Inclusivism and the spiritual journey of Marie de Souza Canavarro (1849–1933)

Every age has its share of religious seekers, but during some periods of spiritual crisis greater numbers of seekers seem to appear. Marie de Souza Canavarro, an American advocate and interpreter of Asian traditions, was a paradigmatic seeker in an age of religious wandering. Along the way, she embraced Catholicism, Theosophy, Buddhism, Bahá'í, and Hinduism. In this article I offer an interpretation of her life and work, drawing on her novels, poems, letters, lectures, articles, and autobiography. I argue that amidst the diversity of views she affirmed, there was some continuity. Canavarro longed for rest from her ceaseless wandering, and she hoped that religious and gender inclusivism might bring it. She, like others of her age, yearned for a tradition that elevated women and reconciled religions.     

Capital Possession: a comparative approach to 'New Age' and control of the means of possession

This paper reconsiders academic representations of religious phenomena that have been called New Age through contextualised comparison of social practice and discourse. This challenges both the replication of emic models of a New Age in terms that are abstract, classed and racialised, and the way in which the New Age is represented as a social phenomenon unrelated to other contemporary religious forms throughout the world. By identifying spirit possession as a central practice within what is called ‘non-formative religion’, comparisons are drawn with Pentecostalism and Shamanism, documenting their growth under common conditions of neoliberal globalisation across the world. To examine reasons for such resurgence, attention is drawn to what is called the ‘means of possession’: the social contexts in which possession occurs and is controlled. The ambiguity by which control of the means of possession is exercised is explored in terms of a broader social context in which self-authority is both denied and demanded.     

‘New Age’ revisited: By way of entry into restorative justice

The present article pursues striking similarities between the discourse of philosophies and practices often categorised as ‘New Age’, and that of restorative justice. By bringing observations from data material produced in seemingly very different fields of research to a close encounter, a common discourse of transformation is tentatively explored, adding to contemporary works that warn against assuming ‘New Age’ as a sui generis movement or milieu. The article is an exercise in tracing connections across different fields of study, lending support to the claim that such tracing may contribute to the opening out of our topic in ways that have implications for what we can understand as constituting a social environment, for what we can understand as constituting context, for what we can understand as constituting ‘New Age’.     

Angels and the Dragon King's Daughter: Gender,Sexuality in Western Buddhist New Religious Movements

Abstract

Through colonialism and globalization, Buddhism has developed an increasing profile in the West. This can be observed within popular culture as well as the presence of Buddhist practitioners from a range of ethnicities of whom a significant number are converts. This presence has led to the development of Buddhist new religious movements (NRMs). We first outline interpretations of gender and sexuality that have arisen within Buddhist traditions. Then, using Linda Woodhead's (2007) model that theorises religion's positioning with respect to gender, we discuss gender norms that have developed for two of the largest Buddhist NRMs in the UK: the Triratna Buddhist Community (TBC, formerly the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, FWBO) and the Nichiren group Sōka-Gakkai International-UK (SGI-UK). Through examining new empirical data, we explore how their gender norms are negotiated by members. We note that within these movements, women, queer people and people of colour are creating provisional spaces that challenge attempts to hegemonize hetero-patriarchal perspectives.     

非政府组织:一种新的上层建筑形式

非政府组织是与政府组织不同的另一类社会治理组织,属一种新的上层建筑形式。非政府组织与联合国和各国政府部门既有密切联系又持有一定距离,既包括政治倾向较强的组织,也包括非盈利组织。非政府组织迅猛发展的根本原因在于它能有效地解决社会生活中存在着政府失灵和市场所带来的诸多问题,促进社会经济,政治和文化的协调发展,对社会的平衡和安定具有极大的作用。     

Feeling New York: Classless urban geographies and affective capitalist reconciliation in Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick

Acknowledging the productive impulses of the affective turn, this paper examines the affective impacts of urban architecture conveyed by Horatio Alger in his novel Ragged Dick. Without any strict adherence to a particular school of thought, I draw instead on those concepts and theories that promise enriching for an analysis of a nineteenth-century Bildungsroman and its socio-spatial representation of New York's architecture, for instance Central Park and Wall Street. The results underline the flexibility of the affective nexus used in literary geographies, finding the metropolis not as a passive dramaturgical backdrop but as an active agent, whose structural composition works towards the integration of its literary subjects into the affective discourses of its historical period and literary genre. Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick directs this very agency towards the protagonist's integration into the hegemonic structures of sentimentality. In the story, this becomes visible in the mythical abilities of empathy to transcend class divisions and the reconciliatory appeal of the capitalist ideology. Ultimately, affect and emotionality are used to maintain and perform the proper feelings for certain architectural structures, manifesting themselves as a sentimental performance of systemic allegiance.     

THE THEOLOGICAL ETHICS OF HERBERT McCABE, OP: A REVIEW ESSAY

Herbert Mc Cabe, OP (d. 2001), was a significant theological figure in England in the last century. A scholar of Aquinas, he was also influenced by Wittgenstein and Marx, his reading of whom helped him articulate a distinctive Thomistic account of human embodiment that serves as a critique of other dominant approaches in ethics. This article shows McCabe's contribution to moral theology by placing his work in conversation with other important approaches, namely, situation ethics, proportionalism, and the New Natural Law Theory.     

Evidence for differentiation of right hemisphere visual-perceptual functions

Performance on tasks sensitive to right hemisphere dysfunction (facial discrimination and perceptual closure) are reported in eight patients with right hemisphere lesions. Patients demonstrated an apparent double dissociation of performance on the two measures. Site-by-task specificity for the closure task was strongly suggested. Implications for right hemisphere organization and underlying psychological processes are considered.     

Stimulus factors and listening strategies in auditory memory: A theoretical analysis

A theory for the temporal course of perceptual coding during auditory short-term memory tasks is described. A low-level “sensor” and a high-level “identifier” process item and order information from stimulus word-strings. Both word durations and interword pauses are needed for this processing, and if adequate processing time is unavailable, perceptual delays will lead to degraded recall performance. Stimulus parameters and subject strategies interact to determine the quality and the order in which stimulus items are coded. These hypotheses are supported both by experiments using grammatical sentences and those using lists of unrelated words.