Posttraumatic growth and religion in Rwanda: individual well-being vs. collective false consciousness

Some scholars include changes in spirituality, such as a greater commitment to their religious beliefs or an enhanced understanding of spiritual matters, in the definition of posttraumatic growth; others conclude that questions of spirituality should be excluded from this definition. This article highlights the fundamental difference of religion to other domains of posttraumatic growth because religions are ideologies (and other domains of growth are not). As ideologies, it is argued that religions can affect different levels of identity in different ways. Based on testimonial evidence from Rwandan genocide survivors, the article demonstrates that although religious beliefs can bring existential comfort at the individual level, they can also lead to a state of false consciousness at the collective level. In Rwanda, the dominant religious ideology facilitated the spiritual and moral climate in which genocide became possible. Today, religious interpretations of the Rwandan Patriotic Front's (RPF) leadership provide spiritual backing to a government which has become increasingly authoritarian.     

Responsibility beyond rationality: the case for rhizomatic consequentialism

A key challenge for education is to encourage children to act responsibly. If ‘spiritual literacy’ does not involve an autonomous, rational soul capable of ‘reading and writing the world as God intended’, it must refer to ethical (and perhaps religious) capacity in relation to contingent actions in a context free of moral absolutes. In relation to the former, Kant's Categorical Imperative supposed that actions are either right or wrong according to an absolute reason derived from the most basic templates of human sense making. According to Kant, therefore, right is rational irrespective of the apparent consequences of specific actions. In contrast, in an age lacking Kant's beliefs in both God and absolute reason, it is tempting to see an unethical pragmatism as the only alternative to the Categorical Imperative. However, it is possible to instil responsibility through a consequentialism based on a broader conception of relatedness, inspired by Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the ‘rhizome’. ‘Rhizomatic consequentialism’, as here defined, provides a ‘third way’ for moral education between instilling an understanding of absolute right and wrong and encouraging the belief that ‘right is what you can get away with’.     

Empowering Muslim children’s spirituality in Malay Archipelago: integration between National Philosophical Foundations and Tawakkul (trust in God)

Multiple studies indicated that children raised to be spiritual were found to be happier, have more resilience and positive outlook towards life events. This paper attempts to explore and integrate the value of spirituality and religious practices. It is approached through the understanding and application of the tawakkul (trust in God) concept, as perceived from an Islamic viewpoint. This aspect is explored through the consolidation of the ‘believing in God’ component, as highlighted in the National Philosophical Foundations in Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia to tawakkul. It will further seek to find the prospect of empowering Muslim children’s spirituality through such integration. This theoretical paper is based on the Islamic foundations and characteristics; its implementation and implications. The outcome illustrates indication of ‘divine involvement’ as the main essence of tawakkul; resulting sustainable religious, spiritual and moral enhancement. Moreover, an internalised and implicit form of tawakkul should be encouraged to promote self-understanding.     

Moral injury,coherence, and spiritual repair

In the PTSD literature, moral injury represents dissonance between a person’s beliefs about how they and the world should function, and the trauma event(s) they experienced. Given the association of moral injury with the assumptive world, it is not surprising the concept is closely intertwined with spiritual concerns. This paper reports on a spiritually integrated group intervention designed to help veterans with PTSD in the process of moral and spiritual repair. Qualitative findings are shared from interviews conducted with 18 participants who completed the intervention. Themes are centred around participants’ overall response to their experience in the group; where they are at regarding feelings such as guilt, shame, anger, trust, sense of betrayal, and desire for forgiveness; changes in religious/spiritual beliefs and practices and the experience of moral injury; and if they now find meaning in the trauma. The findings support the need for additional treatment options that address the moral and spiritual aspects of trauma.     

Victims' Stories: A Call to Care

In her book Victims' Stories and the Advancement of Human Rights, Diana Meyers offers a careful analysis of victims' stories as a narrative genre, and she argues that stories in this genre function as a call to care: they both depict a moral void and issue a moral demand, thereby fostering the development of a culture of human rights. This article, while finding Meyers's articulation of this idea compelling, questions Meyers's account of how victims' stories do their moral work. Whereas Meyers argues that victims' stories are complete narratives, characterized by a distinctive form of closure, it suggests that the moral power of victims' stories may lie in part in their open‐endedness or lack of closure. In telling their stories, victims engage their audiences in a new moral relationship and implicitly give them a role to play in bringing about the moral (and narrative) closure they seek.     

Religious belief,ethics, biological principles and assisted conception

New reproductive technologies present ethical challenges to religious believers. In order to distinguish beneficial applications from harmful ones, believers should be guided by religious teachings and also be aware of current scientific knowledge. In this paper relevant spiritual principles from Baha'i writings are outlined and it is suggested that Christians and Muslims may identify similar principles in their own sacred texts and religious authorities. Medical procedures in assisted conception are also described, and it is explained that biological development from gametogenesis to birth is a continuum of processes rather than a series of events. It is suggested that ethical debates about the moral status of the embryo and related ethical issues do not lead to agreement on a single spiritually significant point in development, but in the current state of knowledge it can be argued that individuation at about fourteen days is of major significance. Striving for an absolute position should be avoided as scientific knowledge is relative and will change in the future.     

“Strengthening the Moral Compass”: The Effects of MDMA (“Ecstasy”) Therapy on Moral and Spiritual Development

This paper argues that therapy with the drug MDMA (also known as Ecstasy) can have positive results in pain reduction for post-traumatic stress disorder and can also encourage moral development and the growth of compassion as well as religious and spiritual insight. Today, small-scale drug trials of MDMA are being performed in a highly controlled clinical environment without any spiritual or moral interpretative framework to help the subjects understand their experiences. Such a framework could help patients integrate and find meaning in the intense, traumatic experiences they have undergone. Pastoral counselors, psychologists, and religious professionals might find it useful to explore this form of therapy further.     

Leo Tolstoy the spiritual educator

This paper considers the often overlooked religious and educational works of the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910). After outlining Tolstoy's life, religious and educational views, it is argued that Tolstoy has much to offer spiritual educators today. In particular, it suggests Tolstoy's insistence on the absolute and eternal nature of spiritual and moral truths, coupled with a free and heuristic pedagogy, are key ingredients of an authentic spiritual education.     

Tacit Knowledge and Spiritual Pedagogy

Michael Polanyi recognized the relevance of his theory of tacit knowledge to all areas of human understanding, including the religious, spiritual and moral domains. Nonetheless, few if any efforts have attempted to extend his theory's implications into the formulation of a spiritual epistemology. This article examines the possible implications of the concept of tacit knowledge advanced by Polanyi for the development of a spiritual epistemology. Furthermore, due to the relation Polanyi described between a skill and the tacit element of understanding, there are additional implications drawn out in this article for the formulation of a corresponding spiritual pedagogy     

Fundamentalism

We should never assume that moral outrage provoked by the violation of traditional religious values is a mere reflection of secular grievances of some kind, but we should recognize that such outrage is often meshed with nationalistic and social grievances. If we take the religious Zionist militancy of some Israeli settlers (who do not see themselves as settlers), their political activities have focussed primarily on settling, and opposing the withdrawal from, the territories that Israel occupied in 1967 rather than on moral issues like abortion, homosexuality and pornography. Militant Islamic movements often stress their opposition to Western domination as much moral issues concerning personal conduct. The Shas movement in Israel is fueled in part by the resentment of Israeli Jews of Middle Eastern origin (the Mizrahim or Sephardim) towards Jews of European origin. All these movements can be said to have a ‘fundamentalist’ dimension insofar as they insist on strict conformity to sacred texts and on a moral code based on them, but focus exclusively or even primarily on this dimension of these movements is to ignore some of the crucial sources of their political appeal. With respect to the much discussed issue of bias in the comparative study of ‘fundamentalism’, it is important to avoid idealization as well as demonization. While it is important to correct popular stereotypes about religious conservatives, it is also important not to gloss over the very real problems associated with movements that demand that civil law be based on sacred law.     

Fundamentalism

We should never assume that moral outrage provoked by the violation of traditional religious values is a mere reflection of secular grievances of some kind, but we should recognize that such outrage is often meshed with nationalistic and social grievances. If we take the religious Zionist militancy of some Israeli settlers (who do not see themselves as settlers), their political activities have focussed primarily on settling, and opposing the withdrawal from, the territories that Israel occupied in 1967 rather than on moral issues like abortion, homosexuality and pornography. Militant Islamic movements often stress their opposition to Western domination as much moral issues concerning personal conduct. The Shas movement in Israel is fueled in part by the resentment of Israeli Jews of Middle Eastern origin (the Mizrahim or Sephardim) towards Jews of European origin. All these movements can be said to have a ‘fundamentalist’ dimension insofar as they insist on strict conformity to sacred texts and on a moral code based on them, but focus exclusively or even primarily on this dimension of these movements is to ignore some of the crucial sources of their political appeal. With respect to the much discussed issue of bias in the comparative study of ‘fundamentalism’, it is important to avoid idealization as well as demonization. While it is important to correct popular stereotypes about religious conservatives, it is also important not to gloss over the very real problems associated with movements that demand that civil law be based on sacred law.     

Bridging Science and Religion: How Health‐Care Workers as Storytellers Construct Spiritual Meanings

Contrary to the notion that medical science has supplanted religious understandings of human suffering, recent research suggests that health‐care workers like nurses can still portray their confrontations with illness and death in spiritual terms through storytelling. However, scholars have yet to systematically analyze the rhetorical devices used to construct spiritual meanings. Drawing on a symbolic interactionist perspective, we theorize that front‐line health professionals can deploy various rhetorical devices to infuse their workplace interactions with a spiritual significance. We also propose novel fuzzy set analysis techniques for determining which configurations of devices are most important in developing spiritual meanings. This approach was illustrated by examining 173 stories elicited from nurses at a nonsectarian, teaching hospital about encounters at work that significantly impacted their understanding of spirituality. Consistent with our expectations, the way in which nurses tell stories about their experiences not only shapes whether they attach spiritual significance to them, but whether they perceive spirituality and medicine to be compatible. We discuss the implications of our findings for future research on lived religion, conflicting identities, and institutional boundaries.     

Group Therapy, Spiritual Issues, and Vietnam Veterans

This article describes a form of therapy that focuses on the spiritual dimension of the experience of American military veterans. Since definitions of spirituality abound, it is important that therapists be able to work with multiple understandings of spirituality simultaneously. Such veterans often resist facing, much less integrating, the spiritual dimension of their experience in therapy. A process is described that uses a VA Chaplain as a co-therapist on a monthly basis in an ongoing group. Telling Biblical stories and parables, in the context of therapy, is reported as a valuable means to enable clients to deal with their spiritual issues.     

Spiritual,Religious, Nonspiritual,and Nonreligious Narratives in Marginalized Older Adults: A Typology of Coping Styles

SUMMARY

Narrative therapy is an important tool in the phenomenological framing of life events with older clients. Seventy-nine older adults who lived independently in four subsidized high-rise housing facilities in Chicago were interviewed in a research project about managing life challenges. Cases represent four types in a spiritual-religious typology: religious and spiritual, religious only, spiritual only, and neither religious nor spiritual (Zinnbauer, 1997). This article explores how older adults managed adversity and maintained a sense of self-efficacy. Findings indicate that older adults use many references to religion and spirituality in their narratives, either embracing these domains or defining themselves in contrast to them. Narrative therapy suggests that the implications of religious and spiritual resources addressed in client stories may reinforce coping capacity and promote aging well.     

The phenomenology of respect: with special attention to Kant,Scheler, and Confucianism

In this paper, I focus on analyzing the manifestation and significance of respect. I first illustrate the two (or three) meanings of jing 敬 and their connection in Confucian classical texts, which is helpful to understand the Confucian phenomenology of respect. The two (or three) meanings are (1) seriousness as a mind-state and (2) respect (and attention) as an intentional feeling. After clarifying this point, I undertake a phenomenological analysis of respect, in order to show that respect helps one to achieve moral pursuit. This analysis takes the Kantian notion of respect as a starting point but further is accomplished by the phenomenology of value and feeling. The respect for duties and affairs, the respect for personhood and dignity, and the respect for the worthy with merit motivate one to take moral actions. For example, respect contributes in taking one’s duties seriously, appreciating human beings’ spiritual values and good tendencies even when they have not been actualized, supporting the worthy to play a role (offering them important positions), and emulating the worthy to make a contribution and serve others. In Subsequently, I clarify how respect helps one to achieve religious pursuit in one form of Christianity, in light of Max Scheler’s discussion on humility and reverence. Through revering God one respects others; through serving God and participating in God’s humble spirit one serves others. I elucidate the Confucian classics’ discussions on religious experience, in order to show how respect helps one to achieve religious pursuit in one form of Confucianism, and how it is similar and different from Max Scheler’s clarification. The concrete relation between respect and li 禮 in the Confucian tradition will be treated in another work.     

Cultural Dimensions of Early Pregnancy Loss: Spiritual and Religious Issues

Nearly one in five clinically confirmed pregnancies ends in a loss before 20 weeks (Bardos et al., 2015). Despite the prevalence of miscarriage, many women and partners experience a lack of acknowledgment and support while also encountering complicated concerns related to the intersection of perinatal loss, culture, religious and spiritual issues, medical treatment, their reproductive stories, and grief (Randolph et al., 2015). Counselors working with these clients must address complex cultural considerations. As such, we review key cultural and religious/spiritual issues related to early pregnancy loss and offer recommendations for practice based on the current literature in the context of the Association for Spiritual, Ethical, and Religious Values in Counseling (2009) counseling competencies.     

Of Fish,Butterflies and Birds: Relativism and Nonrelative Valuation in the Zhuangzi

I argue that the main theme of the Zhuangzi is that of spiritual transformation. If there is no such theme in the Zhuangzi, it becomes an obscure text with relativistic viewpoints contradicting statements and stories designed to lead the reader to a state of spiritual transformation. I propose to reveal the coherence of the deep structure of the text by clearly dividing relativistic statements designed to break down fixed viewpoints from statements, anecdotes, paradoxes and metaphors designed to lead the reader to a state of spiritual transformation. Without such an analysis, its profound stories such as the butterfly dream and the Great Sage dream will blatantly contradict each other and leave us bereft of the wisdom they presage. Unlike the great works of poetic and philosophic wisdom such as the Dao de Jing and the Symposium, the Zhuangzi will be reduced to a virtually unintelligible, lengthy, disjointed literary ditty, a potpourri of paradoxical puzzles, puns and parables, obscure philosophical conundrums, monstrous interlocutors and historical personages used as mouthpieces authoritatively arguing on behalf of viewpoints humorously opposite to what they historically held.     

Exegesis,Postmodernism, and Auschwitz 1

Based on material consisting of interviews, we ask how this material sheds light on religion's performance regarding moral competence. Four questions structure the study: Firstly, how do informants articulate moral insights and reasons for actions, practices or personal ideals in religious terms? Secondly, how do they articulate and express religious beliefs in moral terms? Thirdly we discuss theoretically how these ways of articulating moral insights in religious terms, and vice versa, can be linked to the notion of moral competence, and as a possible indication of “religion's performance outside itself”. Finally, we ask how the connection between religion and moral competence identified through the discussion in the third point can be further interpreted in light of the informants’ perceptions of religious contexts and communities where they locate themselves and with which they identify. This provides a more nuanced understanding of how contextual embeddedness conditions moral competence, and the potential performance of religion in that respect.     

Dreams,spirituality, and root metaphors

The subject of dreams and spirituality has received a great deal of attention in recent years. It has not, however, been seriously examined by religious studies scholars; thus, our ability to explore the spiritual potentials of dreams has been left sadly undeveloped. This essay attempts to improve that understanding. The concept ofroot metaphors will be presented as a means of developing a sophisticated, critical understanding of dreams and spirituality. Three dreams in which root metaphors emerge to provide important spiritual meanings for the dreamer will be discussed. Some practical guidelines, oriented around the model ofplaying with dreams, will also be presented to help make the spiritual dimension of dreams more accessible to psychotherapists, pastoral counselors, and lay people.A member of the Board of Directors of the Association for the Study of Dreams, and Chairman of the ASD Education Committee.     

Religion in Contemporary Senegal

Senegal is usually classified as 90% Muslim and 5% Christian. But Senegal’s dominant religious imagination is far different from anything suggested by classical labels like ‘Muslim’ or even ‘Sufi Brotherhoods’. The pervasive religious imagination sees spiritual forces at play everywhere and understands causality primarily in spiritual terms. These spiritual forces can be manipulated by individuals gifted with such powers (marabouts), positively for one’s advancement or negatively to counter or even bring down competitors or opponents. This enchanted religious imagination, often given an Islamic character, is obtrusive in Senegal’s major sports: lutte avec frappe and football. It is inescapable in politics, as politicians admit their recourse to marabouts and even more often accuse opponents of it. For women maraboutage is particularly employed for domestic realities: a husband, children, domestic security. The courts regularly feature cases arising from this imagination. The phenomenon merits research, not just to clarify the nature of Senegal’s religion itself, but also for its effects on the country’s socio-political development generally.