heimer (1889-1986), constitutes the material for analysis. The purpose of this thesis is to examine if Heimer's morning prayers may be regarded as preaching, and to discuss the significance of this, in particular considering her role as leader of morning prayers.The examination is conducted in three steps. The first step investigates how morning prayers in general ought to be understood - as teaching or preaching? This is done by describing and comparing the literary genres of religious teaching and preaching, looking into the rules and principles which define the field of application.

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 purpose of this paper is to analyze the reasons a religious minority leader has to convert to a larger religious group and how the leader chooses to communicate this event in certain daily press. In March 2014 the leader and founder of the Christian and charismatic movement ?Livets Ord? (Words of Life), Ulf Ekman, announced his decision converting to the Roman Catholic Church after a 10 year long process of thinking. The communications of Ekman?s linguistic language in the articles are discussed through two discourse analyzing perspective, Laclau & Mouffe?s and Fairclough?s.

The aim of this essay is to study how the University Church is represented in student newspapers. By conducting an inductive thematic analysis on sixteen articles chosen from newspapers distributed by the student union at three Swedish universities, the main purpose of the study is to further understand the role and function of the University Church in a contemporary Swedish context. Three themes emerging from the initial step of the thematic analysis were chosen for further analysis: (1) a secularized church?, (2) provocation and (3) reasons to seek out the University Church. The themes were then highlighted by two theoretical perspectives: Mark Chaves? theory of internal secularization and a theoretical framework developed by Anders Bäckström with the aim to explain the role of the church as a welfare agent in Sweden.The study shows that the University Church is portrayed as both an ambiguous and complex organization.

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.