Women's Spiritualities: Resource for Mission

What are the distinguishing features of women's spiritualities, what informs women's spiritualities and practice? This paper attends to the transformative elements that women's spiritualities potentially offer to the task of mission. Mary and her song in Luke 1 are explored in order to plumb something of the depth of the spirituality of Mary and her song and Mary in her role as woman, as co‐worker with God to redeem and transform the world.     

Alternative Spiritualities and the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Some practices in Alternative Spiritualities have been criticised by social commentators for their ‘appropriation’ of indigenous cultures. This article will argue that ‘appropriation’ is not limited to these cultures but is part of a larger phenomenon, that of cultural consumption of selective parts of history. Furthermore, this cultural consumption is not restricted to history alone, but is extended to contemporary popular culture, such as people and groups who find inspiration for their spirituality from the fictions of H.P. Lovecraft, vampire stories and the Star Wars mythos. Following Fredric Jameson's work on Postmodernism, this article will provide an insight into how the cultural consumption of history and popular culture by people involved in Alternative Spiritualities has become part of the cultural logic of late capitalism.     

Exploring New and Renewed Eco‐Spiritualities

This essay discusses five recent books, written in French, that contribute to refection in environmental ethics. Francophone literature on the topic is marked by resonant and divergent concerns, and rooted in a geography, politics, and history different from North America and marked by distinctive lines of intellectual influence. Jean‐Claude Eslin proposes recovering ecological resources from the Christian tradition and also suggests imagining new images of God: notably, God as pilote rather than artisan. Dominique Bourg takes a multi‐disciplinary approach that emphasizes the spiritual conditions for relating to the world ecologically and economically; he argues for sobriété (austerity) as a spiritual disposition and an economic model. Baptiste Morizot develops diplomacy as an ethical, political, and spiritual model for cohabiting with wolves, whose return to the French countryside has been highly controversial. Nastassja Martin offers an anthropological study of the indigenous Gwich’in community of Fort Yukon, Alaska that accentuates the mix of Protestant missional influences and Gwich’in spiritual affirmations and practices at play in their relationship to the nonhuman world. Attending to this literature may helpfully decenter anglophone debates and enrich their conceptual vocabulary.     

Whitehead and Wilber: Contrasts in theory

Abstract

The question of how to interpret the ideas and evidence from the transpersonal realm has been a challenge to western psychology since its inception. This article illustrates how process philosophy, as developed by Alfred North Whitehead, can serve as a theoretical foundation for transpersonal psychology. Making it especially qualified for this role are process philosophy's unique approach to the nature of experience, its openness to spiritual matters, and its ability to offer a single framework of thought capable of integrating these issues with the concerns of the scientific and academic communities as well as our experience of everyday life. Following the introduction of some of Whitehead's basic ideas that illustrate this philosophy's relevance to psychological and transpersonal metatheory, aspects of Ken Wilber's new work are examined and criticized from a Whiteheadian perspective.     

Facing the Beyond: Experiences,Metaphors, and Spiritualities of the Afterlife

Unlike religious versions of the afterlife which promulgate notions of heaven and hell, spiritualities of the afterlife promote the idea of self-transformation in post-physical conditions. These spiritualities are more concerned with the meaning of self-authentication beyond death than with the moral conception of a salvationary future. In this respect, the extraordinary experiences claimed by proponents of the near-death and dream-travel phenomenon provide a class of data that support the redefinition of the self in its quest to confront death as a means to reach a ‘higher self’.     

The Family Diagram and Genogram: Comparisons and Contrasts

The family diagram and its derivative the genogram are widely used in marriage and family therapy, other mental health disciplines, and family medicine. After a brief history of the origins of the family diagram and genogram, several different areas are compared in order to help distinguish differences between family diagrams and genograms. The results of these evaluations illustrate some similarities in format and symbols due to a common history, but distinct differences in purpose, theoretical basis, rationale for data collection, and interpretation guidelines. Divergent theoretical perspectives explain the differences between family diagrams and genograms. The family diagram is intertwined with Bowen family systems theory, while the genogram emphasizes how the nuclear family interacts within multiple contextual levels. The family diagram and genogram are not synonymous; rather, they are distinctly different methods of family assessment.     

Contrasts and correlations in effect-size estimation

This article describes procedures for presenting standardized measures of effect size when contrasts are used to ask focused questions of data. The simplest contrasts consist of comparisons of two samples (e.g., based on the independent t statistic). Useful effect-size indices in this situation are members of the g family (e.g., Hedges's g and Cohen's d ) and the Pearson r . We review expressions for calculating these measures and for transforming them back and forth, and describe how to adjust formulas for obtaining g or d from t , or r from g , when the sample sizes are unequal. The real-life implications of d or g calculated from t become problematic when there are more than two groups, but the correlational approach is adaptable and interpretable, although more complex than in the case of two groups. We describe a family of four conceptually related correlation indices: the alerting correlation, the contrast correlation, the effect-size correlation, and the BESD (binomial effect-size display) correlation. These last three correlations are identical in the simple setting of only two groups, but differ when there are more than two groups.     

Interrogatives and Contrasts in Explanation Theory

Philosophical Studies -     

The Infirmity Debate: On the Viability of New Age Spiritualities of Life

The ‘infirmity debate’ is becoming increasingly lively. On the one hand, scholars argue that New Age spiritualities of life are in a ‘poor’ condition; on the other hand, scholars argue that they are in a good state of ‘health’. Drawing on key publications, including articles from the Journal of Contemporary Religion, the argument is couched in terms of ‘the turn to the self’—more specifically ‘the massive subjective turn of modern culture’. How do New Age spiritualities of life fare in the context of this development? Concentrating on activities found in the holistic milieu which is to be found in many countries today, the argument is that activities like yoga or spiritual aromatherapy serve as ‘intermediary institutions’, successfully negotiating a path between antinomian freedom and social conformism.     

Causal explanations for school performance: Contrasts between mothers and children

This study investigated the causal attributions given by mothers and their fifth and sixth grade children to explain the children's success in a school subject of relatively high achievement as well as their failure in an area of low performance. Participants were asked to weight the importance of four attributions: ability, effort, personality, and training. Analyses of variance revealed significant differences between mothers' and children's weightings. Mothers cited children's ability as the main cause of success, while lack of effort was viewed as the reason for failure. Children, in contrast, gave effort as the explanation for success and lack of ability as the reason for failure. The apparent lack of concordance between mothers' and children's causal beliefs is discussed in terms of three explanatory possibilities: (a) actor/observer differences, (b) the effects of the affective bond between mother and child, and (c) the tendency toward self-presentational bias.     

Teaching Genesis: A Present-Day Approach Inspired by the Prophet Nathan

The prophets Nathan (2 Samuel 12:1–15) and John the Baptist (Mark 6:16–28) had comparable tasks before them: to convince their respective kings about the wrongs of taking somebody else's wife and marrying her. Nathan succeeded, while John failed and furthermore lost his life. What made the difference? One possible explanation is that Nathan proceeded in two steps: (1) Tell an interesting, nonthreatening story that nevertheless makes the point at issue; (2) transfer that message to the case at hand. In contrast, John used a direct approach, which raised apprehension, even fear (on the part of Herodias, the woman involved), and led to failure. That lesson has wider applications, as illustrated here for teaching the biblical Genesis narration. The other ingredient in this teaching is relational and contextual reasoning (RCR), the use of which is also indicated for other issues besides teaching Genesis.     

Psychological Reactions of Biologists: A Cross-Section of Present-Day Biological Thought

Abstract

Differential outcomes and processes were examined between groups drawn from Hong Kong Chinese students and U.S. students. Predictions about group performance and processes were based on cross-cultural empirical literature, theoretical work on collectivist and individualist social behaviors, and group research. The participants engaged in decision-making tasks, first as individuals and then by consensus in groups of 5. A group-effectiveness measure was developed: A group was considered effective if the group as a whole outperformed a majority of its individual members. According to the results of a postexercise questionnaire, (a) Chinese ingroups had a higher percentage of effective groups than did Chinese minimal (acquaintance) groups, whereas U.S. minimal groups had a higher percentage of effective groups than did U.S. ingroups; (b) although the Chinese ingroups' deliberation times were nearly 3 times longer than those of the U.S. ingroups, their performance accuracy was not superior to that of the U.S. groups; and (c) the Chinese participants were more concerned than the U.S. participants about an appropriate image and perceived their group discussions as more intense and conflict ridden than the U.S. participants did.     

Women in male-dominated professions: Contrasts in their personal and vocational histories

Women in four high-status, male-dominated professions—architecture, law, medicine, and psychology—are described in terms of a variety of historical, social, and career variables. The women share common antecedents of their vocational choices and similar perceptions of their work, but the occupational groups are dissimilar on a number of dimensions. Psychologists stand in particular contrast to the other three groups of professionals, describing experiences and career patterns less in conflict with stereotypic female roles. These contrasts may reflect differences in the sex-typed characterizations of the professions even though all are male-dominated.