Att bedriva ett aktivt förändringsarbete inom idéburna organisationer kan vara problematiskt då det kan uppstå motsättningar baserat på spänningar mellan organisationens syfte och ekonomistyrning. I religiösa organisationer tar sig detta i uttryck genom konceptet ?The Sacred and Secular Divide?. Studien undersöker hur inneboende spänningar påverkar ett förändringsarbete av ekonomistyrning i en regional enhet av Svenska kyrkan och syftar till att förklara hur förändringsarbetet ser ut. Syftet studeras genom en kvalitativ fallstudie med respondenter från organisationens ledningsgrupp där förändringens process, inneboende spänningar och önskade resultat undersöks.

In Scandinavia the general idea of the Bronze Age society is that it was organised as chiefdoms. The model for what they looked like is taken from the anthropological studies of the Polynesian chiefdoms. The aim of my study is to investigate a Scandinavian Bronze Age feature, known as cairns mainly containing fire-cracked stone. This is compared with how people in different Polynesian chiefdoms, looked at similar remain. This is done to get a background for new ways of interpretation of such remains.

India is home to every sixth person in the world, some 30 million dogs and a quarter of the total world cattle population. A vast majority of Indians are Hindus, and even though the Hindu religion proclaims love, nurturing and worshipping of animals, sometimes the same religion constitutes an obstacle for animal welfare in practice. This paper investigates the significance of historic and religious symbols to the way animals are perceived in modern Indian society, as well as the different social factors which underlie attitudes to animals. The concept of karma, as well as that of good versus bad deaths, is probably the foundation of the general Hindu reluctance to euthanasia in any form. Although in theory all species are generally regarded as equal in Hinduism, in practice there seems to be a differentiation; for cultural, religious, medical and financial reasons.

This study is about the artist Monica Sjoo?s (1938-2005) painting God giving birth (1968) that was accused of being blasphemous and obscene in the early 1970s. God giving birth could have had much in common with Niki de Saint-Phalle?s She ? a cathedral (1966), both works suggesting a mother goddess image. The main difference however can be found in the fact that Monica Sjoo?s painting had connection to the women?s movement in the 1970s.

This essay aims to explore continuity in water centric cult within the period of the Christianization of Scandinavia (ca 800-1100 AD) and to understand the changing of symbolism of water in pre-Christian cult and early Christian religion. It has previously been thought that Christian priests took over the old holy wells and renamed them after saint, all to ease the pagan people into a Christian lifestyle. But archaeological evidence shows that the cult at these wells, and other water centric sites, where almost completely abandoned a few hundred years before the Christians came to Scandinavia. The Christians should not have felt the need to transform this tradition since it was only practiced in a very small and supposedly private scale. On the contrary, religious activities at these wells seems to increase with the new religion and perhaps this is explained by Christianity itself.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate and analyse the private researchers encounter with the Royal Library, national library of Sweden. The main focus is on answering the two questions: who is the private researcher and what is his/her impression of the Royal Library? These questions are answered from the vantage point of the following theoretical perspectives: library anxiety, Bourdieu, library architecture, gender studies and service management. The methods used are qualitative interviews, and textual analysis using the printout of these taped interviews along with notes and an earlier user study as material. The conclusions are that barriers with staff is the most frequent factor of library anxiety in the private researcher at the Royal Library, and mechanical barriers the least frequent.

Crisis communication can make a crisis turn into a double crisis. The purpose of the thesis is to analyze by which rhetorical means a double crisis can occur. With the Swedish zoo Parken Zoo as a specific example, this essay examines the crisis communication during the crises that started with the tv-show Kalla fakta. The tv-show revealed that Parken Zoo killed and slaughtered endangered and Sacred animals. When asked about the specific animals, the head of the zoo gave different answers ? which contrasted with former employees testimony.

The aim of this study is to investigate the components of religion and spirituality in the specific context of "Fryshuset" ? a multicultural and glocal arena. Against the backdrop of contemporary researchers such as Heelas and Woodhead and their hypothesis about the "spiritual revolution" and a "new spirituality", as well as the postmodern discussion about "the return of God", this study discusses how religious change can be understood in the context of Fryshuset.The theoretical point of departure is taken in a hermeneutical method where Fleck´s theory about "thought-collective" and Gidden´s theory about the "duality of structure" are used in order to understand and describe the dialectical relationship between individual and social structure.The method used in this study is qualitative. The interviews are made of six individuals representing different social projects at Fryshuset.By analyzing the material from the field study through theories on religious change, three areas are identified:"The subjective turn"Religion and spiritualityA Cosmopolitan interpretation of life The result of this study is that the religiosity among the interviewed can be described through Taylor?s understanding of the "subjective turn".

From being an exotic small religion that has existed at a fading presence in southern Iraq and Iran mandeism has moved to the West and Sweden. As more and more Mandaeans encounter a new culture and a new society in Sweden it affects not only them as individuals but also their religion mandeism. In this essay, I have begun to examine how Mandaeans think about their identity and religion. I have taken my starting point in a broad theoretical discussion of identity, religion and secularisation. Mandeism is a gnostic religion that probably has its roots in today?s Israel / Palestine and sees John the Baptist as the last prophet.

Ystad har under lång tid varit en populär turistdestination för svenska och utländska besökare. Staden med dess omnejd har genom den fina miljön och dess historiska byggnader goda förutsättningar att attrahera turister till regionen. Efter filmatiseringarna av Henning Mankells romaner om kriminalkommissarie Kurt Wallander, som utspelas i Ystad, har antalet turister ökat än mer till regionen. Förhållandet mellan böcker och filmer är en väsentlig del av den turism som uppstår efter en berättelse om en fiktiv karaktär i en existerande miljö. Vi ville följaktligen undersöka film- litteraturturism och dess påverkan på en plats.

This essay examines how witches are portrayed in American produced TV-series in the year 2000 and forward, what elements could have effected that portrayal in the series and also how this portrayal differs itself from witches within Wicca. The material used for this examination are the TV-series Charmed, The Vampire Diaries and Witches of East End and as comparing literature; Living Wicca, The Spiral Dance and Witchcraft Today. The methods used for this process are discourse analysis and content analysis. I used theories of Pierre Wiktorin about religion and popular culture. I used three themes (Characteristics, Practice and mode of thinking) for the processing of the material and to structure the result.

The first aim of this study is to discuss and try to understand the relationship between the holy andethics, and more specifically how it can be understood, which is the critical question that I haveformulated, in Giorgio Agamben?s and Emmanuel Levinas? philosophies. The second, moreconstructive aim is to discuss whether the holy can be understood as something good or problematicin relation to the society.Rooted in philosophy of religion and ethics, I have first tried to discuss how the holy has beenunderstood in the philosophy of phenomenology and in the texts of Rudolf Otto, Mircea Eliade andEspen Dahl. The holy has in the history been understood as something central in religions, and hasalso not been connected to the idea of ethics. Recently it has also been critized ? by Dahl ? for notbeing so pure as first thought of.In Levinas texts the holy has been understood as something differentiated through his distiction,in the Talmudic reading ?Desacralization and Disenchantment?, between the holy, which can beseen as something pure, and the Sacred which can been seen as something impure and a form ofdegenerated holiness.

This essay takes its start in the problematic situation concerning source material in the study of the Norse religion before the Christianization of Scandinavia. There is a lack of written sources from the time when the religion was still practiced. There are plenty of archeological sources economic situation than their religious beliefs. The Icelandic stories written in the 13th and 14th centuries give us a broad pictureof the Norse mythology, but the writers were Christians which makes their reliability questionable.The focus of this essay is therefore on two texts written during the time when the Norse religion was still in practice. The first source is the travel notes written in 922 by the Muslim scholar Ahmad ibn Fadlan who met a group of the Rus? people.

Det senaste decenniet har stadsplaneringen i Sverige till stora delar handlat om förtätning, särskilt i centrala och vattennära lägen. Området Vilan i Kristianstad är ett verksamhetsområde med dessa förutsättningar. Vilan ligger nära Kristianstads centrum, alldeles intill Helge å och i anslutning till ett våtmarksområde. Jag har i mitt examensarbete valt att arbeta med en del av Vilan, nämligen den nordöstra delen. Det är en stadsdel med dålig struktur och liten kontakt med den natur och våtmarksområde som området gränsar till.