This is a qualitative research paper, which aims to examine how religion classes are conducted in inner-city and suburban schools. Interviews have been performed with two religion teachers, one at Grindtorp School in Alby and one at the English Gymnasium in Södermalm. There have been performed interviews with eight students, four from each school. The students have a different age, sex and religious beliefs. With these interviews we can get a better understanding how the students of today?s school think about the religious education.

Encounters between students and religious believers is common in the subject of Religious Education in Swedish schools. For pedagogical reasons teachers arranging these encounters hoping that exciting things will happen. But which qualities and experiences arise out of these encounters?In this study representatives of eight different religious communities are interviewed who regularly receive pupils coming to their respective communities. The proposed theoretical framework is related to Phenomenology and Hermeneutics and the methodological approach is interpretive.

In this essay I want to investigate how the Viking aristocratic warrior elite in Scandinavia used religious mythology for the construction of their identity. The essay also takes up the concept of honor, which was important for the warriors. Honor was central to all people during Viking age and for the warriors it was absolute. In the religious myths, the aristocratic warriors justify their position in society and legitimate their acts of war. Religion continues to have importance to the warrior elite even after the arrival of Christianity.

In this paper I aimed to explore the bodily experiences and expressions that Christian charismatics interpret as religious.  The so-called presence of God and the so-called gifts of the spirit were in focus in the gathering of information. My purpose was to find out how the social community of the Christian charismatics affects the subjective bodily experiences that are interpreted as religious by the individual. The main questions were:1: How do Christian charismatics describe religious experiences and their effect on the body?2: What bodily expressions of religious experience can be observed in Christian charismatic contexts?3: Is there a common way of expressing the experience of God's presence (individually or in a group) and how, in this case, can any resemblance be explained?The methods used to answer these questions were qualitative interviews and participant observations, which then were analyzed by the anthropologist Thomas J. Csordas theory of embodiment.

The aim of this essay was to investigate how religious topics and events are presented in five coursebooks in social studies. To do this the following questions were answered: In which context do discussions about religion take place? Are religions brought up in different contexts? To which extent do discussions about religion occur? The method consisted of a both quantitative and qualitative content analysis. The results of this essay showed that discussion regarding religion in social studies coursebooks mainly focuses on wars, conflicts, terrorism and to some degree the human rights. Islam was the religion that occurred most frequently in the coursebooks.

This study aims to investigate how a number of students who are at the end of a teachers? educations program in social studies, geography, religion and history interpret that the national curriculums states that every teacher is responsible for students language development and should be supportive of language backgrounds. In the light of the curriculums the study explores how the teacher education students feel that the education has prepared them for teaching children with Swedish as a second language. The study also examines how the teacher education students think that the teacher education could improve in matters like preparing future teachers to teach social studies, geography, religion and history to second language children.The study is based on interviews with seven university students and shows that they feel a responsibility to develop their future students? language.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the new Swedish curriculum, GY11 brought with it changes to how non-religious world-views are presented in five different books in religious education, RE. The method used to analyze the material was a qualitative content analysis as well as counting the pages that dealt with secular world-views. This was later analyzed using philosopher Charles Taylors description and theory on secularization. This was used to identify secular processes as well as to define wether the books definition and description of secular world-views using Taylors concept of ?exclusive humanism?.The research questions are:? What are the authors writing about when describing the secular world- views?? What differences and similarities are there between the different editions prior and after the implementation of the new curriculum, GY11?? Are the secular world-views presented in a way that is compatible with Taylors concept of ?exclusive humanism??The results that are being presented are, first of all that the change between the different editions are not big.

The purpose of this C-essay within the subject of religion is to form a notion as to how the attitudes towards women and their position in a theoretical biblical society might have been perceived, based upon a select number of texts from the first five books of the Bible (the Pentateuch).Since this essay was written under the framework of the teacher education programme, it is also integrated with the pedagogy subject. This manifests itself with the didactic reflection at the end of this essay, where I try to relate the subject of this essay to the teaching profession.The material, which consists of excerpts from the first and second chapters of Genesis, and aselection of the laws in the first five books of the Bible (from Genesis to Deuteronomy), wasanalysed according to an ideological model, where themes and patterns have been more important than specific word choices.The analysis showed that the views on women vary depending on who writes and who interprets a specific text extract, and the conclusion was that since laws reflect the society it is likely that they were created to improve women's status to make it as equal to the man's as possible.The didactic reflection offers suggestions for lesson plans on the themes gender, feminism andfeministic theology..

The aim of this study is to make a comparative study between the grievances during the Dacke Warand the German Peasant´s War. These two conflicts may have occurred separately, regarding bothgeographical and chronological distances but also share common issues for this comparative study.Less than two decades separates these two conflicts and they were all by their own serious insurrectionsduring their time. While the German Peasant´s War was the greatest uprising in Europe up tothe French Revolution, the Dacke War was the biggest Peasant Rebellion in Scandinavian history.While the German Peasant War has been studied and researched by historians for a relative longtime, the Dacke War has been neglected in research history. If it were not for the Swedish professorLars-Olof Larsson?s studies during foremost in the 1960s, the Dacke War would have been a historicallyuncharted territory of research indeed.

The main discussion in this essay concern what the Emerging Church is, its sociological and theological context, their main critique of modernism and the consequences in theology and praxis. EC is not a new church but wants to be a new way of being church. In England much of the discussion concerning EC has found a context within the report Mission-Shaped Church (MSC). EC differs from Emergent Village which is a continuing discussion from a postmodern philosophical view.EC is born in an evangelical context with the tensions in the postmodern context, the liminal situation with among other items the disussion about a liquid culture and liquid church. Other backgroundfactors are the ChurchGrowth-movement, Willow Creek and the Gospel and Our Culture.EC critisizes its evangelical background and moves the center from justification to incarnation, from propostionalism, individualism, mission and activism to a theology of incarnational community life.Four different proponents are considered; Brian Mclaren, Dan Kimball, Karen Ward and Ben Edson.

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.

Since 2007 the American sitcom the Big Bang Theory has spread throughout the world. With its twenty million watchers it is one of the most popular sitcoms of our time. The starting point for this essay is that the humourus series with the more or less geeky main characters is more than just entertainment - it is a part of the mediatization of religion. This means that media is affecting the recipients? view on religion in general and the personal religion.

The main aim of my research essay is to examine two congregations, one in Sweden and one in Democratic Republic of Congo, how theology and the life in the church shape the cultural context. The analysis uses semi-structured interviews of two pastors responsible for organizing the Easter celebration in their churches. The interviews serve the purpose to reveal how they apply theology in their context, how they interpret the Easter celebration liturgically in relation to the early church and how they perceive the cultural development in the congregations Easter celebration 2010-11. To give complementary insights to the interviews I use computer-aided interviews with members of the congregations. The methodological approach is based on a study of contextual theological theories, Easter traditions in the early church, Easter theologies and then applying these theories in the interviews.

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.

This essay looks to examine the view on religious and non-religious people thoughts on the possible relationship between feminism and religion. The essay in itself relies on semi structured interviews conducted with five informants where focus has been centered on the informants main thoughts on the subject. The theoretic basis of the study is found in post-structuralistic feminism and intersectionalism. The result will show that while all the informants believe there is a kind of relationship between feminism and religion, this relationship greatly varies depending on the informants? preconception of religion and feminism..