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This thesis is an attempt to make visible how Christians within a minority people in the southern Philippines view the Bible conceptually as a source of spiritual authority and also how they read and interpret the Bible, both privately and within the context of community worship. Reading and studying the Bible is now universally practised by people from multitudes of cultures, a reality that has naturally engendered a great deal of interest on the part of scholars. The resultant scholarship however, has been preoccupied with the findings of the professional researcher, and little has been published which reveals how “ordinary indigenous readers” view the Bible and/or how they interpret it. Using qualitative data gathered by this author among Manobo Christians living in the hills of central Mindanao, this thesis will endeavour to redress this imbalance and provide access to the voices of ordinary Manobo readers. The thesis also makes an important contribution to the Bible’s place within Philippine Christianity. Despite the expanding readership of the Bible within the Philippines almost no research has focused on how the Bible is actually interpreted by ordinary readers. The thesis will major on the appropriation of the Bible by Christians from within the Manobo Bible Church Association of Mindanao, an association of churches born out of the church planting efforts of missionaries belonging to the Overseas Missionary Fellowship. At the centre of the thesis is an encounter between conservative evangelical missionaries and the unique culture and cosmology of the Manobo. The central argument is that the missionaries’ prototypically, evangelical doctrine of Scripture was appropriated and reconfigured by Manobo Christians in ways that reveal the persistent ability of elements of their own cosmology, and customary law, to exert influence upon their localisation of Christianity. In particular, the thesis focuses on how the localisation process has led to innovations by the Manobo on what is meant by the Bible as “spiritual authority” and to reinterpretations of significant theological themes within the evangelical gospel message. At the same time the thesis also outlines how adoption of the Christian Scriptures has redefined the position that indigenous sources of authority, such as spirit priest and village chief, now occupy within Manobo Christian communities.

Modelling of the charge transport in different types of organic semiconductors (molecular crystals and semicrystalline polymers) is undertaken using a number of different methods. Using a polarisable force field we have determined the extent of the external reorganisation energy for hole transport in molecular crystals. We have found that this key parameter is very small for naphthalene, anthracene, tetracene, pentacene and rubrene and discussed the implications of this finding in the context of charge transport modelling. Charge trapping in organic crystals due to defect states is studied by computation of the rate of escape of a trapped charge carrier using non-adiabatic rate theory. Two cases are considered, the first is hopping between separate identical defect states and the second is hopping from a defect state into the bulk (delocalised) states. This latter process is determined as the more likely to occur for a realistic defect concentration. The necessity of the inclusion of an effective quantum mode of vibration for the accurate computation of the rate is also demonstrated. A linear scaling method based on the definition of a localised molecular orbital set is devised for the computation of the electronic structure of a conjugated polymer (poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT)). Utilising a combined classical and quantum chemical approach we show that charge carriers are localised in correspondence with long-lived traps which are also present in the crystalline phase of the polymer. The regio-regularity of P3HT is shown to have little impact on the shape and tail of the density of states; we compute the 2D localised trap density as ~3.1×1013 cm-2, a value which is not found to significantly change with the regioregularity. The states in the tail of the density of states are found to be predominantly localised but energetically close to delocalised "quasi-band" states which are accessible under device operation.