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.

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 study is to examine whether the high school textbook on religious studies differences in how Christian ethics and in what way it is presented in comparison with the presentation of Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism and it´s ethics. The analyzed material is textbooks from the late 1960s to the 2010s. Due to the survey´s nature the focus is first and foremost the chapters dealing with religious ethical issues and what amount of pages or space the different religions are given in the books. The results from the textbooks are compared with the curriculum that is or was effective during the time the books were published. This is done to determine whether there is a clear link between the books and the guidelines of the curriculum.

"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 is to examine whether the high school textbook on religious studies differences in how Christian ethics and in what way it is presented in comparison with the presentation of Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism and it´s ethics. The analyzed material is textbooks from the late 1960s to the 2010s. Due to the survey´s nature the focus is first and foremost the chapters dealing with religious ethical issues and what amount of pages or space the different religions are given in the books. The results from the textbooks are compared with the curriculum that is or was effective during the time the books were published. This is done to determine whether there is a clear link between the books and the guidelines of the curriculum.

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.

In a Swedish classroom today there will be students with different ethnicities, world views and religious beliefs.  The students will be taught religion through a non-denominational education, where as a teacher you are meant to be objective, open-minded and fair in the representation of different traditions. This representation is colored by the outsider-perspective and the students then learn about religion from a party which is not involved in the religion being taught. This essay discusses how to balance the outsider-perspective in religious education in the Swedish school with insider-voices. More specific, the use of Muslim websites when teaching about Islam.The material this essay studies are three Muslim websites: al-islam.se, islaminfo.se and islamguiden.se. In order to make a didactic analysis of the websites, they are compared to a standard Swedish textbook.

The purpose of this study is to explore how teachers at Swedish upper secondary schools perceive the so-called value words and knowledge requirements of religious studies 1 as defined by the present curriculum for upper secondary school 2011 (Gy11) how they consider themselves to apply these value words in their teaching, and whether they consider the knowledge requirements as alegitimate basis for equivalentassessment. My studyis based oninterviewswithfour teachers in religious studies at four different upper swcondary schools in the municipalityof Jönköping, Sweden. The results of my study show that the interviewed teachers perceive the value words in the knowledge requirements of religious studies 1,as defined by the present curriculum Gy11, aredifficult to interpret and that the value wordsare not definitive, but interpretable. All teachers use the knowledge requirements in theirplanning of teaching,but also in teaching where they are to concretize the knowledge requirements and value wordsthrough their own examples. Half of the teachers, however, experienced a lack of interest in the knowledge requirements by the pupils, which make it even more important to discuss knowledge requirementswith them, while the teachers?assessment has to rely on these knowledge requirements.

Construction of Identity and Charismatic Leaders deals with fundamentalism and Islamism within the United States, emphasising on similarities between fundamentalists and Islamists. The term "fundamentalist" is here referring to Christian extremists, while "Islamist" refers to the Muslim counterpart. The purpose of the essay is to make North American fundamentalism and Islamism comprehendible on a larger scale.In order to show similarities between these groups when it comes to values, structure and commitment to their tasks, it is important to understand the nature of the religious devotion.Analyzing the similarities of the two groups enables construction of general criteria for how anthropology of religious extremists can be outlined..

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.

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.

This paper aims to describe how religion teachers in Swedish schools teach concerning questions about life issues and popular culture. To research the teachers' didactic approach to these issues, didactics has been defined with three educational questions: what, how and why. The essay focuses on teachers' effective implementation of teaching on life issues and popular culture, which we used a theory of offering meaningfulness describing what subject matter that may be imparted to the students. An offer of meaningfulness can be pursued and can be made visible in the context of what and how performs the teaching and also in the context where the teacher planned the teaching elements. The method that the paper has used is the interviews of four different active religious educators in Stockholm and Uppsala area.

I have used a discourse analysis as a method and queertheori for the theoretical. In this paper I have analyzed how different wedding magazines write about partnerships, gender-neutral marriage and wedding between homosexuals. I have for some time been interested in the beliefs wedding magazines have about homosexuality and how newspapers maintain heteronormativity implicitly and explicitly. Bridal magazines are anxious to have the marriage as a design and standard when they write about partnership. When they write about the two different forms of marriage, they glorify the religious marriage and pay no attention to civil marriage.

The purpose of this essay was to describe the opinions of different religious and non-religious ideologies and aspects of treatment, concerning use of drugs and drugsaddiction, and with a special focus at Narconon. We also wanted to try to understand the connection between professionalism and ideology in their treatment.Our central questions where;· How does the treatment Narconon's provides, look like?· What is Narconon's opinion on use of drugs and drugaddiction?· What is Narconon's connection to the Scientology?· Is there any scientific proof that Narconon's treatment is functioning?· How can we understand the connection between professionalism and ideology in treatment?We made intervjues with six social workers and six intervjues with staff at Narconon. Added to the intervjues, we studied articles and Internet research.From our work and through information we have got from Narconon, we have discovered the need of further research concerning their treatment. Narconon does continuous following-ups when the treatment is finished.