Pedagogy as a Field Guide to the Ecology of the Classroom

Reflecting on the complementary pedagogical models on teaching courses related to religion and the environment presented in this issue of the journal by Kevin O'Brien (“Balancing Critique and Commitment”) and Jennifer Ayres (“Learning on the Ground”), I suggest ways in which these essays form a conversation about teaching. Together, O'Brien and Ayres show how the classroom must acknowledge the materiality and embodied nature of learning, the emotional and intellectual levels of commitment, and the place of critical reflection on our everyday practices and actions. O'Brien and Ayres show the benefits of more fully reflecting on the ecology of the classroom – the relationship between individual members of the educational community, and the educational environment itself – in religious studies and theology.     

Integrating Spirituality and Religion Into Counseling: A Guide to Competent Practice

Book reviewed in this article: Craig S. Cashwell and J. Scott Young, Eds. (2005). Integrating Spirituality and Religion Into Counseling: A Guide to Competent Practice.     

A Review of Integrating Spirituality and Religion Into Counseling: A Guide to Competent Practice

Book reviewed in this article: Craig S. Cashwell and J. Scott Young, Eds. (2005). Integrating Spirituality and Religion Into Counseling: A Guide to Competent Practice     

A Field Guide to Cinetherapy: On Celluloid Psychoanalysis and Its Practitioners

This paper addresses the strange bedfellowship between psychoanalysis and cinema since the century's turn. Its specific focus is the idiosyncratic psychoanalysis/psychotherapy practised in mainstream cinema and television. Cinetherapists have consistently fallen into one of three categories: Dr. Dippy, a focus of derision, weirder than his patients; Dr. Evil, Hollywood's psychiatric version of the mad, bad scientist; and the unfailingly benevolent, self-sacrificing Dr. Wonderful. The prevalence of these stereotypes has waxed and waned according to shifting cultural circumstances. The study concludes with reflections on the possible impact, deleterious or otherwise, of distorted filmic images of the impossible profession.     

Field Experiments in Religion: A Dream Whose Time Has Come

Field experiments offer powerful tests of causality in real‐world settings. They have high validity—both internal and external—and require smaller inferential leaps than observational or laboratory methods. Nonetheless, they are rarely applied to religion. This article advocates for the frequent use of field experiments in the study of religion. It reviews their methodological advantages, and it identifies various ways that religion can be incorporated into a field experiment design. It proposes multiple strategies for creating feasible, ethical religion field experiments as well as optimizing them. Ultimately, field experiments have the potential to transform the study of religion.     

Wittgenstein and the Criticism of Religion A Case Study

This article discusses the relevance of Wittgenstein's remarks on the doctrine of predestination for an understanding of his approach to religious matters. On the one hand, Wittgenstein held that this doctrine involves distorted concepts and is ethically and religiously nonsensical. On the other, he stated that others may find it “good and godly.” He seems to suggest that personal experience shapes the genuine meaning of the doctrine of predestination. The points that emerge cast light on tensions prevailing between Wittgenstein's conception of meaning as essentially a social and inter-subjective matter and his individualist perspective in the matter of religion. These issues lie at the heart of the dispute over Wittgenstein's views on the possibility of a philosophical criticism of religion.     

Religion and Esotericism among Students: A Cross-Cultural Comparative Study

Analysing the results of a study on religious and esoteric beliefs and practice among university students from five European and five American countries, we found that the level of religiousness of students depends very much on their cultural environment: the level of religiosity and esoteric beliefs is significantly higher among North- and South-American students than among European students. On the other hand, Asian spiritual techniques and esoteric methods of healing are practised more frequently by students in North-Western European countries. In the second part of the paper, we examine the relationship between academic discipline and religious worldviews. According to our data, students in the social sciences and the arts are more distanced from religion than students of other areas of science, but they, like students of medicine and languages, are closer to esotericism than students of the 'exact sciences'. Several hypotheses are proposed to explain these results.     

论儒学对民间神明信仰的影响——以闽台民间神明信仰为例

儒家通过人的神化和神的道德化两个方面的造神运动实现了对民间神格塑造的影响。在鬼神信仰上的宗教伦理理性的价值取向是儒学对民间信仰产生影响的思想渊源,国家机器的神道设教和知识分子推动是这一影响的现实途径。     

Gender, Religion, and the Experience of Suffering: A Case Study

This article explores how gender and religious belief come together in an elderly woman’s experience of suffering. It is based on qualitative research that explored experiences of suffering in a group of community-dwelling elders (80+) living in a North American city. We use the case study method to introduce themes that show suffering’s uniqueness to the individual whose narrative we report, as well as similarity to themes that emerged in other participants’ narratives. In this case, an elderly woman’s gender and religious identities merge in her stories of suffering, which include the memory of a childhood disability and an incident of clergy abuse that occurred 70 years previously. A key finding in this paper is that key themes in her story of suffering, which are disablement and clergy abuse, resonate to the general themes of suffering found in our study, which are (1) threats to personal identity; (2) loss of a valued item, quality, or relationship; and (3) a lack of control over self or the circumstances of life.