The Embodied and Contingent Self in Later Life: A Narrative Understanding

This article examines a narrative understanding of identity and discusses its relevance within the sociocultural contingencies of the postmodern age. Providing an historical overview of understandings of the self, Meador traces the lineage of the self from Augustine through contemporary theories of identity. He focuses on the narrative concept of identity, acknowledging the existence of multiple narratives—those that individuals tell about themselves and those told by others. Finally, he explores the transformative potential available within this context for those in their later years.     

Life Stories and the Psychosocial Construction of Careers

ABSTRACT This paper describes and interprets the narratives that middle-aged businessmen tell about their careers It draws a symbolic connection between these men's careers and the longings and frustrations of their childhood, revealed in part by the characters that populate these men's stories But the connection is also revealed by something more abstract the formal shape of their stories' plot These plots, which emphasize relentless forward movement, are shaped by career culture, which demands constant advancement But advancement is also a psychodynamic symbol It expresses men's aggressive self-aggrandizement, while denying their desire for affection and their vulnerability to rejection The result of this alliance between psychodynamic motives and social practices is that men pursue one type of recognition–that of aggressive achievement–while they systematically disavow their longing for more personal attachment     

Stories Matter: Narrative Themes of Counselor Educators' Religious and Spiritual Competency

Using narrative inquiry, the author explored the multicultural aspects of religious and spiritual experiences, assumptions, and patterns of 9 counselor educators to understand the impact that experiences and beliefs have when supervising and teaching counseling students. A gap exists between counselor standards, ethics, competencies, and practice, because counseling students receive mixed messages about addressing spiritual and religious concerns. Through hermeneutic analysis, 6 themes emerged: (a) religious and spiritual journeys, (b) religious and spiritual practices, (c) relationships, (d) marginalization, (e) modeling, and (f) risk and taboo. Trustworthiness strategies, implications for counselor education, limitations, and directions for future research are described.     

Understanding Stress and Life Satisfaction for Children of Clergy: A Retrospective Study

Because clergy children live within a unique family context, the goal of this study was to examine the individual and family stressors that adult clergy children experience while growing up and how individual and family coping resources, along with the adult clergy children’s perceptions of their experiences or sense of coherence, have affected the perceived life satisfaction. The present study examined the life satisfaction of clergy and non-clergy children, both retrospectively as adolescents and currently as adults, to determine the stability of their perceived life satisfaction over time. Compared to a sample of adult non-clergy children, adult clergy children experienced greater levels of individual and family stress along with a lower sense of coherence and less life satisfaction as adolescents. A path analysis of the model based on family stress theory indicates that sense of coherence provided the greatest total effect on participants’ life satisfaction as adolescents, whereas life satisfaction as adolescents provided the greatest total effect on life satisfaction as adults. These findings provide several implications for research and practice.     

A Narrative Analysis of Sibling Grief

Sibling grief is linked to serious physical and mental health outcomes, yet remains the least researched of all family bereavement. This exploratory study created a shared sibling grief narrative. Open-ended interviews were conducted with 27 participants who lost a sibling. Primary themes included Shared Life: Identity Within the Sibling Arrangement; Sibling Death: Pivotal Moments in Time; Life After Sibling Loss: Emotional Suffering, Life After Sibling Loss: Missing Roles & Changing Relationships; and The Sibling Lives On. The following study findings clarify the overlooked impact that sibling death has on the surviving sibling and demonstrate the crucial need for more sibling loss research.     

A Linguistic Comparison of Letters of Recommendation for Male and Female Chemistry and Biochemistry Job Applicants

Letters of recommendation are central to the hiring process. However, gender stereotypes could bias how recommenders describe female compared to male applicants. In the current study, text analysis software was used to examine 886 letters of recommendation written on behalf of 235 male and 42 female applicants for either a chemistry or biochemistry faculty position at a large U.S. research university. Results revealed more similarities than differences in letters written for male and female candidates. However, recommenders used significantly more standout adjectives to describe male as compared to female candidates. Letters containing more standout words also included more ability words and fewer grindstone words. Research is needed to explore how differences in language use affect perceivers’ evaluations of female candidates. This research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grant #1R01MH071749 to the first author and a University of Arizona grant from the College of Science Millennium Report Oversight Committee awarded to the third author.     

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.     

English for Bible and Theology: Understanding and Communicating Theology Across Cultural and Linguistic Barriers

This article introduces English for Bible and Theology (EBT), an inherently interdisciplinary field that merges English language learning with the content of biblical and theological studies in a context that is, by nature, cross‐cultural. Within this collaboration there exists the possibility not only to enable theological study, but also to enhance it through a focus on personal meaning and its communication, both of which are foundational to the communicative language classroom. That is, EBT seeks both to aid students worldwide in attaining the specialized language and cultural proficiency necessary to access English theological resources and to provide a community in which students can connect theological content to their lives. It is this second aim that provides EBT its relevance across a range of theological contexts, as native English‐speaking students likewise stand to benefit from the application of EBT's principles.     

宽容:在人性比较中透析

在观念学意义上,宽容通常被用来描述对异己的思想和行为容忍的价值准则."宽容"观念被理解的过程,实际上也是附加上不同人性观照、价值立场、人生态度和政治策略的过程.研究核心概念、词汇的语义演变是观念史研究的一个重要传统[1],从语用学的立场分析,一个单词进入不同类型的历史话语系统时,其实映照着特定的社会、历史过程,词义的删减和增生、曲折与转化也是不同价值观的微观呈现.     

情感与人生:伦理学视野的审视

人是情感的动物.人的情感是以本能和欲望为基础,受理智影响和控制的心理感受.人的情感是一个多彩的、复杂的天空,存在着性质、广度、深度和强度的区别.从伦理学的角度看,可以根据是否有利于人的生存,从是否健康、是否丰富、是否持久、是否高尚、是否美好五个维度对人的情感进行价值审视.这五个维度也是情感是否有利于人的生存的五条标准,其中是否健康是底线标准,规定着情感的好坏善恶性质.情感对人生有全面、深刻而直接的影响,可以成为人生幸福的源泉,也可以成为人生痛苦的渊薮.情感需要理智的合理导向和控制,理智与情感以更好生存为取向实现和谐,才会有完整意义上的真正人生,才有人生的幸福.     

Understanding the Linguistic Turn and the Quest for Meaning: Historical Perspectives and Systematic Considerations

Although the linguistic turn is usually described in historical terms this article aims at combing the significant historical transitions with systematic philosophical considerations. Against the background of earlier rationalistic and empiricist trends particular attention is given to the successive epistemic ideals manifest in the conceptual rationalism of the Enlightenment, followed by the historicism of the 19 ^th century and subsequently by the linguistic turn. An assessment of these transitions will explore systematic issues, in particular the relationship between universality and what is individual, the difference between functional laws and type laws, and regarding the limits of concept formation the distinction between conceptual knowledge and concept-transcending knowledge. This distinction enables the introduction of a new understanding of the difference between rationalism and irrationalism. Apart from Dilthey the linguistic turn penetrated also the thought of thinkers such as Freud, Wittgenstein, Frankl, Heidegger, Habermas, Dooyeweerd and Gadamer, all of them (implicitly or explicitly) elaborated the initial criticism raised by Herder, Jacobi, Hamann, Heidegger and Gadamer against Kant‘s Critique of Pure Reason for neglecting language. After briefly referring to the connection between the linguistic turn and the idea of the meaningful construction of reality, the article ends with a concluding remark emphasizing the fact that no single concept-transcending usage of modal (aspectual) terms should be elevated above others or employed at the cost of other equally legitimate idea-statements.     

Narrative,Self-Realization,and the Shape of a Life

Velleman, MacIntyre, and others have argued for the compositional view that lives can be other than equally good for the person who lives them even though they contain all and only the same moments, and that this is explained by their narrative structure. I argue instead for explanation by self-realization, partly by interpreting Siegfried Sassoon’s exemplary life-narrative. I decide between the two explanations by distinguishing the various features of the radial concept of narrative, and showing, for each, either that self-realization is just as good an account, or that we should prefer the self-realization account, of the composition it is supposed to explain. I conclude that, if the shape of a life matters, it matters because some shapes are self-realizations, not because they are narratives.     

奥斯勒的生命书写及其叙事意义

叙事具有强大的人文和人际功能,它能促使主体之间更有效地实现认知上的共识。居丧者的哀伤历程和罹患疾病的患者接受自己生病身份的过程是一个需要通过见证、续写或改写故事来重构人生意义的过程。从奥斯勒创设天堂来信帮助作为居丧者和患者的妻子格蕾丝克服心身疾痛这个故事,发现叙事素养能够帮助临床语境下的多方主体之间构建“同声相应,同气相求”的生命共同体关系。从叙事医学的角度而言,医学是一门综合性的艺术。在“医学是不确定的科学与可能性的艺术”的基础上,医学实践可以理解为需要科学技术知识和叙事人文素养合力的“应用型科学和关系性艺术”。     

抑郁症主要叙事疗法的解析

叙事疗法在治疗抑郁症的过程中,以把人和问题分开的外化思维和“问题从哪里来”的解构思维为基础,从个体监控、家庭监控和社会文化层面的监控三个视角,去追溯困扰抑郁症来访者问题的源头。从而可以有距离地看待“抑郁症”这个问题,提高患者对抑郁症的掌控感和力量感。叙事疗法从患者生命中的闪光点着手,通过寻找抑郁症患者生命中的独特结果,重塑、改写和丰厚抑郁症患者想要的生命故事,从而重建患者的自我身份认同,开启崭新的生命历程,带着新的自我身份认同,从而应对生命中的问题和困难。     

Three Pervasive Presuppositions about Human Life and Ethics Strongly Warrant Analysis

Common philosophical discussions concerning the ethics of human interaction with the biosphere and universe have been significantly informed by certain presuppositions: (1) nature is conquerable; (2) human cultural and social (contrasted with moral) progress is somewhat like a thing, beyond human control, and is inevitable and benevolent; and (3) Homo sapiens is the superior life‐form. Although arguments, such as whether humans should conquer nature, founded upon these presuppositions have sometimes been challenged, each of these three presuppositions wants direct analysis. The three have become so ingrained in professional and everyday discourse that they have mythic proportions, as though beyond question. Because of the weightiness of the relevant philosophical issues, they merit overt analysis. Although they are independent and may be analyzed separately, this article treats them as whole, as they often work together in arguments. After finding substantial problems, the article suggests alternative ways of building sustainable presuppositions in similar territory.