The purpose of this study was to gain understanding of Orthodox Christianity in Swedish educational material. The aim was to compare the presentation of Orthodox Christianity towards pupils before the new curriculum and after. With the help of an analytical approach by Bergström and Boreu ?s and the interpretation strategy by Quentin Skinner, I have studied material used in school for the subject religion. I have limited my educational material in one way.

This essay is about the representation of Orthodox Christianity in Swedish educational material. With the help of my analytical approach inspired by Michel Foucault, I have studied material used in school for the subject Religion. I have limited the educational material in two ways. First, the main reason for this is that I am only interested in material written and produced from the year 2010 until today. Secondly, the material I have chosen to focus on is written for the grades 7-9 and for high school.

Religious education in Swedish schools aims to be as objective and non-confessional as possible. This sort of education can lead to that the different religions are presented in a way which is unfamiliar to the followers of the different religions. This problem is what I have focused on in this essay since I myself was a victim of a similar situation. As a syriac-Orthodox youth I felt that my Christianity was not the same as the one presented in school. I felt that it had nothing in common with what I learned in my church, therefore I asked myself the question: Whose Christianity is being represented? Therefore I have focused on the syriac-Orthodox church in this research.The purpose of my essay was to enlighten the differences between religious education in syriac-Orthodox churches and Swedish community schools.

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.

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.

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 some postmodern philosophy and theology, the view of God has returned to the centre of the discussion. God is seen as a living reality beyond human conception. Some of the contemporary philosophers even relate to the negative or apofatic theology. They often do this as a contrast to the positive theology. The view of God in postmodern theology and philosophy is beyond our rational knowledge.

Mitt syfte med denna uppsats var att undersöka Katolska och Syrisk-Ortodoxa kyrkans förståelse av bikten. Det var på grund utav mitt intresse för båda kyrkorna samt att jag inte funnit något liknande material på svenska som jag valde just detta syfte med min uppsats. Jag har i bästa möjliga mån försökt presentera och analysera bikten utifrån katolsk och syrisk-ortodox tradition. Jag har genom att granska de båda traditionernas katekeser samt bibeln och andra källor, försökt söka deras förståelse av bikten samt hur de tänker kring de olika delarna som bikten omfattas av. Jag valde ut de texter som jag kände passade bäst och var mest representativa för traditionerna samt de texter som har en koppling till kyrkans auktoriteter, det vill säga påvar och patriarker.

ThisthesisisananalysisofSt.JohnoftheCross?treatiseTheDarkNightoftheSoulfromanEasternOrthodoxperspective,focusingonelementsofclassicaltheologyofthéosisandliminalitywithinthetext.UsingVladimirLossky?sviewonOrthodoxmysticaltheologyaswellasritualtheoryandtheoriesofliminalityfromVictorTurnerandArnoldvanGennepthestudyexamineswhetherornotitispossibletospeakaboutthéosisinWesternmysticalteachingsandpractises,andifDarkNightcanbeviewedasanexampleofsuchateaching.Thisthesisthusseekstoanswertwomainquestions,namelywhetherStJohnoftheCross?treatisecanbesaidtobeanexampleofthéosistheologywritteninWesternform,andifthetrialsoftheDarkNightcanbesaidtobeaformofsocio-­?ontologicalprocessofchange,eitherpartiallyorcompletely.ThemethodusedintheworkisamodifiedversionofthetextualanalysisdescribedinCarl-­?HenricGrenholm?sbookAttförståreligion:metoderförteologiskforskning,focusingoncentralthemesandideas,andkeywordsrelatedtothéosis.ThetheoreticalperspectiveforthethesishasbeenbasedinEasternOrthodoxmysticaltheology,andthecentralaimhasbeentoofferaresponsetoVladimirLossky?scritiqueoftheWesternChurchashavingforgottenitsmysticalroots.KeyfindingsarethattheDarkNightasaprocesshasstrongelementsofbothliminalityandsocio-­?ontologicaltransformation,andthatthelanguageofSt.JohnisverysimilartothatofearlyOrthodoxtheologians,withclearapophaticterminology..

Dietary patterns has varied throughout history, both due to resource and cultural limitations. In this thesis, a study was conducted to establish the dietary patterns of eight individuals from an early Midieaval gravesite in Rambodal, Östergötland, in order to explain why they were buried there. This was done through stable isotope analysis on collagen extracted from bone and tooth on the buried individuals. The analysis showed that these indviduals had a diet that was mainly based on freshwater fish. This suggests that these people may have been christians, due to the fact that fish was not regarded as meat and therefore you did not have to abstain from it during periods of fasting.

Sweden introduced a development assistance policy in 1952 and thirteen years later Sida, Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency started, in 1965. But in 1995, five separate development assistance authorities came together and established the new Sida as it is today. Sida is Sweden?s representative in the development assistance policy field and they work through projects that have to be presented through a Country Strategy Process (CSP). The aim of this paper is to point out Sida?s perspective on the conducted development assistance policy and what guide lines that are followed.

Since events of September 11 and the subsequent conflicts surrounding the event, the war against terrorism has been constantly present. It has been used several methods and strategies to address these threats, including a method current in use, the targeting method. The method refers to use few but precise attacks to knock out key functions within these organizations, mostly individuals in the higher command and control structures within these organizations. The effectiveness of the method has been put in question when the majority of the terrorist organizations continue their strife, in some cases even increasing its intensity. The purpose of this study is to investigate which role the higher command plays in these organizations ability to wage war.

This paper aims to analyze how preservation of and access to old and rare book collections are organized in public libraries in Serbia. The paper is based on an analysis of documents, a survey and qualitative interviews with librarians in Belgrade and Novi Sad. Serbia is a country that has experienced violent historical periods with far-reaching consequences for its old and rare book collections. The interpretative background refers to documents about cultural policy in Europe and in Serbia. Serbia is a country in transition which aims to join the European Union.

This thesis has the purpose that through a text analysis examine how four schoolbooks for high school treats the religions Judaism and Hinduism. The schoolbooks are from the years 2000, 2001, 2003 and 2009. The perspectives are from a religious viewing point, that means that the women are religious, Jewish feminists and Hindu feminists. The theories used are written by these women and are academic litterature.  The questions are how are women represented in the schoolbooks, is the feminist critique present or are the two religions represented and described in an invariable way, and is the description of Judaism and Hinduism consistent with the curriculum?The text analysis used in this examination means that reality is organized through and by the language used by the actors in that reality.

Previous research regarding the European debt crisis has mostly focused on the purely economic aspects of the crisis. However, there is a strong ?Protestant-Catholic? dimension in Europe, where historically Protestant countries are more prosperous than their Catholic and Orthodox counterparts. This has especially been a fact since early 2010, when several countries within the European Union had their credit ratings downgraded. Is this phenomenon merely a coincidence? Or could the roots of the recent troubles in Europe have a basis in historic religions? To tackle this question, Max Webers ?s 110 year old study The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is brought back into light and used as a tool for analysis of the crisis.The results show that not only are Protestant countries in general more prosperous, but they also have lower corruption and their citizens have a higher level of trust towards the government.