An Ecological Approach to Therapy With Gender Minorities

This special series includes four articles that review important considerations for clinical work with gender minorities, including youth and young adults, individuals who are nonbinary, transgender individuals in inpatient or residential care, and transgender individuals recovering from trauma. These articles provide important insights and concrete suggestions for how to enact affirming practice, spanning across macro, mezzo, and micro levels. Ultimately, a multilevel approach to working with transgender and gender diverse individuals is essential to addressing health disparities in this population, as the work of an affirming provider goes beyond the therapy hour and the therapy office or treatment unit. In this commentary, I review the major themes from these contributions, provide a perspective on how they fit within the existing literature, and provide an overview of pressing future directions in gender minority research.     

Church-based social interactions and psychotic experiences among Black Americans: findings from the National Survey of American Life

Religious attendance has generally been salutary for mental health, though recent evidence suggests that church attendance has no significant relation with psychotic experiences. This study will examine how various types of church-based social interactions might be related to psychotic experiences. We analysed data from the National Survey of American Life –a representative sample of Black Americans in the United States –and used multivariable logistic regression to examine associations between seven church-based social interaction variables and lifetime psychotic experiences. In separate models, church attendance, church member interaction, and closeness to church members were not significantly associated with psychotic experiences, while greater emotional support, negative social interactions, providing help to other church members and receiving help from fellow church members were associated with increased odds of reporting psychotic experiences. But in a fully adjusted model including all church-based social interaction variables, only negative church interactions and giving help to church members were significantly associated with psychotic experiences. Church-based social interactions did not protect against psychotic experiences, and in some cases increased risk. Future studies should explore why the deleterious aspects of social interactions prevail over the beneficial ones.     

Between the Christ of Deep Incarnation and The African Jesus of Tinyiko Maluleke: An Improvised Dialogue

All differences considered, the Christ of deep incarnation and the African Jesus of Tinyiko Maluleke share at least one fundamental dimension: they both stand out as signs of God's radical embodiment in the world of creation/of African culture(s). Put crudely, while the deep incarnation theologians extend Jesus’ body into social and cosmic bodies, Maluleke locates Jesus’ body in the bodies of his fellow Africans. This study first identifies major convergences and tensions between these two christological perspectives and, second, posits that the scandal of reciprocity, seen as a characteristic feature of African christologies, can be translated into a twofold guiding principle for approaching and assessing African Christianity theologically.     

Continuities across continents: Assessing African American cultural themes among Black and Coloured South Africans

Much of the scholarship concerning African American culture is premised on the notion that it is a legacy of African origins but there has been essentially no attempt to document that relationship empirically. This paper briefly reviews existing evidence for cultural continuity in the Diaspora and then compares the responses of Black and Coloured South African and African Americans on measures of culture emic to African American populations. The observed patterns of psychometric performance, participants' responses, and the predictive utility of the measures employed were consistent with the thesis that despite inevitable variation, these three groups of the African Diaspora share similar orientations on the cultural themes assessed. This research hopes to initiate empirical work on the continuity thesis as it applies to connecting African American culture with a legacy of Africa and as related more broadly to the study of global Diasporas.     

Letters to the Editor

No abstract available for this article.     

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.