Sanctity of the Body and the Relational Paradigm

The individual is in constant interaction with others from birth onwards. The primary experience evolves from the innate need for bodily touch and connection, which form the foundation for the psychobiological structure of the individual. The body’s anatomy is made to yearn for another, for building a home with the body of another. This makes the body the focal instrument, which is discernible already in the mother–child relationship, as well as later in male–female or husband–wife relationships. The body thus provides the most sacred space, and deep within it carries a natural yearning for another, for having a relationship with another. Relationships are the means through which the body can come to full realization.     

Touching the Virgin. On the politics of intimacy in Jean-Luc Godard's Hail Mary

This paper is guided by a conviction common to Godard and Merleau-Ponty: namely, that the special power of art is its ability to show up for us the invisible, what was previously unseen, and thereby to shape intimately, to transform, our own perceptions of the world. Art can thereby bring us into a more intimate contact with reality. With reference especially to Godard's film Hail Mary, the paper argues that Godard distinguishes between two ways of approaching the human body: on the one hand, it can be approached as prostituted thing – which has the effect of developing in the prostituted person a kind of absence to herself and to others, a dispossession of herself and an anesthesia to her own and others' affective life. On the other hand, the human body can be approached as sacredly human – in which case we will touch that body very differently, expressing our presence to its embodied divinity precisely by withdrawing our touch and leaving space for its own desires. It is proposed that Godard's filmmaking aims at precisely this kind of withdrawal and letting be, and that thereby he awakens his viewers to, makes them more intimate with, the sacred in the human.     

Viewing a face (especially one's own face) being touched enhances tactile perception on the face

Observing touch on another person's body activates brain regions involved in tactile perception, even when the observer's body is not directly stimulated. Previous work has shown that in some synaesthetes, this effect induces a sensation of being touched. The present study shows that if perceptual thresholds are experimentally manipulated, viewing touch can modulate tactile experience in nonsynaesthetes as well. When observers saw a face being touched by hands, rather than a face being merely approached by hands, they demonstrated enhanced detection of subthreshold tactile stimuli on their own faces. This effect was specific to observing touch on a body part, and was not found for touch on a nonbodily stimulus, namely, a picture of a house. In addition, the effect was stronger when subjects viewed their own faces rather than another person's face. Thus, observing touch can activate the tactile system, and if perceptual thresholds are manipulated, such activation can result in a behavioral effect in nonsynaesthetes. The effect is maximum if the observed body matches the observer's body.     

Step into liquid: Rites,transcendence and transgression in the modern construction of the social sacred

This essay looks at the construction and transformation of the notion of sacred space in the twentieth century. The notions of transgression and lived moments (or everyday rites), as put forth by numerous writers and architects, are examined as an alternative vision of the sacred and spatial ontology that relies upon material conditions and relations as its source. In particular, it focuses on the emergence of this social spatial category through the work of the Collège de Sociologie a group of ethnologists, philosophers, writers and artists (Georges Bataille was a founder) who convened bi-weekly at a Paris café between 1937 and 1939 in the hope of constructing a sacred sociology. This group's activity provides the groundwork for understanding how the social sacred emerges as a category of spatial practice in the late twentieth century, and how the categories of events and rites are explored by the youthful avant-garde in architecture that emerge from the 1960s. In particular, the architect Bernard Tschumi's writings on transgression and event provide a direct link to the sacred sociology of the Collège as he is a close reader of Bataille's, and the work of the European radical avant-garde in architecture from the late 1960s and early 1970s helps to elucidate how the Collegians call for a sacred sociology is manifest in what I call the sacred social. I proposes this new category of the ‘social sacred’ to explain a spatial category which emerges in the twentieth century, and which we can use to understand how space, architecture, and urbanism help to define and engender this new sacred category.     

Sacred and secret stories in professional knowledge landscapes: learner agency in teacher professional learning

Set in a schooling practitioner research context, this article critiques instrumental forms of teacher professional development. An account of teacher professional learning and development is provided, as an inter-relational construct, where teachers reflect on practice to inquire into their students’ learning and foster their own and others specific interests and talents in creative ways. In an Aotearoa/New Zealand context, teachers are mandated to inquire into what their students need to know and understand, the strategies required for teachers to attain these learning goals, and how effective the approach implemented is in enhancing student learning. Emerging from qualitative case study research, a teacher’s narrative account of a student-initiated critical thinking episode in a secondary science classroom is analysed to demonstrate sacred, secret and cover stories of professional knowledge landscapes. Findings highlight the importance of agentic teacher-enacted forms of practitioner inquiry that support critical and collaborative reflective practice.     

ACHIEVING A SCIENCE OF SACRED DOCTRINE*

Aquinas claims that sacred doctrine is a science, or scientia. All scientiae involve demonstrations containing principles which yield conclusions that are necessary and certain. The principles leading to sacred scientia are the articles of faith. Those articles are contained in Scripture and constitute the premises of demonstrations the conclusions of which form sacred doctrine's content. Because of those articles' divine origin, we can expect them to yield conclusions the truth of which is guaranteed. According to William Abraham, however, Aquinas must demonstrate Scripture's divine origin as a condition for achieving a sacred scientia. In the absence of such a demonstration, we cannot be certain that the articles contained in Scripture are God‐breathed, nor can we be certain that the conclusions deduced from them belong to sacred doctrine. Abraham argues that Aquinas's putative demonstration of Scripture's divine origin fails and—consequently—so does his attempt to establish a sacred scientia. In this paper, I will show that Aquinas never intended to provide such a demonstration, nor does he need to in order to secure sacred doctrine's status as a scientia. Furthermore, I will show that achieving sacred scientia is not, pace Abraham, an epistemological undertaking but a spiritual discipline that eventuates in knowledge of and love for God.     

Affective touch modulates the rubber hand illusion

Introduction

Humans experience touch as pleasant when this occurs with a certain velocity (1–10cm/s). Affective, pleasant touch is thought to be mediated by a distinct neural pathway consisting of un-myelinated tactile afferents (C tactile fibers) that respond to stroking with a low velocity on the hairy skin. As pleasant touch provides additional information on bodily signals we hypothesized that, compared to regular touch, pleasant touch would have a stronger effect on body ownership as measured through induction of the rubber hand illusion (RHI).

Methods

Two experiments involving the RHI were conducted. In the first experiment, the effects of stroking velocity (3 cm/s and 30 cm/s) and stroking material (soft/rough) on the RHI were tested. In the second experiment, the effect of an additional stroking velocity (0.3 cm/s) and side of stimulation (hairy and glabrous) was examined.

Results

The first experiment showed that low velocity stroking in combination with a soft material was not only regarded as most pleasant but also resulted in an enhanced RHI on proprioceptive drift and temperature measurements. In the second experiment, we confirmed that stroking with a velocity of 3 cm/s resulted in a larger RHI in terms of proprioceptive drift. In addition, compared to regular touch, pleasant touch of the hairy skin resulted in a larger proprioceptive drift, while similar stroking on the glabrous side of the skin did not induce a stronger effect of RHI on proprioceptive drift.

Conclusion

Our data suggest that pleasant touch modulates the body representation which is consistently reflected in a larger proprioceptive drift. Our data also suggest that C tactile fibers are likely to be involved in the modulation of body ownership.     

Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (Book)

This study applies the construct of sanctification to college students' perceptions of their bodies. Students (N = 289) completed measures on the extent to which they viewed their bodies as being a manifestation of God (e.g., "My body is a temple of God") and as characterized by sacred qualities (e.g., holy, blessed, sacred). Greater levels of both forms of sanctification were related to higher levels of health-protective behaviors, strenuous exercise, satisfaction with one's body, and disapproval of alcohol consumption as well as to lower levels of illicit drug use, unhealthy eating practices, and alcohol consumption. Viewing the body as having sacred qualities was also related to lower rates of binge eating and illicit drug use.     

Touching at depth: The potential of feeling and connection

The senses are often talked of as bodily senses. Although more recently there has been valuable work on the cross-over of the senses, it is still common for our understanding of the senses to be located in the finite body: the body that hears, smells, sees, tastes and touches. There is a defined subjectivity and identity logic here which ontologically impacts on how we feel, particularly in the context of touch. For example, if it is my body that touches, it must be my body that feels. Or, if my body touches another, that body feels my touch and vice versa. Emphasis is on intersubjectivity and separate bodies/senses rather than on feeling, connection and emotion. This paper explores affective and embodied meanings of touch. It moves beyond common assumptions underlying most literature on touch, assumptions which regard touch as physical and visible. Touch cannot be viewed primarily as a bodily sense for it then emanates from a finite body, a body which is separate, subjective and contained. This type of touch (or body) stifles the potential for feeling and connection. When touch is viewed as ‘flesh’ or ‘mi’, however, we become aware of a non-finite logic of the world which helps us reassess touch. There is a sensuous and embodied connection in flesh that is at the ‘heart’ of this type of touch. This paper develops the notion of a ‘touching at depth’ which helps us move beyond the senses in a bodily (and therefore finite) capacity and explore an encompassing space and relationship in touch that brings out the potential of feeling, connection and emotion.     

Social touch alters newborn monkey behavior

In humans, infants respond positively to slow, gentle stroking—processed by C-tactile (CT) nerve fibers—by showing reductions in stress and increases in eye contact, smiling, and positive vocalizations. More frequent maternal touch is linked to greater activity and connectivity strength in social brain regions, and increases children’s attention to and learning of faces. It has been theorized that touch may prime children for social interactions and set them on a path towards healthy social cognitive development. However, less is known about the effects of touch on young infants’ psychological development, especially in the newborn period, a highly sensitive period of transition with rapid growth in sensory and social processing. It remains untested whether newborns can distinguish CT-targeted touch from other types of touch, or whether there are benefits of touch for newborns’ social, emotional, or cognitive development. In the present study, we experimentally investigated the acute effects of touch in newborn monkeys, a common model for human social development. Rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta), like humans, are highly social, have complex mother-infant interactions with frequent body contact for the first weeks of life, making them an excellent model of infant sociality. Infant monkeys in the present study were reared in a neonatal nursery, enabling control over their early environment, including all caregiver interactions. One-week-old macaque infants (N = 27) participated in three 5-minute counter-balanced caregiver interactions, all with mutual gaze: stroking head and shoulders (CT-targeted touch), stroking palms of hands and soles of feet (Non-CT touch), or no stroking (No-touch). Immediately following the interaction, infants watched social and nonsocial videos and picture arrays including faces and objects, while we tracked their visual attention with remote eye tracking. We found that, during the caregiver interactions, infants behaved differently while being touched compared to the no-touch condition, irrespective of the body part touched. Most notably, in both touch conditions, infants exhibited fewer stress-related behaviors—self-scratching, locomotion, and contact time with a comfort object—compared to when they were not touched. Following CT-targeted touch, infants were faster to orient to the picture arrays compared to the other interaction conditions, suggesting CT-targeted touch may activate or prime infants’ attentional orienting system. In the No-touch condition infants attended longer to the nonsocial compared to the social video, possibly reflecting a baseline preference for nonsocial stimuli. In contrast, in both touch conditions, infants’ looked equally to the social and nonsocial videos, suggesting that touch may influence the types of visual stimuli that hold infants’ attention. Collectively, our results reveal that newborn macaques responded positively to touch, and touch appeared to influence some aspects of their subsequent attention, although we found limited evidence that these effects are mediated by CT fibers. These findings suggest that newborn touch may broadly support infants’ psychological development, and may have early evolutionary roots, shared across primates. This study illustrates the unique insight offered by nonhuman primates for exploring early infant social touch, revealing that touch may positively affect emotional and attentional development as early as the newborn period.     

Attenuating the haptic horizontal—vertical curvature illusion

In a number of experiments, blindfolded subjects traced convex curves whose verticals were equal to their horizontal extent at the base. Overestimation of verticals, as compared with horizontals, was found, indicating the presence of a horizontal-vertical illusion with haptic curves, as well as with visible curves. Experiment 1 showed that the illusion occurred with stimuli in the frontal plane and with stimuli that were flat on the table surface in vision and touch. In the second experiment, the stimuli were rotated, and differences between vision and touch were revealed, with a stronger illusion in touch. The haptic horizontal-vertical illusion was virtually eliminated when the stimuli were bimanually touched using free exploration at the body midline, but a strong illusion was obtained when curves were felt with two index fingers or with a single hand at the midline. Bimanual exploration eliminated the illusion for smaller 2.5- through 10.2-cm stimuli, but a weakened illusion remained for the largest 12.7-cm patterns. The illusion was present when the stimuli were bimanually explored in the left and right hemispace. Thus, the benefits of bimanual exploration derived from the use of the two hands at the body midline combined with free exploration, rather than from bimanual free exploration per se. The results indicate the importance of haptic exploration at the body midline, where the body can serve as a familiar reference metric for size judgments. Alternative interpretations of the results are discussed, including the impact of movement-based heuristics as a causal factor for the illusion. It was suggested that tracing the curve’s peak served to bisect the curve in haptics, because of the change in direction.     

Symptoms and selection bias: The influence of selection towards specialist care on the relationship between symptoms and diagnoses

Observations with respect to the relationship between symptoms and diseases can seriously be biased by selection phenomena. This selection may occur from the general population, via consultation behavior, diagnostic and therapeutic activities of the general practitioner, and by referral. Relationships may be suggested and reproduced even if they do not exist in unselected populations, as a product of diagnostic routines. Correction for selection bias can only be achieved by choosing proper comparison groups. While this can be done in a general practice setting, this is almost impossible after referral, as is demonstrated in this paper. Surprisingly, the most unbiased estimation of the relationship between symptoms and diseases after referral can be made from patient groups that are referred for reason unrelated to the disease under study. Definitive answers for the general practitioner can only be provided by prospective studies from a primary care setting. In the meantime, however, biased relationships can be maintained by teaching knowledge derived from a specialist experience.     

Reach out to one and you reach out to many: Social touch affects third‐party observers

Casual social touch influences emotional perceptions, attitudes, and behaviours of interaction partners. We asked whether these influences extend to third‐party observers. To this end, we developed the Social Touch Picture Set comprising line drawings of dyadic interactions, half of which entailed publicly acceptable casual touch and half of which served as no‐touch controls. In Experiment 1, participants provided basic image norms by rating how frequently they observed a displayed touch gesture in everyday life and how comfortable they were observing it. Results implied that some touch gestures were observed more frequently and with greater comfort than others (e.g., handshake vs. hug). All gestures, however, obtained rating scores suitable for inclusion in Experiments 2 and 3. In Experiment 2, participants rated perceived valence, arousal, and likeability of randomly presented touch and no‐touch images without being explicitly informed about touch. Image characters seemed more positive, aroused, and likeable when they touched as compared to when they did not touch. Image characters seemed more negative and aroused, but were equally likeable, when they received touch as compared to when there was no physical contact. In Experiment 3, participants passively viewed touch and no‐touch images while their eye movements were recorded. Differential gazing at touch as compared to no‐touch images emerged within the first 500 ms following image exposure and was largely restricted to the characters' upper body. Gazing at the touching body parts (e.g., hands) was minimal and largely unaffected by touch, suggesting that touch processing occurred outside the focus of visual attention. Together, these findings establish touch as an important visual cue and provide novel insights into how this cue modulates socio‐emotional processing in third‐party observers.     

Insulting the sacred in a multicultural society: the conviction of Jussi Halla-aho under the Finnish religious insult section

This article analyses the most well-known and legally important contemporary Finnish religious insult case: the case of the politician Jussi Halla-aho. Concluded in 2012, the said legal process resulted in a conviction due to Halla-aho’s blog post about Islam and its sacred figures. Using a discursive framing, the article argues that the contemporary religious insult cases can, in fact, be political struggles involving various interests in a multicultural society. Building on broadly Durkheimian theorisation of the sacred, it also argues, that besides the Islamic objects set apart as sacred in the process, ‘secular’ ideals or values, such as the public order, tolerance, equality, and freedom of religion are also constructed as such and protected by the officials. By protecting Islam, the courts, in fact, aimed to protect a ‘secular sacred order’ against societal threats.     

Beyond Reductionism: Reinventing the Sacred

We have lived under the hegemony of the reductionistic scientific worldview since Galileo, Newton, and Laplace. In this view, the universe is meaningless, as Stephen Weinberg famously said, and organisms and a court of law are “nothing but” particles in morion. This scientific view is inadequate. Physicists are beginning to abandon reductionism in favor of emergence. Emergence, both epistemological and ontological, embraces the emergence of life and of agency. With agency comes meaning, value, and doing, beyond mere happenings. More organisms are conscious. None of this violates any laws of physics, but it cannot be reduced to physics. Emergence is real, and the tiger chasing the gazelle are real parts of the real universe. We live, therefore, in an emergent universe. This emergence often is entirely unpredictable beforehand, from the evolution of novel functionalities in organisms to the evolution of the economy and human history. We are surrounded on all sides by a creativity that cannot even be prestated. Thus we have the first glimmerings of a new scientific worldview, beyond reductionism. In our universe emergence is real, and there is ceaseless, stunning creativity that has given rise to our biosphere, our humanity, and our history. We are partial co-creators of this emergent creativity. It is our choice whether we use the God word. I believe it is wise to do so. God can be our shared name for the true creativity in the natural universe. Such a view invites a new sense of the sacred, as those aspects of the creativity in the universe that we deem worthy of holding sacred. We are not logically forced to this view. Yet a global civilization, hopefully persistently diverse and creative, is emerging. I believe we need a shared view of God, a fully natural God, to orient our lives. We need a shared view of the sacred that is open to slow evolution, because rigidity in our view of the sacred violates how our most precious values evolve and invites ethical hegemony. We need a shared global ethic beyond our materialism. I believe a sense of God as the natural, awesome creativity in the universe can help us construct the sacred and a global ethic to help shape the global civilization toward what we choose with the best of our limited wisdom.     

Conscious mind – conscious body

The incorporation of body awareness and touch techniques within analytic treatment is the main theme of this paper. Beginning with a personal experience of the oneness of body and psyche, the author considers Jung's observation of the physiological accompaniments of emotional reactions and his understanding of body as both shadow and ground. The author proposes a new model of analytic treatment that embraces both the verbal and imaginal as well as the non-verbal and somatic aspects of psyche. She describes the three elements of her approach: 1) reading what the body is saying about psyche; 2) using the body as an organ of perception; 3) using touch as a therapeutic tool. The effects of the taboo around touch are considered. Clinical examples throughout the paper demonstrate how somatic awareness and the use of touch promote the analytic process.     

Finding the Sacred in Unexpected Places: Religious Evanescence and Evocation

This address examines the complex processes whereby cultural understandings of the sacred and, consequently, religious identity are negotiated in the contemporary social world. Two key processes of negotiation are delineated, namely, religious evanescence and religious evocation. Religious evanescence reflects efforts to deemphasize or sever connections to the sacred. By contrast, religious evocation consists of activities that emphasize or enhance linkages to sacred things. Groups actively manage their relationship to the sacred, and thus their religious identities, by engaging in evanescent or evocative practices. Moreover, the rejection of sacred things (evanescence) and the affirmation of them (evocation) are not mutually exclusive processes. They can be enlisted strategically, selectively, and even in combination with one another to suit a wide variety of social contexts and normative expectations. Boundaries in relation to the sacred are, therefore, sites for contradictory and innovative social processes. The contested and fluid boundaries that define the genre of “Christian rock” serve to illustrate these processes.