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This paper, based on a Master's thesis in Sociology of Religion at Uppsala University, addresses issues regarding gender, sexuality and love as well as television and meaning-making. The aim of the study was to see how young women watching Sex and the City would interpret and make meaning out of values and norms regarding gender, relationships and sexuality in the television show, and also to see whether the way the show pictured relationships and love could function as meaning-making or identity-making stories for the women to use to understand and make meaning out of their own experiences of love, relationships and being a woman.

Theoretical perspectives on the use of narrative and popular culture in identity-making are combined with Giddens' theory on the transformation of intimacy to give a frame for understanding how the stories of love and relationships in popular culture could be used to interpret and give meaning to people's own experiences. Identity and meaning-making are understood as processes that are not identical, but partly overlapping, and they are both reflexive projects of constant change, influenced by outer structures as well as individual choices.

The results of the study show how the young women use different strategies to negotiate between competing ideals or values present in Sex and the City as well as in their actual lives. The ideal of the “independent woman” is strong in the series, as well as a traditional romantic ideal for relationships, and these two ideals often clash. The two ideals both have important aspects regarding construction of gender and power. Results from the study also show that the women in several ways connect the stories of the show with their own lives, and use Sex and the City to interpret and make meaning out of their own experiences of relationships, gender and sexuality. They even describe the show as a “friend”, a place to find comfort, strength and support, and in that way function in different ways in their everyday life.

Två avhandlingar har behandlat frågan om prästers alienation från utvecklingen och en pågående utbrändhet. Undersökningarna ger en god bakgrund till frågan, men behöver kompletteras för att bli mer allmängiltiga.

Detta är den svenska slutrapporten från projektet Från statskyrka till fri folkkyrka vid Vetenskapsrådet. Slurapporten visar på den komplexa situation som de nordiska folkkyrkorna står inför, med den Svenska kyrkan som exempel. Religionen privatiseras samtidigt som intresset att använda sig av kyrkans riter ligger högt. Detta tyder på en spesifikt nordisk paradox.

År 1997 antogs projektet ”Från statskyrka till fri folkkyrka” av det svenska Vetenskapsrådet. Tretton självständiga delstudier har ur olika synvinklar belyst religiösa och sociala förändringsprocesser i Sverige från mitten av 1800-talet fram till idag. I denna slutrapport bearbetas och vidareutvecklas resultaten, insatta i ett sammanhang av aktuell religions- och samhällsvetenskaplig debatt.

Det speciella i den svenska religiösa situationen har att göra med den tidigare starka integrationen mellan kyrka och stat. Successivt har relationen lösts upp, fram till separationen år 2000. Rapporten visar att religionen inte har spelat ut sin roll i det senmoderna samhället, utan förändras på sätt som tidigare forskning inte förutsett. I det globala tjänstesamhällets Sverige är människors trosliv starkt privatiserat, samtidigt som religionen på ett ibland överraskande sätt uppträder på den offentliga arenan. Religiösa institutioner och organisationer fungerar som existentiella och kollektiva resurser i sökandet efter livskvalitet och mening. Kyrkans auktoritet och legitimitet är inte längre kopplad till dess formella position, utan till dess upplevda värde för individ och samhälle.

Nya sociala förhållanden öppnar i dag för kyrkan som social aktör, men också som samtalspartner i en dialog om samhällsutvecklingens riktning och mål.

Readjustment – and then? The Effects of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Church Services and Parish Life in the Church of Sweden

This article studies the effects of the covid-19 pandemic on church life in Sweden, and especially the liturgical life of Church of Sweden. During the first year of the pandemic (spring 2020 – spring 2021) local services were increasingly replaced by worship in front of the computer screen. Eucharist was celebrated less frequently and church buildings were for extended periods of time closed not only for services, but also for visitors. The article discusses ecclesiological challenges related to two aspects of these changes.The first aspect concerns the exploding amount of locally shaped varieties and types of worship, when parishes were encouraged to celebrate ”in a way that is possible”. The author relates this to a longer development that may be observed since the early 1970:s, and which has been summarized by theologian Marie Rosenius as ”autonomization”. Parishes have gradually become more separated from each other on a horizontal axis, while simultaneously being dissociated from their dioceses vertically. The effects of the pandemic seem to intensify this development, in turn challenging the ecclesiological idea of the Church of Sweden as defined by a liturgy that is recognizable from one week to the next and from one parish to another. This relates to the second aspect studied here, which concerns the tension between embodiment and disembodiment of church life. Digitalization of liturgical life clearly taps into the latter trend, challenging the ecclesiological idea of the local gathering as the primary expression of the church

This article takes its starting point in a recent tendency to include care for creation in the interpretation of diaconia as a ministry of the Christian church. Among those who argue for a renewed care for our neighbor and for the earth as our common home, we find such diverse Christian leaders as Pope Francis and the bishops of the Lutheran Church of Sweden. The article relates these arguments to a feminist discussion on the present crisis of welfare and care in the Western world. Both social care and ecological systems are exhausted in a system where care and reproductive work is subordinated to market oriented goals of growth and increased consumption. In order for the understanding of diaconia to integrate a responsibility not only in relation to needy human beings, but also to ecological systems that are under serious threat, the article argues for the importance of relating to this wider discussion on the crisis of care within feminist social theory. Feminist social theory may thus enrich theology in order to guard social care as a basic aspect of a global eco-system.

The 2008 Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Communion illustrated the difficulties presently facing all mainline Western churches in dealing with their internal divergencies in matters of gender, family and sexuality. Drawing on recent articles on queer theology the author argues that the Christian traditions—contrary to common assumption—have unique resources for solving not only their internal controversies in these matters, but also for contributing to the wider challenges facing the human family on how to live differently together.

The whole world followed the events in Lund, Sweden, on October 31, 2016, when for the first time a joint ecumenical commemoration of the Reformation took place between the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) and the Roman-Catholic Church. A photo distributed worldwide, shows Pope Francis and the Archbishop of the Church of Sweden, Antje Jackelén, embracing each other. The photo contains both hope and tension. The Church of Sweden tries to balance the tension between its heritage as ecumenical bridgebuilder, launched already by Archbishop Nathan Söderblom a hundred years ago, and its pioneering role with regard to issues of gender and sexuality. In the article these seemingly contradictory roles is set into a wider context of the journey Sweden has made from the time of the Lutheran reformation up to the present. A uniform society characterized by one people and one Christian faith, has gradually transformed into a society where faith is a voluntary option. The former state church faces new demands in handling religious as well as cultural diversities. Leadership is increasingly equally shared between women and men. The Church of Sweden holds all these tensions together through the approach launched on the official website of a church in constant need of reform.