Spirituality in the Treatment of Alcoholism: A Worldview Approach

To consider alcoholism an addiction with a spiritual dimension has historically posed a problem for the logical positivism and egalitarian orientations of most Western-trained therapists and academics. Many of these professionals argue that to define alcoholism as including a spiritual component invites nonscientific if not mystical approaches to treatment. For this reason, it has been difficult to legitimize a definition of alcoholism that considers spiritual components to etiology or treatment. In this article, the author suggests that issues of spirituality are an important focus in the treatment of alcohol dependence. To consider spirituality as representative of how one views the world and his or her role in creation may well relieve some of a professional counselor's apprehension about inserting a “theology” into treatment.     

Hermanas de Corazón y Alma

Friendship is a relationship that can traverse generations or be located within a specific era of a person's life. In this article, the author examines the role that her childhood friendship played in shaping her understanding of gender, ethnicity, poverty, immigration, spirituality and family processes. This friendship was during emerging adolescence and helped the author navigate and develop mestiza consciousness. These lessons were reinforced during her graduate training and have influenced her identity as a Chicana feminist therapist and the manner in which she connects with clients in psychotherapy. After presenting the story of her friendship, the author incorporates the theoretical perspectives of Chicana Feminism and Spirita to demonstrate how this friendship has influenced her clinical work with women. Specific themes discussed are language, invisibility, and cultural formulations of gender and spirituality.     

Simone Weil on Labor and Spirit

This essay argues that Simone Weil appropriates Marx's notion of labor as life activity in order to reposition work as the site of spirituality. Rather than locating spirituality in a religious tradition, doctrine, profession of faith, or in personal piety, Weil places it in the capacity to work. Spirit arises in the activity of living, and more specifically in laboring—in one's engagement with materiality. Utilizing Marx's distinction between living and dead labor, I show how Weil develops a critique of capital as a “force” that disrupts the individual's relation to her own work by reducing it to the mere activity of calculable “production.” Capital reduces labor to an abstraction and thereby uproots human subjectivity, on a systemic scale, from its connection to living praxis, or what Weil calls spirituality. Life itself is exchanged for a simulacrum of life. In positioning living labor as spiritual, Weil's work offers a corrective to these deadening practices.     

Beyond totem and idol,the sexuate other

The author interprets idolatry, totemism, sacrilege and taboo through her theory of sexual difference and her study of Eastern spirituality. She argues that the taboo on spirituality in Western culture has cancelled difference, resulting in our current forms of idolatry. Preserving difference, however, would allow the transcendence of the human other to exist. The task of learning to respect difference is central to human spirituality and spiritual progression. The article is a translation of “La transcendance de l’autre” in Autour d’idôlatrie: figures actuelles de pouvoir et de domination, Ed. Bernard Van Meenen, Publications des Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, Brussels: 2003.     

Well-being and Spirituality from a Korean Perspective: Based on the Study of Culture and Subjective Well-being

Criteria for well-being and spirituality are culturally bound. In this article, therefore, the notions of well-being and spirituality were reconsidered from a Korean perspective. Two major conceptual approaches that pertain to “subjective well-being” research in social psychology provide the methodological framework for this study. While “bottom-up” approaches focus on how external events and situations influence happiness, “top-down” approaches center on diverse variables within an individual and his or her culture. Noting the cultural differences between American and Korean self-construals (i.e., independence vs. interdependence), the author argues that Koreans need to construct “top-down” approaches to both well-being and spirituality. Reviewing Robert Emmon’s concept of “spiritual intelligence,” the author also suggests an integrative model for spirituality and well-being in Korea.     

Honoring the Mantis Between Our Toes

Sir Laurens van der Post, friend to Jung and fierce advocate for the Bushmen of the Kalahari, expressed his protean gifts and passionate spirit as a novelist, journalist, statesman, and conservationist. His oeuvre of more than twenty-five published books includes A Mantis Carol, his memoir of a synchronistic series of events that led him to travel from his home in London to visit a New York analyst who had been tantalized for many years by near-nightly dreams of a praying mantis. That visit led him to befriend a young woman who related her childhood relationship with circus performer and family friend Hans Taaibosch, who’d become a magical and precious soul friend to her despite remaining in some ways a profound mystery. Together, she and van der Post pieced together Taaibosch's likely origins as a Kalahari Bushman, whose capacity to experience and give joy van der Post saw as an outgrowth of the deeply earthed spirituality of a people whose god, Mantis, is guided by his dreams. One hallmark of Bushman culture is their ritual dancing, their most important dances being “The Dance of the Little Hunger” for food and “The Dance of the Big Hunger” for meaning. The author describes her own synchronistic encounters with mantises and what they and van der Post taught her about the instinctually healing properties of our embodied relationship with one another, our fellow creatures, our dreams, our bodies, and the earth from which all possibilities are born.     

Toward an Ethical Reflective Practice of a Theory in the Flesh: Embodied Subjectivities in a Youth Participatory Action Research Mural Project

The focus of this paper is to demonstrate how embodied subjectivities shape research experiences. Through an autoethnography of my involvement in a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) after‐school program with low‐income and working‐class youth of Color from predominantly Latinx communities I examined my embodied subjectivities, via an ethical reflective practice, as these surfaced in the research context. Autoethnography is presented as a tool to facilitate an ethical reflective practice that aligns with heart‐centered work. Drawing from an epistemology of a theory in the flesh (Anzaldúa & Moraga, 1981), embodied subjectivities are defined by the lived experiences felt and expressed through the body, identities, and positionalities of the researcher. The article concludes with implications for the development of community psychology competencies that attend to the researcher's embodied subjectivities.     

Integral Psychology: My Spiritually Based Guiding Metatheory of Counseling

This article explains the author's guiding theory of counseling based on her understanding and adaptation of K. Wilber's (2000b) integral psychology (IT). She discusses, from an IT perspective, how the psyche develops and changes and the role of counseling in change. She explains her particular resonance to IT, which she considers an inherently developmental, multicultural, systemic, and spiritual metatheory that brings order to the multiplicity of other counseling theories. The author hopes that readers will find in this article both a useful contribution to their own counseling perspectives and practices and a stimulus for further discourse regarding the infusion of spirituality into counseling.     

Love and Death—and Other Somatic Transactions

This paper both elaborates and interrogates the transactional model of human experience at the center of Shannon W. Sullivan's Living Across and Through Skins. In particular, it highlights the need (especially given her concerns and commitments) to supplement her account with a psychoanalytic reading of our gendered subjectivities. Moreover, it stresses the necessity to focus on such humanly important—and irreducibly somatic—phenomena as grief and eros.     

Moments Out of Time: A family canoes the north woods

This nature essay recounts the author's 10-day canoe trip with her blended family through Algonquin Provincial Park in Canada. Within the narrative, she explores the ways in which a young child's spirituality ('relational consciousness') influence her own adult consciousness. Conversations with her 6-year-old son lead to her to develop the metaphor of radio frequencies to reflect upon the differences between children's and adults' attitudes toward time: solar time; here-and-now time; the human life cycle; historical time; memory time; industrial time; infinity time. In addition to these conversations, the author draws upon several social critics, nature writers, and others. Other themes touched upon include contemplation, the sense of wonder, bodily knowing, the deep self, and time management. The essay closes with the author reflecting on the need to reclaim time in ways that nurture the natural spirituality of childhood.     

Interrogation,Interpretation and Integration of Spirituality: Insights from Sri Aurobindo for “Care for Creation”

This paper brings together three strands of enquiry – interrogation of spirituality, interpretation of spirituality and Sri Aurobindo's integrative spirituality – which form the three natural parts of the paper. In the first part I interrogate the idea and category “spirituality” and argue that this term came to be understood in opposition to the “material” only in medieval times, and thus the common notion of spirituality as opposed to materiality is misplaced. In the second part, in light of George Lindbeck's work, I will explore the question – is it possible for different traditions that interpret spirituality differently to hold a common unifying position? I will argue that if we are to arrive at an understanding of spirituality that will be acceptable to different traditions, then the very conception of spirituality must be informed by all. In the final part, I will argue that Sri Aurobindo's integrative spirituality offers a sufficient rationale for creation‐care by proposing a view of spirituality which, on the one hand, overcomes the spiritual‐material dichotomy, while on the other, contains an implicit guard against imposing its view of spirituality on other traditions. Finally, by bringing Sri Aurobindo into the dialogue I demonstrate how insights from another tradition can be drawn to enrich our understanding of spirituality.     

How Do “Religion” and “Spirituality” Differ? Lay Definitions Among Older Adults

Research and public interest in religion and spirituality is on the rise. Consequently, there is an increasing need for rigorously obtained information on what individuals mean when they use these terms. This study examined how 64 older adults living in three retirement communities (including one Christian‐based community), a relatively understudied population, conceptualize religion and spirituality. Participants defined “religion” and “spirituality,” and their narrative definitions were coded and compared using a framework derived from Hill et al.'s (2000) conceptualization of religion and spirituality. Despite considerable overlap, participants' definitions differed on several dimensions. Participants were more likely to associate religion than spirituality with personal beliefs, community affiliation, and organized practices. Moreover, spirituality appeared to be a more abstract concept than religion, and included nontheistic notions of a higher power.     

Taking spiritual experiences seriously in the religious education classroom: a transrational approach

ABSTRACT

Spiritual experiences are common across religious and non-religious faiths, but schoolchildren are often afraid to share these because they fear ridicule from peers who are convinced religion is irrational. The need to speak about spirituality in religious education is increasingly recognised. Signposts suggests that intercultural understanding implies recognising religious students’ perception of reality and helping others understand it. Religious education in Norway now includes exploration of existential questions as a core element, and in England, making sense of religious, spiritual and mystical experiences has been suggested as a big idea. In this paper, we discuss how the dualistic paradigm of modern science makes it difficult to take spirituality seriously as lived experience and empirical phenomenon. Instead we suggest a transrational approach to explore our multidimensional reality in an intercultural dialogue where insiders and outsiders learn from each other. We also explore examples of transrational research on spiritual phenomena.     

The spirituality of people with late-stage dementia: a review of the research literature,a critical analysis and some implications for person-centred spirituality and dementia care

If spirituality is fundamental to personhood, it must be as integral to the life of a person with dementia as to any other person. In this paper, the author uses a three-stage process to explore the features, meanings and significance of spirituality in late-stage dementia. First, a critical literature review is undertaken to evaluate the present state of research and its methodological limitations. The second stage of the argument comprises a critical analysis of the available models of how spirituality may persist beyond the loss of cognitive and communicative capacity, leading the elucidation of two dimensions to spirituality (duration over time and the role of social space) that can sometimes be overlooked. Finally, these findings are brought to bear on wider questions of how person-centred spiritual care may be offered to people with dementia and the role of shared social values in building spiritual resilience.     

"Wholly Aflame": Erotic Asceticism in the Work of Sara Maitland

Abstract

The writing of the Christian feminist novelist Sara Maitland has explored the interplay of eroticism, masochism and asceticism in women's spirituality. Maitland's 1984 novel Virgin Territory and 1987 essay "Passionate Prayer: Masochistic Images in Women's Experience" condemns how, in patriarchal Christianity, a model of romantic relationship with God, when compounded by the symbolism of women's sinfulness, results in spiritual masochism for women. In her later work, Maitland's writing takes a more ambivalent attitude, wanting to preserve the "otherness" of historical women mystics and martyrs, also admiring the "purity" of the extremity of their devotion. This reflects Maitland's advocating of an excessive and "unsafe" spirituality, given representation in her fiction and in her pursuit of a solitary lifestyle, as explained in 2008's A Book of Silence.     

Beyond doer and done to: an intersubjective view of thirdness

Analytic work based on the intersubjective view of two participating subjectivities requires discipline rooted in an orientation to the structural conditions of thirdness. The author proposes a theory that includes an early form of thirdness involving union experiences and accommodation, called the one in the third, as well as later moral and symbolic forms of thirdness that introduce differentiation, the third in the one. Clinically, the concept of a co-created or shared intersubjective thirdness helps to elucidate the breakdown into the twoness of complementarity in impasses and enactments and suggests how recognition is restored through surrender.     

Four Butterflies: End of Life Stories of Transition and Transformation

In this article, the author discusses her experiences as an Artist In Residence in the Department of Palliative Care and Rehabilitation Medicine at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. Emphasis is placed on the ways in which end of life images and narratives often unfold in the fragile yet powerful space where conceptions of aesthetics and spirituality intersect with critical issues in the medical humanities. Drawing on four vivid case studies, the author examines the ways in which end of life narratives shed valuable light on conceptions of the subtlety of human embodiment; issues of violation, sorrow, and forgiveness; the mystical dimensions of traditional cultural beliefs; and the capacity for perceiving the natural world as a living symbol of grace. In so doing, she explores how the themes of transition and transformation become invested with meaningful existential and symbolic dimensions in artworks that give voice and presence to some of the most vulnerable, and often invisible, members of our society—people at the end of life.     

A Review of Carolyn Chen’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience</Emphasis>

Carolyn Chen’ Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience examines the impact of immigration on the religious practices of Taiwanese American Christians and Buddhists. In particular, the author studies how recent immigrants from Taiwan either convert to evangelical forms of Christianity or identify as explicit Buddhists as a way to remake the self in a particularly American context. By offering a dual tradition focus, the author provides significant insight into the relationship between gender, religious, and ethnic identities for Taiwanese Americans. Reviewing the centrality of religion in the lives of Taiwanese American Christians and Buddhists and its similar function in the lives of Korean American Buddhists, this review essay addresses how Asian American forms of religion and spirituality are reinterpreted to address the complex renegotiation of identities that take place for recent immigrants. This review essay also examines the process of religious conversion by questioning whether the move from one religious tradition to another can be understood as an additive process rather than a complete transition and addressing the impact of conversion on later generations.     

The Assembly as the Body of Christ: A Case Against the Omission of LBW's Offertory Prayers

Abstract : This article examines the offertory prayers in ELW, comparing them to the two prayers found in LBW. The author argues that the prayers in ELW have lost the spirituality of stewardship suggested by the prayers in LBW, and no longer maintain the important connection to Pauline theology, whereby the Christian understands his/her whole life, including time, talents, and money, to be offered back to God as a living sacrifice.     

Revisiting Viktor Frankl: his contributions to the contemporary interest in spirituality and health care

The case is made for location of spirituality to be in the body, and at the same time for the power of the spirit to transcend the body when it is afflicted. The author highlights Viktor Frankl's strongest convictions that one can survive through the shear power of one's spirit. Correspondingly, the promise of resurrection can help a Christian to maintain a vision of life, stay courageous though there may be no hope of tomorrow as we have known it. The author asserts the role of the hospital chaplain in helping the sick person to draw upon his or her spiritual strength to cope with their physical illness or affliction.