Mortality and Re-enchantment: Conscious Dying as Individualized Spirituality

The emergence of conscious dying in modern society suggests that the redefinition of death as consciousness transference not only challenges the fear of death, but also empowers a personal approach to dying moments. It can be considered a form of individualized spirituality, because the meaning of consciousness transference is not exclusively rooted in institutionalized meanings of the sacred, but redefines the sacred in highly individualistic terms. This change in attitudes towards death reflects a process of re-enchantment concomitant with the individualism of the New Age.     

New Age Commodification and Appropriation of Spirituality

The New Age Movement can be seen as one response to the decline of traditional religion in the West. It conforms to the spiritual pluralism that Bryan Wilson understands as a consequence of secularization. From a New Age perspective, the world's various spiritual traditions are now public property and no longer the private preserve of the parochial groups or religious élites that they once were. Since in this open availability process, the sacred becomes commodified, the general argument allows that it can be bought and sold and thus consumed according to basic free-market principles. The paper explores both the New Age rationale for spiritual commercialization and some of the clashes this engenders with the traditions from which it appropriates.     

The value of observing an autopsy in clergy and pastoral care education

The value of observing an autopsy for clergy and students training to provide pastoral care is that it raises consciousness about death and dying, assists in the participants' healing from loss, provides resources for ministering to the bereaved, builds a network with other professionals responding to death and dying, and evokes viscerally-generated insights into theological questions concerning body and soul, life after death, and concepts of God in relation to death and bereavement.     

Spirituality: The Emergence of a New Cultural Category and its Challenge to the Religious and the Secular

The present article examines spirituality as an emergent new cultural category that challenges the binary opposition of the religious and secular realms of life. The article probes the cultural significance of the popular phrase ‘spiritual, but not religious’ and examines the emergence of New Age spirituality within the framework of late capitalism and postmodern culture. It offers a new perspective on the debate of the secularization theory and re-examines the notions upon which this debate hinges. The article also examines the assessment of New Age spirituality as disguised neo-liberal ideology and proposes that the disparaging condemnations of contemporary spirituality can be seen as a response to its challenge to the entrenched notion that the religious and the secular are universal distinct categories.     

Religious studies and claims of satanic ritual abuse: A rejoinder to Stephen Kent

Care of the dying is likely to be a useful indicator of trends in Christianity, a religion which for centuries has been deeply concerned with the problem of death. The article identifies three approaches to the spiritual dimension in contemporary terminal care—a religious approach, an ecclesiastical approach and an approach that identifies the spiritual as the search for meaning. Though the ecclesiastical approach dominates practice, the ‘meaning’ approach is becoming fashionable and represents a highly individualized, postmodern variety of religion with similarities to the New Age—a surprising conjunction in those hospices with a Christian foundation.     

Reckoning with the last enemy

Developing the ethics of palliative sedation, particularly in contrast to terminal sedation, requires consideration of the relation between body and soul and of the nature of death and dying. Christianly considered, it also requires attention to the human vocation to immortality and hence to the relation between medicine (as aid for the body) and discipline (as aid to the soul). Leaning on Augustine’s rendering of the latter, this paper provides a larger anthropological and soteriological frame of reference for the ethics of palliative sedation, organized by way of nine briefly expounded theses. It argues that palliative sedation, like other elements of medicine, is appropriate where, and only where, it properly orders care for the body to the requirements of care for the soul.     

Death anxiety among New Zealanders: the predictive role of gender and marital status

The aim of this cross-sectional study was to investigate attitudes of New Zealanders towards death and dying. We administered an online version of Collett–Lester Fear of Death Scale and Concerns About Dying Instrument subscales to a representative sample of the New Zealand population. In total, 1001 people responded to the survey. Women reported more anxiousness concerning their own death (p?=?.001) and dying at a young age (p?>?.001). Women also showed more agreement towards spiritual aspects of dying (p?>?.001). Single female respondents worry more about dying (p =?.02) especially when young (p?=?.003). Single participants (p >?.001) aged 18 and 29 (p?>?.001) reported higher anxiety for Items relating to the death of others especially concerning never being able to communicate with the person again. Our findings show that marital status and gender strongly predict higher levels of death anxiety among New Zealanders. This is probably due to the cultural identity of those sampled.     

Value systems in a changing culture

Conclusion We may be experiencing the last gasps of a once brilliant culture that is worn out and dying. Indeed, it seems to have a subconscious death wish, but the end is nowhere in sight. We may have to spend a little more time in this transitional period before the dominant sensate culture is balanced by a culture that will not disavow sensory truth, but that will rediscover the truth of faith with God as the center. Then and only then will the new day come to birth. Call it Idealistic (Sorokin) or the Age of Aquarius, or whatever you will; it will be a time of spiritual perception and a time when destructive aggression will be changed to creative assertion for the good of all mankind.     

Nature and Self in New Age Pilgrimage

Several scholars have argued that New Age spirituality is best understood as a form of ‘self-spirituality’ and as an expression of the consumer capitalist tendency to commodify all things, in the process converting religion into a ‘spiritual marketplace’. This article examines the phenomenon of New Age pilgrimage, especially pilgrimage to natural ‘power places’, with a focus on New Age practices at Sedona, Arizona, USA. The author assesses New Age notions of sacred space, nature, and the self, and compares pilgrim practices and sensorial interactions with Sedona's red rock landscape to forms of tourist practice and commodification more prevalent in Sedona. He argues that New Age pilgrimage, in theory and sometimes in practice, rejects the consumerist impulse, and that the New Age ‘self’ is both more open-ended and ‘postmodern’, and less central to New Age practice, than is suggested by the characterisation of New Age as ‘self-spirituality’.     

New age advice: ticket to happiness?

The ‘New Age’ movement emerged in the second half of the 20th century and New Age ideas became the vogue in the Western world. New Age is much concerned with personal quality of life and offers both a philosophy of life and various therapeutic practices, presumed to raise happiness. This paper first describes the main recommendations to be found in New Age books. Next it considers the probable effects on happiness of these, by examining both the theoretical plausibility and the empirical conditions of happiness. This paper concludes that several recommendations are likely to produce beneficial consequences. It is argued, however, that the advice will not fit everybody equally well and that some New Age practices may reduce happiness, e.g., practices that undermine a realistic outlook on reality.     

The Charm of Disenchantment: A Quest for the Intellectual Attraction of Secularization Theory

In the course of Western history, philosophy has proven to be an active participant in the process of secularization. This article seeks to examine that philosophical role more closely. The central question is how the role of philosophy must be rethought in light of the contemporary critique of classical secularization theory. The first part of the article sheds light on the current crisis of secularization theory. Drawing on recent scholarship in the social sciences, it explains why the classical tenets and assumptions of secularization theory are no longer being considered as plausible and empirically grounded hypotheses. Against that background, the second part turns to philosophy. It examines the implications for a philosophical tradition of religious criticism that has consciously operated within this once-undisputed model of secularization. The question is how this critique of religion must be rethought, if its prominent role in the history of modern philosophy can no longer be ascribed to a general secularization of the Western mind. The third and final part attempts to answer this question by focusing on one of the most frequently overlooked, yet most significant and crucial elements in the history of philosophical secularization: the intrinsic intellectual attraction of religious disenchantment.     

Relationships between religiosity and attitudes towards death and dying in a middle-aged sample

Bivariate relationships between each of five components of (Christian) religiosity and each of six variables covering an individual's attitude towards death and dying were examined in a German sample of 93 men and 93 women aged 45–55 years. Most of the variables were assessed both by questionnaire and by means of interview and subsequent content analytical coding. In men, the fear of other persons' death and dying proved to be consistently negatively associated with various aspects of religiosity whereas in women, the fear of one's own dying was consistently inversely related to religiosity. Agreement with the moral standards of the Roman Catholic Church concerning sexuality and birth control was found to be positively correlated with two aspects of the fear of death and dying in women only. Belief in God showed a positive correlation with an attitude of acceptance towards death and dying in men only. Results are discussed within the context of Eysenck's theory of personality.     

THE NEW AGE OF KABBALAH

In recent years, a remarkable revival of interest in Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism has taken place in Israel, the United States and other, mostly Western, countries. This revival, which includes a resurgence of kabbalistic and hasidic doctrines and practices and an integration of kabbalistic themes in various cultural fields, coincides with the emergence of the New Age and other related spiritual and new religious movements in the Western world in the last decades of the twentieth century. New Age themes appear in various contemporary kabbalistic and Neo‐hasidic movements, and there are significant similarities between these movements, the New Age and other recent spiritual and religious revival movements. This article will examine the contemporary revival of Kabbalah and investigate the relationship between contemporary Kabbalah and New Age phenomena. It will demonstrate that central characteristics of the new spiritual culture appear not only in contemporary Kabbalah and Neo‐hasidic groups that explicitly use New Age themes, but also among kabbalistic and hasidic movements that are perceived as presenting more traditional forms of Jewish mysticism. The shared characteristic of contemporary Kabbalah and New Age, it will be argued, are not dependent only on the direct impact of the New Age movements on contemporary Kabbalah, but rather on the postmodern context and nature of both these phenomena. The emergence and constructions of contemporary Kabbalah, the New Age and other related new spiritual movements, which can be described as “postmodern spiritualities”, is dependent on the global economic and social changes in the late twentieth century. This article will claim that these new cultural formations reflect the cultural logic of late global capitalism and respond to the new social conditions in the postmodern era.     

The titration of death: a new sin

..."Titration of death" is the phrase I have used, in private musings and discussions, to express the undertaking of causing or permitting death to occur within carefully delimited parameters. It is, I think, a new form of sin. I distinguish it from a similar enterprise, in principle benign, that we might call "titration of dying," which attempts to manage the dying process. The focus of attention of titration of dying is the experience of the patient prior to death, with little or no concern given to the condition of the cadaver following death. Titration of death, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with producing, at the close of the process, a cadaver that is usable in some manner; and titration of death, per se, has only incidental concern with the dying process.     

Between Retribution and Restoration: Justice and the TRC

Abstract

Having been struck by the Levinasian aspects of J.M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron, this article tries to ‘reveal’ Coetzee’s novel as a Levinasian narration of how the other ruptures a specific subject’s self-regarding egoism, leading the subject to take up its responsibility for the other. Throughout, the concreteness and realism of the novel is considered supplementary to the abstraction of Levinas’s philosophical thought. It is demonstrated how the main character in Age of Iron, Elizabeth Curren, is confronted by the other as a face, has her right to be put into question by the other, experiences guilt for her usurpation of the place of the other, which becomes positive in her assuming responsibility for the other. In awakening to the other, Curren moves from a Heideggerean concern with her own death (she is dying of cancer) towards a Levinasian prioritising of the other’s life over her own. Her coming into contact with the political violence and oppression of late 1980s South Africa adds to and focuses her expiation for the other.     

Death with Dignity: Fifty Years of Soul-Searching

The thesis of this paper is that there has been a gradual liberalization of thinking in the U.S. since the 1950's about what is morally allowable in how individuals control their own dying. The degree of liberalization will be plotted based on changes in public and professional opinion, landmark court cases, publication of books about dying, key players in the public eye, and the emergence of more organizations promoting death with dignity. More recent developments show a growing interest in finding better ways to respond to the needs of the dying. A final section speculates on the future of death with dignity.     

“Everything starts within”: New Age Values,Images, and Language in Israeli Advertising

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the appropriation of New Age values, images, and language by different sectors of the mainstream in a Western society—in Israel. The findings support earlier research about the shift in values in the mainstream of Western societies. Specifically, this is a shift towards the admiration of nature, Far Eastern lore, a search for a ‘balanced’ way of life, and so on, in accordance with New Age values. This article analyzes how, and for what purpose, mainstream advertisements appropriate New Age elements. The analysis of about 100 advertisements from the last decade leads to the conclusion that all mainstream sectors, including relatively conservative ones (such as academic institutions), borrow elements from New Age, but differ in the intensity and form of appropriation: some are interested in simply attracting attention, while others directly appropriate New Age values. This article discusses the differentiation between the receptivity of specific sectors to New Age and explores possible motivations for the use of New Age elements, such as the more conservative sectors’ use of esoteric elements of New Age.     

Oh death,where is thy sting? Reflections on dealing with dying patients

This paper examines the reactions of physicians and other health-professionals when they become involved in decisions about the death of their patients. The way people understand the condition of death has a profound influence on attitudes towards death and dying issues. Four traditional views of death are explored. The problem that physicians have in helping patients die (be it by hastening death through pain control, assisting patients in suicide or by more active means) is analyzed. Physicians, in dealing with such patients, must be mindful of their own, and their patients beliefs as well as mindful of the community in which such dying takes place. They must try to reconcile these often divergent views but can neither paternalistically deny patients their rational will, hide themselves behind an appeal to the law or go against their own deeply held moral views. When such views cannot be reconciled, compassionate transfer to a more compatible physician may be necessary.     

Aquinas on the Immortality of the Soul: Some Reflections

Aquinas's thoughts about the human soul present us with a puzzle. On the one hand, Thomas has been applauded within the analytic tradition as an anti-dualistic thinker, who emphasises the animal nature of human beings and denies that there could be disembodied human persons. Yet on the other hand he holds, as a faithful Catholic theologian, that the human soul survives death, and maintains that the post-mortem soul, prior to its reunification with the body is the subject of characteristically personal intellectual activities. This paper reviews the state of the debate regarding whether these commitments of Aquinas's can be reconciled, and concludes that they cannot in his own terms. However, a recognisably thomist approach to the post-mortem survival of the soul is available, proceeding on the basis that to be rationally ensouled is to have a life-story.