This study aims to deepen the understanding of how belonging and community is created in one of the aesir faith communities in Sweden. The study examines the aesir faith communities ability to develop the community members religious identity as well as their understanding of the importance of cultural heritage and how it affects the members in their practices of their aesir faith. The main argument in this study is that cultural heritage creates a sense of community that makes the members want to stay and develop their religious identity together with the other members of the aesir faith community. I have used cultural heritage, symbols and rituals, belonging, community and religious identity as concepts in order to answer my research questions. The methods used in this study are participant observation during the group's public activities, as well as interviews with the members of the aesir faith community in order to confirm the analysis I made during the participant observation.

This paper analyzes the content of eight Islamic Friday-sermons, held at Chalmers Technical University in Gothenburg in spring 2010, organized by Chalmers Islamiska Förening (CIF) (Chalmers Islamic community).The forces of globalization, the accessibility of information and the Internet have given rise to discourses and movements that know no national boundaries. The accessibility of these global movements and discourses through media, Internet, etc., affect the way Muslims in Sweden interpret and practice their religion. Thus, this paper includes discussions and descriptions of global Islamic revivalist-movements, and relates the contents of the sermons at Chalmers to these movements. In the sermons, the imams often discuss the concept of a global Muslim community, the umma, and their perceptions of the prescribed ethics linked to this community. They often relate this discussion of ethics to frequently discussed issues in the West such as equality, justice and ethical standards in war.

Previous research has found an increased transmission of stock movements in Europe, partly caused by the establishment of institutions as the EU and the EMU. The purpose of this paper is to find the possible impact from the EU and the EMU concerning the evolution of international transmission of stock market movements, on four Scandinavian markets, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. The research is based on primary data, existing theories and earlier studies regarding international transmission of stock market movements. The examined method is a VAR (Vector autoregressive model) including a 10x1 vector of variables. Furthermore the tests considered are correlation, granger-causality, variance decomposition and impulse response.

The purpose of this study is to examine how different religious traditions are portrayed in teaching materials based on news reports. The main question concerns the way in which religious practices and holidays are described and in which contexts religion is presented. The method includes a both quantitative and qualitative content analysis. The study concludes that certain religious practices are presented in a way that describes the practitioners as more faithful and homogenous than others. This was especially prominent among Muslims and to a certain extent Hindus.

This report is an attempt to clarify how religious and non-religious views-of-life [livsåskådningar] are created through the collaboration and opposition of religious and scientific elements/ideas. This with the hope of reaching a fruitful result related to the solution of world-view related conflicts, such as the ones existing between science and religion, on an individual and societal level.This is accomplished with the help of two assertions: (1) Mankind has a need to explain its existence and surroundings. (2) Religion and science has their origins in the same seed and aim to serve the same purpose, or function. Together these two assertions lay the theoretical foundations of this report which implies that all humans have an innate need of sustaining a stable world-view.The result of this report is that a final solution to world-view related conflicts are beyond reach as our mental and physical nature limits us. However there are strategies for minimizing world-view related conflicts effect on society..

In this thesis I have done a discourse analysis of the documentary movie A Jihad for Love. A Jihad for Love came out 2007 and is directed by Parvez Sharma. The documentary movie is about homosexual Muslims and their jihad, struggle, for love and to be accepted in a world where they are barely recognized as a group. My aim of the thesis was to see how the movie portrays the persons who are in the film and their relationship to Islam and who gets access to the religion. I have also analyzed if Islam can be used to strengthen the sexual identity or if it works in the opposite way.

This thesis aims to explore the representations of musicians and soundscapes on the column of Trajan in Rome. While many different parts of the column have been explored thoroughly, the musicians are not such a part. As such, this thesis aims to explore this gap in research as well as explore how the soundscapes have been represented on the column. By sorting and grouping scenes with musicians into different groups, this thesis has been able to find patterns of representation such as musicians being represented in religious scenes more often than in military scenes and the fact that there seem to be some compositional overlap between the different groups in how the musicians are represented. Grounding the thesis in a theoretical approach that uses the presumed audience and their experiences as a guide for how to represent different scenes, it is argued that part of the reason for musicians being more present in religious scenes than in military ones is because the roman audience were more aware of the actual religious soundscapes.

I wanted to focus this essay on the operative?s perspective of running religious organizations in the city of Karlstad and to see positive and negative aspects of their day-to-day life working with their organization, following up with a comparison of the difference and the similarities between those groups. After delimitating which groups I was going to examine, I implemented a qualitative study of four people, from two different religious groups, whom I performed interviews with. My method of performing these interviews and understanding the perspective of the informants, I had a semi structured interview guide along with a recent study that was opting for similar conclusions, only in a different county and with different input perspective. The result of my study showed a difference in establishment of their region but with a lot of similarities in problems with their religious and structural premises.

Faith is a phenomenon that engages the individual into emotional, social and daily manners.Religion tends to engage the individual in different levels in the daily life. In the church communion, there is a belief to the traditional and the repeteated behaviour. This shared group is strength by ceremonies and rituals and people in this collective somehow experience another type of reality. This study has a social - psychological perspective and the purpose is to study people?s know-how of faith and why they seek religion in today´s secularized society.

In this textual analysis I have examined the book Att följa Jesus by Ulf Ekman and information from Word of Life's official website. The aim of this study is to see how a religious leader is shaping the identity of the groups members after a certain pattern that differs from the surrounding, secular society. The research focus  of this essay includes several aspects:  how a culture is formed in a religious minority in contrast to the prevailing cultural context; how the material can be explained by Paul Pruyser?s theory on the psychological worlds; how what Ulf Ekman writes about distinguishing themselves from the environment differs from how other religious minority groups distinguish their identity;  and,  how the psychological world, expected behavior, and context of Word of Life can be structured by Valerie DeMarinis? model of assessment. I have placed Word of Life in a realistic illusionistic world developed from Paul Pruyser?s theory of psychological worlds.

This report is an attempt to clarify how religious and non-religious views-of-life [livsåskådningar] are created through the collaboration and opposition of religious and scientific elements/ideas. This with the hope of reaching a fruitful result related to the solution of world-view related conflicts, such as the ones existing between science and religion, on an individual and societal level.This is accomplished with the help of two assertions: (1) Mankind has a need to explain its existence and surroundings. (2) Religion and science has their origins in the same seed and aim to serve the same purpose, or function. Together these two assertions lay the theoretical foundations of this report which implies that all humans have an innate need of sustaining a stable world-view.The result of this report is that a final solution to world-view related conflicts are beyond reach as our mental and physical nature limits us. However there are strategies for minimizing world-view related conflicts effect on society..

In the late 20th century the Soviet Union collapsed and the eastern European countries were freed from the communist Russian oppression. However, during the Soviet period Marxism was a recurring life stance in the Swedish textbooks for religious education in the gymnasieskola. Today the Soviet Union has collapsed, but the Marxist philosophy has had a huge effect on both single individuals and the modern society as a whole. Nonetheless, the Marxist life stance is nowadays often being replaced by other non- religious life stances in the textbooks of religious education.Therefore, this analysis is a hermeneutic study of the presentation of the Marxist life stance in textbooks for Swedish religious education. The purpose of the paper is to investigate how these textbooks portray the Marxist life stance, and to prove that the societal context and the individual author have an immense effect in the portrayal of both religions and life stances in religious education.

The Swedish RE curriculum states that a major purpose and aim of education inreligion is to make the students accepting and understanding of people, regardlessof religious beliefs and conceptions of life. Previous research has shown that thereare tendencies indicating that these goals are not being attained thus Swedish adolescencespeak of religion and religious people in a stereotypical manner. Thesetendencies are causes of concern which is why this study seeks to make a contributionto the previous research. This research is required since there may havebeen a change in terms of results since the last study was made. In addition, resultsfrom research that are based on interviews are hard to generalize.

Is the Muslim Brotherhood a political force that can be able to push Egyptian society in to the process of democratization? We think that the answer to that question is yes, even though the movement clearly state that their main aim to create a democratic state, but based upon the Islamic shari?ah-laws. In this paper, we examine if the Brotherhoods? political platforms and ideas are compatible with the classic ideas of how a democratic state should be. We discuss Robert A.

This literature review aims to investigate, expose and explain August Strindberg's religious position in his partly autobiographical work Inferno, published in Swedish in 1897, in relation to Peter Berger's socialization theory. Strindberg says in the beginning of Inferno that he goes from being an atheist, occultist and Swedenborgian to finally return to his ancestral religion, Christianity. This is questionable, as Strindberg seems to be religious in its atheistic era, and occultist during his Christian period. Strindberg's own religious views seem not always match what he portrays, compared to what he writes in his correspondence and diary entries. This literature review aims to highlight the influences of Strindberg affected to clarify his religiosity which is implicitly and explicitly depicted in Inferno.