Recentering Christian Ethics as Comparative Religious Ethics

The filial relationship between Christian ethics and Comparative Religious Ethics (CRE) need not be perniciously distortive and can be salutary for comparative work. I suggest that the suspicions about CRE as a disguised form of a “Christian ethical enterprise” are overstated and that we can appreciate the value of the legacy of Christian ethics for comparative work in the focal themes of emancipatory criticism and common morality. Both of these themes, even if influenced by Christian ethics, reflect more universal social‐moral problems that can be discerned in cross‐cultural contexts.     

Odanta through a child’s eye: a study on Buchi Emecheta’s The Moonlight Bride

An interesting story session often takes its listeners on a journey to an imaginary land where ‘good’ always prevails over ‘evil’. Such stories, generally narrated by elders, reinforce the spiritual values of a particular community by consciously building up its moral strength through its own religious beliefs and practices. However, in Emecheta’s The Moonlight Bride, the story is told by the child protagonist Ngbeke and in her responsibility as a griot, the profound spiritual message that she conveys through her story is: ‘the most important beauty is the beauty of the heart' (77). The focus of this study will be specifically on Ngbeke and how she explains the cultural traditions of Odanta community to an outside world.

In the course of this study, the researcher has understood that the traditional practices of Odanta community is a mixed bag in which a few precious conventional ideals deserve appreciation and assimilation, while a few need to be critically looked at and rejected even, taking the interest of women and children into consideration. Positive values can be inculcated universally in today’s world, where community living and its positive effects on people are fast disappearing and losing its value.     

BETTERED WOMEN,CULTURAL MYTHS,AND CLINICAL INTERVENTIONS

No abstract available for this article.     

Exploring the Influence of Attitude and Stigma on Participation of African American and Latino Populations in Mental Health Services

Various factors, including mistrust and disparities, prevent people of color from taking advantage of mental health services. Previous research has focused on mistrust, disparities, and stigma. However, little is understood about how one's attitude affects participation in mental health. The authors surveyed 129 African American and Latino community participants to examine the relationships among attitudes, stigma, and help‐seeking behavior. Linear regression analyses revealed that attitude is a unique predictor in one's decision to seek counseling and is influenced by the presence of stigma. Varios factores, entre los que se incluyen la falta de confianza y las disparidades, impiden que las personas de color aprovechen los servicios de salud mental. Las investigaciones hasta ahora se han centrado en la falta de confianza, las disparidades y los estigmas. Sin embargo, falta mucho para comprender cómo la actitud de una persona afecta a su participación en la salud mental. Los autores entrevistaron a 129 participantes de comunidades afroamericanas y latinas para examinar las relaciones entre actitudes, estigmas y la búsqueda de ayuda. Los análisis de regresión lineal revelaron que la actitud es un indicador único en la decisión de un individuo de buscar servicios de consejería, y está influida por la presencia de estigmas.     

Internal Reformation Within the Contemporary Coptic Imagined Community: The Sunday School Movement and Mechanisms of Minority Survival

Abstract

With the centennial jubilee of the Sunday School Movement (SSM) occurring in 2018, this article explores two main questions: what are the main features of the Coptic community as imagined by the leaders of the SSM? And what is the nature of the relationship between “Coptic” Christian and “national Egyptian” identities within the dominant discourse of the SSM? The article argues that the contemporary Coptic identity, as reconstituted by the SSM, helps the Coptic community to survive as a vertical ethnie. The new Coptic identity is rooted in and relies upon the exclusive use of demotic symbols and narratives. Thus equipped, modern Copts perceive themselves as part of an imagined spiritual community within the wider Egyptian community. Indeed, this article argues that the SSM’s discourse presents a unique ‘marble cake’ model wherein religious and national identities are both present. By portraying Coptism as the area of interplay between Christianity and Egyptian-ness, the SSM blends “biological” and “cultural-ideological” modes of myth-making. Accordingly, to identify as Copt becomes equivalent to identifying as Egyptian.