Ethical contexts of healing: Peoplehood and righteousness

Pastoral Psychology -     

Ethical contexts of healing: Ecclesia and praxis

Conclusion We have suggested that the church is called to reflect the Reign of God. To do so it must engage in a process of careful reflection on its confession that Jesus is Lord. This calls for a relativization of all other communities, the recognition of the church as a community in its own right and the rejection of ethical individualism. To be a healing community it will need to discern a response to the mental health needs around us. In the third article in this series, I will focus on the character of healers that might emerge if we were to take more seriously the Reign of God as an ethical culture and the church as a discerning community.     

企业核心竞争力与企业伦理品质

企业真正的核心竞争力来自企业伦理品质所产生的道德实力。企业的道德实力是企业遵循与市场经济理性相适应的道德准则,它一贯尊重和尽力满足利益相关人利益,并与利益相关人和谐交往共同发展而产生的道德凝聚力和影响力。与企业经营实力一样,企业道德实力是可以描述和量度的客观状态。具体可以从顾客忠诚度、员工忠诚度、股东忠诚度、融资资信度、同行联系度、供销稳定度、社区融洽度和社会美誉度等八个方面进行考量。     

Creative ritual: Bridge between mastery and meaning

Many adults who have survived the death by suicide of one or both parents remain victims of unresolved grief responses far into adulthood. This is all too frequently true, despite years of psychotherapy and or/consultations with representatives of various religious persuasions. Adult survivors of childhood parental suicide require an intervention which bridges the psychotherapeutic issues of parental loss and the spiritual issues raised by a sucidal death. The use of creative rituals is just such a response. By linking psychodynamic and spiritual issues, while simultaneously providing a current experiential process, a creative mourning ritual blends the needs of the inner child for mastery of the parental loss and the adult needs for a spiritual/meaning response. Mastery and meaning can concomitantly evolve through the process of designing, and then enacting, a ritual of grief completion. This is particularly effective, since the ritual is designed by the survivor to meet that person's unique needs. This presentation is an example of just such a ritual and will also include a very brief outline for ritual design. This approach would be useful to anyone working with survivors as well as to survivors themselves.     

Doubts on Spirituality: Interpreting Waldorf ritual

To investigate whether some kinds of kindergartens are better than others at bringing order, calm and stability to children's lives is, though not without its problems, fairly straightforward: the kinds of behaviour that count as evidence are relatively uncontroversial. Researchers can apply themselves, without too many qualms, to figuring out how kindergartens do it. Where spiritual development is concerned, because many kindergartens are already differentiated by religious or spiritual orientation - Jewish, Roman Catholic, Muslim, Waldorf, etc. - there is a temptation similarly to focus on how it is achieved. Relationships between the approaches and distinctive methodologies are prime areas for investigation. But such research might be premature. Any answer to the question 'To what extent have children been spiritually changed?' needs some agreement on the kinds of things we take as evidence of spiritual change. There are few signs of such agreement. This presents researchers, and also teachers, with a problem in proving their claims. In this article we try to substantiate this doubt by reflecting on some of our own research on Waldorf education. It too focused on 'how' and identified 'ritual' as a crucial factor in the Waldorf approach but we gradually realized that the epistemological issue was prior and had to be addressed.     

Confucian ritual and modern civility

The Confucian notion of civility has for thousands of years guided all aspects of socio-ethical life in East Asia. Confucians express their central concern for civility in their notion of li, which is commonly translated ‘ritual’ and refers to the conventions and courtesies through which we submit to the socio-ethical order, as we do, for example, in performing sacrifices, weddings, and funerals, and various daily acts of deference. Since the rise of China and other East Asian countries as economic powers, it has been suggested that we have in East Asia a ‘Confucian’ ritual-based culture that is opposed to the law-based culture of the West, a culture of rites opposed to a culture of rights, and that this ritual-based culture can be carried into modernity as another way to secure social harmony. I argue that the values central to Confucian ritual – deference, repayment, and harmony – are incompatible with the freedom enacted in modern civility. It is unlikely, therefore, that Confucian ritual can be carried into modernity and, as some suggest, remedy the fragmentation, and indeed lack of civility, characteristic of modern societies.     

Ambivalence in play and ritual

Life is not breath, but action; to live is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, every part of ourselves which gives us the feeling of our own existence. Rousseau Emile     

Pilgrimage today: the meaning-making potential of ritual

Pilgrimage on the Road to Santiago is flourishing, even in late modern times characterised by detraditionalisation, individualism and pluralism. A large number of these pilgrims is either not explicitly religious at all, or only moderately religious. Why, then, do they submit to this ancient Christian ritual, and what are the psychological consequences? After a short introduction to the study of implicit religiosity and different perspectives on rituals from the past to today, current research on pilgrimage is reviewed and pilgrimage to Santiago is analysed as a personal ritual from a perspective of implicit religiosity. In the psychological theory of implicit religiosity, rituals are identified as one of three universal religious structures (along with myths and experiences of transcending) with strong meaning-making potential. Personal rituals are defined as formalised patterns of action, pointing beyond the actual event to a particular meaning imbued by the actor. Data from 85 pilgrims on the Road to Santiago are presented. Motives for peregrination, base-line sources of meaning, experienced meaningfulness and crises of meaning are reported, as well as changes in sources of meaning, meaningfulness and crises of meaning immediately after the pilgrimage and four months later. The majority of pilgrims (about two third) is motivated by a “need for clarification.” Multidimensional scaling shows that pilgrims either travel for explicitly religious reasons (conviction) or in search of clarification (quest); they either draw motivation from vertical transcendence (religiosity or spirituality) or from apparently purely secular reasons, such as athletic challenge. Religious and spiritual motives are mostly reported by highly religious individuals. A need for clarification is primarily stated by individuals who suffer from a crisis of meaning. Crises of meaning are significantly more frequent among pilgrims before the journey than in the general population. For the entire sample of pilgrims, the meaning-making potential of pilgrimage is supported by the data. Directly after the journey, as well as four months later, pilgrims experience life as significantly more meaningful, and crises of meaning are overcome. Pilgrims also report a strengthened commitment to vertical selftranscendence, horizontal selftranscendence and selfactualisation. These changes occur independently of the motivation for pilgrimage.     

Evaluating ritual efficacy: evidence from the supernatural

Rituals pose a cognitive paradox: although widely used to treat problems, rituals are causally opaque (i.e., they lack a causal explanation for their effects). How is the efficacy of ritual action evaluated in the absence of causal information? To examine this question using ecologically valid content, three studies (N = 162) were conducted in Brazil, a cultural context in which rituals called simpatias are used to treat a great variety of problems ranging from asthma to infidelity. Using content from existing simpatias, experimental simpatias were designed to manipulate the kinds of information that influences perceptions of efficacy. A fourth study (N = 68) with identical stimuli was conducted with a US sample to assess the generalizability of the findings across two different cultural contexts. The results provide evidence that information reflecting intuitive causal principles (i.e., repetition of procedures, number of procedural steps) and transcendental influence (i.e., presence of religious icons) affects how people evaluate ritual efficacy.