This essay is a work on Mircea Eliades's interpretation of the religious human understood as "homo religiosus" and the role of the shaman from the Eliade perspective. In Eliade human existence consists of a dichotomy between the sacred and the profane. The question is whether one can understand the concept of Eliades ?axis mundi?, center of the universe? Can we create an understanding of human existence with Eliade? Can one use  phenomenology of religion as perspective for the exploration of ?reality?? Furthermore, this paper aims to understand the role of the shaman has religious worldviews. Shamaism  is through an ecstatic technique traveling to other cosmic plane, in order to gain knowledge that would otherwise not be reached.

Abstract:The purpose of this study is to get increased knowledge of how teachers motivate and teach youth about existential questions at junior highchool. My issue for this composition is to find out how ? and how much ? teachers in fact teach about existential questions in the religious education.I interviewed four teachers at junior highschool, with various experiences. One teacher had about thirty years of experience in teaching, and one teacher was quite young and unexperienced.The result indicates that the youth were interested in a lot of existential questions. The study also indicates the teachers view of youth?s identity-work and their existential questions.The resultat is compared with studies of Dahlin, Hartman and Sjödin..

The role of religion, of religious individuals and organizations, is currently discussed within both a private and public sector of development. I have viewed documents from the World Bank and DFID where the religious presence is a growing fact and previous theories that religion would disappear with economic development have been abandoned. As a result DFID conducted a large study on the importance of religion for development work, RaD 2005-2011, under the directions of Professor Carole Rakodi. Rakodi (2011) concluded that religion was highly related to the success or failure of developmental projects, and to understand the values people had religion needed to be understood within its specific cultural context. She developed an analysis model to conduct this work.

Följande uppsats handlar om studie- och yrkesvägledares inställning till troende, främst muslimska klienter och hur deras förförståelse av religion i allmänhet och islam i synnerhet, påverkar deras arbete med dessa klienter. Den behandlar också hur de ser på religionsfrihet, frihet till frihet från religion. Den genomförda enkätundersökningen visar att vägledarnas professionalitet gör dem väl förberedda på att arbeta med troende klienter. Med få undantag uppvisar vägledarna en vilja till tolerans och öppenhet, även när deras egen livsåskådning är helt annan än klientens. De flesta vägledarna har en positiv syn på religionsfrihet, alltså att det innebär frihet att ha den religion man vill ha.The subject of this paper is how some Swedish career counsellors view their religious, mainly Moslem, clients and whether their preconceived ideas influence their work as counsellors.

The purpose of this essay is to describe and analyze the debate surrounding the construction of the 2011 years curriculum of the Swedish schools` religious studies. The debate is concerning whether or not Christianity should have a unique position in the curriculum against other religions. The method is to analyze the arguments by an argument analysis. The purpose is also to analyze the argumentation to see how secularization and pluralism have influenced the debate and the different standpoints. The essays material consists of debate articles from the four largest news sites on the internet.The most common argument for Christianity?s unique position is that Christianity has had an important role in the development of the Swedish society, culture and literature and is therefore important knowledge for understanding the Swedish society.

In the essay the author examines how pilgrimage can be used as a tool to radicalise democracy in a late modern society marked by neoliberalism. Applying a dialectic perspective on social movements the essay puts forward how the pilgrimage movement Pilgrim?s Walk for Future, administrated by Church of Sweden, is working in line with the historical pilgrimage theology - a modern critical ecclesiology- to mobilise political action to prevent climate change. The result of the study shows how PWFF meet the neoliberal hegemony with a mobilisation of alternative values beyond the order of capitalism, in line with Christian theology and tradition. The mobilisation is made possible by new forms of identifications with oneself and the social world that meet a modern power/knowledge- regime based on rational thought, and which questions norms and practises by paying attention to their negative effects on nature and on human life in general.

"One life in two worlds" is a qualitative study of Syriac boys constructs ethnic and religious identity in different social contexts.Based on these three questions: how do the boys describe the importance of the parents' cultural and religious background in relation to their own identity? How do the boys describe their experiences of being categorized in school? Which significance is given to religion and ethnicity when the boys describe their experiences in relation to home and school context?I did reach the aim of this essay which was to investigate by interviewing the Syrian boys how they construct or reconstruct ethnic and / or religious identity in relation to different social contexts with a focus on the home and the school.In this study, I assumed the qualitative method in which I interviewed six Syriac boys who attend grade nine. The starting point of the study was social constructivism. Therefore, knowledge in this study is seen as something that is constructed in language, social and cultural interactions. The reality and perspective of reality is socially constructed, meaning that knowledge is created through the interplay of common action.The results of this study show that all the informants are agreed that their parents' ethnic background has had and has great significance for their identity formation.

In this paper I have tried to find out the reason the medieval town of Vä was created. I have studied several different areas in witch all, in one way or another, have had an effect on the making of Vä. This areas includes topography, iron production, mill handling, religious effects, royal affliction and also if the name Vä could tell something about Väs history as a religious cult. I have also looked at two other places not far from Vä, the medieval harbour town Åhus and the big village of Fjälkinge. By comparing these three places I tried to find out what Vä had that the other places did not, which made Vä turn in to a town.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how Islam and Muslims are portrayed a) in results from studies on Swedish teaching materials, and b) in articles in Swedish media newspapers. The study was conducted through two separate studies. In the first study, five previous research reports on how Islam and Muslims are portrayed in Swedish teaching materials were analysed in order to discern the main results regarding the portrayal of Islam and Muslims. In the second study, newspaper articles from 11 Swedish newspapers were analysed in order to discern which central themes emerge in the description of Muslims and Islam in said newspaper articles, as well as which properties and features are attributed to Muslims and Islam in the articles studied. In both studies, the data was analysed inductively through a qualitative content analysis.

Fyra stycken lärares beskrivningar om hur de undervisar och definierar nyreligiositet och nya religiösa rörelser har studerats i föreliggande uppsats. Syftet med studien är att undersöka vad verksamma religionskunskapslärare på högstadiet säger att de undervisar om i undervisningen kring nyreligiositet och nyreligiösa rörelser. En kvalitativ metod med semistrukturerade intervjuer har använts för att få fram data till studien. Teorier om didaktiskt innehåll och undervisning som meningserbjudande har använts vid analysen av resultatet. Uppsatsen utgår från tre stycken frågeställningar om hur definierar religionskunskapslärare begreppen nyreligiositet och nyreligiösa rörelser, om vad beskriver religionskunskapslärare att de undervisar kring nyreligiositet och nyreligiösa rörelser och hur beskriver lärare att de arbetar kring nyreligiositet och nyreligiösa rörelser i undervisningen? Resultatet i studien visar att lärarna har problem med att definiera begreppet nyreligiositet, vilket kan vara en orsak till att området får en marginell plats i religionskunskapsundervisningen.

In 1989 the Cold War ended and in 1991 the Soviet Union ceased to exist, over night the ruling paradigm of International Relations was obsolete. What would happen now? Samuel Huntingtons answer was that in the future, cultural identity would be the most important factor behind international conflict. And that the threat of world war would come from clashes between civilizations instead of clashes between ideologies like during the cold war. Was he correct? This thesis is an attempt to find out if Huntingtons theory was right in its predictions of the world to come.

This study aims at using discourse analysis to analyze SFI students attitudes to religion and religiosity in an SFI-context. The questions are: How is the discourse constructed and maintained by religion and religiosity of SFI students in an SFI context? How do SFI participants experience that their religion has affected their time at SFI?Using a case study approach, interviews were conducted with a group of SFI students. The results show that the religious discourse in SFI is influenced by the SFI-context and affected based on the current education discourse that exists there. Furthermore, the discourse is designed and maintained by the participants private religious beliefs and the religion of the majority of the group, One canhere speak of a strong social unit forming a plausibility structure The power structure that emerges is that the majority has the power to define the significance of religion and place within the SFI context. In the SFI-context the participants view is that religion is something private that should not be expressed in the school environment.

The aim of this essay is to examine what happens when Veronica Roths Divergent-trilogy is read with a lutheran theological pre-understanding. Using reader-response theory and lutheran theology written for and in a post-modern context, three lutheran figures of thought are presented as one way of understanding the trilogy. The conclusion is that it is possible to reveal lutheran ideas concerning justification, guilt, forgiveness, mercy and self-sacrificing love in the Divergent-story. .

This essay presents an examination of some aspects of an anonymous Italian fifteenth centurypainting, the Madonna in Adoration of the Christ Child with the Young John the Baptist, in theGothenborg Art Museum. My first aim is to understand its symbolic and religious content, and theother is to make an attempt at an attribution, or at least put the work in a likely environment,temporally and geographically. To the first end I analyse the image using Panofsky?s three stagemethod, and then make an iterpretation using the ?period eye? concept of Baxandall, especially froma religious viewpoit. Secondly, I try to define the style of the work mainly by analysing selectedparameters from a large number of fifteenth century Italian pictures found in the photo archive ofthe Federico Zeri Foundation website on the internet.

In a press release from the Swedish church it says that the pressure from people who are in need is increasing on the deacons in Sweden and that it?s getting higher each year. This study contains the search of knowledge about the deacons of the Swedish church, if they actually feel an increasing pressure and in what way, how they are handling the possible pressure from people in need, if that pressure is too high and if the deacons feel that they can assist the people seeking their help. The study also aim to provide more knowledge about the deacons experiences of the opportunities and boundaries (or obstacles) they meet in their line of work and how they handle the boundaries when/if they can?t provide the help that the people need.