Some reflections on spirituality,religion and mental health

For both religion and psychiatry context is becoming more important. Object relations theory, and especially the concept of a transitional object, may be a means of linking religious thinking and psychoanalysis together. The distinction between religion and spirituality is important, though not absolute. Two factors emerge from this engagement: 1) critical questioning at the boundary of each discipline; and 2) both spirituality and mental health are related to life in a specific society. The link between religion and irrational behaviour is important, religion being a primary means of acknowledging the irrational facets of everyday life. But delusion must not be confused with illusion: between these two imagination, art and religion flourish. Each of these is dangerous, since they connect the ‘normal’ with the ‘riskily marginal’. In a multicultural society behaviour which may be acceptable in one context may in another be regarded as a sign of illness. This is particularly true of religious behaviour. Three key issues are examined: 1) the social function of spirituality and religion; 2) the idea of personal wholeness; and 3) the link between external and internal validation of the individual's spirituality. The boundary between psychotic and religious behaviour is a difficult one to discern. Yet neither medical nor spiritual explanations alone seem sufficient. There is a complementary mapping of the complications of human experience.     

Science,philosophy, and religion today: Some reflections

The new developments of science have opened a new field of dialogue between science and theology as well as a further integration between science and philosophy. This new field is shown in its historical background and with its current theoretical issues.     

Afterword: some reflections on implicit religion and ordinary theology

This brief piece relates Edward Bailey's concept of implicit religion, together with some themes from the papers published in this special issue, to Astley's concept of ordinary theology. In particular, it attends to their different, but overlapping, focal concerns and their shared emphasis on a spiritual core of personal meaningfulness.     

Further reflections on Freud and his writing

As we broaden our frames of reference, Freud's genius looms larger. An adequate appreciation of Freud accordingly necessitates an examination of how he read and wrote and how Strachey translated him. Despite the enormous amount of psychoanalytic commentary, the subject of his writing qua writing still remains untapped to a considerable extent. By deepening our awareness of the nuances and implications of the manner in which Freud wrote, we correspondingly increase our knowledge of his original mind and the way he understood psychoanalysis.     

From religious emotions to affects: historical and theoretical reflections on injury to feeling,self and religion

ABSTRACT

Images of angry Muslims have become a common sight in repeated controversies problematising the compatibility of Islam and freedom of speech. To explain such outrage, it is often put forward that Muslims reacted to the disrespect and violation of their ‘religious feelings’. In this paper, we challenge the trope of hurt religious feelings in the explanation of unrest. Referring to the writings of Schleiermacher, James and Taylor, the discussion traces how religion and feeling have become inextricably intertwined, located within the individual self and institutionalised as a dominant interpretation of religion. We introduce affect as a conceptual alternative to such understandings, which allows us to analyse the emphasis on Muslim emotionality as a relationship between Muslim and secular bodies, hence no longer reduced to the interiority of Muslim subjects. We will illustrate the potential of an affect-based approach discussing Muslim feelings’ vital role in the construction of European democracies.     

Is critique possible in the study of lived religion? Anthropological and feminist reflections

ABSTRACT

This article, based on the author’s fieldwork in a Catholic context, aims to theorise the dilemmas of taking seriously religious worlds at precisely those moments when they may be in tension with academic worldviews in terms of epistemology and ontology. The lived religion approach has emerged as a critical enterprise which serves as a corrective to more text-based or macro-sociological approaches, developing a form of radical non-reductionism and a preference for ethnographic approaches. This article aims to explore this critical edge of the lived religion approach further to address the modernist legacy in the study of religion. It will do so by bringing two anthropological approaches into the conversation that both challenge, albeit in different ways, the modernist underpinnings of studying religion within anthropology: phenomenological anthropology and what is called ‘the ontological turn’. The second part of the article centres on the question whether critique is possible in the pursuit of a non-reductionist approach to studying lived religion, taking up the question ‘is critique secular?’ posed by Talal Asad et al. This article suggests ways to take the impossibility of critique forward by following up some directions within the anthropological approaches already presented and linking this with feminist thinking on the status and role of academic knowledge.     

Religious agency,identity, and communication: reflections on history and theory of religion

Abstract

This paper discusses the applicability of recent theories of religion to the problem of describing and explaining religious transformation in the period between the final Bronze Age and Late Antiquity. Instead of evolutionist and cognitive approaches, it proposes a model of religion that tries to analyze religion in terms of its making by starting from the individual's appropriation and creation of religious tradition. Religion is understood as a strategy to attribute agency to agents that do not appear immediately plausible. Recent scholarly discussions on human agency suggest categorizing human religious agency into the three subsets, namely: (1) acting religiously with regards to past, present, and future; (2) collective religious identity; and (3) religious communication. These subsets are shown to produce fruitful questions for research on historical sources. Against this backdrop, religion is explained as a precarious cultural resource articulated through the agency of individuals and allowing changed attributions of individual agency.     

Further reflections on the suicide of Kawabata Yasunari.

The suicide of Kawabata Yasunari has been studied in terms of loneliness, aestheticism, postwar Japan's mass democracy, and ill health and old age. This paper places focus on the Oedipus complex in relation to Kawabata's concepts of beauty, life, and death. This analysis was supported by the psychosocial data which were provided by Jiko no Tenmatsu (An Account of the Incident) by Usui Yoshimi. The book is based on the story told by a maid of Kawabata, who is believed to have played an important role in his suicide. Although it is a novel, Usui claims that he followed events as told by the reporter as closely as possible.     

Religious polarization: contesting religion in secularized Western European countries

In light of recent claims about increasing religious polarization in secularized countries, we study the extent to which the non-religious contest religion in Western European countries and whether and how the Protestant and Catholic heritage of these countries plays a role in this. Analyzing data from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP 1998 and 2008) data by means of multilevel analysis, we demonstrate that religious polarization is stronger in the most secularized countries and in countries with a Catholic religious heritage. Moreover, in secular countries, polarization stems from religious fervency, whereas in countries with a Catholic heritage, it stems from anti-religious fervency.     

Further reflections on the impact of clinical writing on patients

Though it is unlikely that instituting universal guidelines will ever be possible for patient approval of the analyst's use of clinical material outside of the treatment setting, the author offers some supplementary refl ections to those already available in the literature. Broadly applied informed consent guidelines would increase the distortion that already exists in our clinical literature due to self-imposed restraints by writers. Moreover, the powerful irrational forces mobilized by consent in the dyad are not easily 'held' by traditional applicable legal categories. Metapsychological formulations of the intrapsychic and intersubjective impact of patient participation in the writing process on individual analytic dyads are needed. Notions of privacy protection, validation, dyadic co-construction, or writing-as-containment by a third as rationales for informed consent fail to encompass the transindividual and external sources of human identity and the ineradicable lack of unity in the unconscious. Nevertheless, theoretical affi nity and preferred technique may be mediating factors in positive outcomes of the consent process. Some paradigms not only accommodate more comfortably but also actively seek the intersubjective repercussions of informed consent. Asanalternativeorcomplementaryviewpoint, theauthoroffersthehypothesis that the clinical ramifi cations of either disguise or consent are not exclusively, nor even necessarily, concerned with what patients read about themselves, but what they assess or intuit-directly or indirectly through the material presented-of their analyst's unconscious strivings. To truly triangulate the clinical reporting project, it is wisest to consult the third ear of a colleague to assess the potential impact on patients on what might be being unconsciously transmitted by the analyst in the writing and the consent process     

Work engagement: Further reflections on the state of play

In this article we further reflect on the “state of play” of work engagement. We consider, clarify, and respond to issues and themes raised by eight preeminent work engagement researchers who were invited to respond to our position article. The key themes we reflect upon include: (1) theory and measurement of engagement; (2) state and task engagement; (3) climate for engagement versus collective engagement; (4) the dark side of engagement; (5) where job crafting may go wrong; and (6) moderators of the engagement–performance relationship. We conclude that engagement can sensibly be conceptualized as a positive and high arousal affective state characterized by energy and involvement; that there may be additional dimensions that might usefully be included; that we need to more fully understand the day-to-day and moment-to-moment temporal dynamics and implications of engagement; that a “climate for engagement” will influence individual and organizational outcomes; that although engagement is at heart a positive construct, the “dark side” of engagement needs to be acknowledged and understood; that “job crafting” provides a potentially powerful way for employees to manage their engagement; and that we need to gain a better understanding of the moderators that influence the way that engagement is related to performance. We also outline some practical implications that follow from our conclusions.     

美国的宗教与宗教渗透

我国实行改革开放以来,经济发展取得了举世瞩目的成就,但随着开放步伐的加大,宗教渗透也越演越烈。在构建社会主义和谐社会的今天,和谐