Spiritual Need One: Spiritual Development: The Aging Process: A Journey of Lifelong Spiritual Formation

SUMMARY

To grow old is but one chapter in a lifelong journey of spiritual formation. Spirituality can be defined most easily by what it is not. Aging is a process of discovery and pondering, reminiscing, and acting, integrating and meaning making, even surrendering to Life as it is, not as we will it to be. Spiritual insights are gained from James Fowler, Viktor Frankl, Thomas Merton, Paul Tournier, Adrian Van Kamm, and Rachel Remen.     

Spiritual Maturity and Wholeness – A Concept Whose Time Has Come

SUMMARY

Legal advocates, clergy and politicians have all been challenged by the concept of the separation of church and state since the first European set foot on the American continent. Two schools of thought have been developed for this unique problem in the United States. Roger Williams took the position that there needs to be a separation of church and state in order to keep the church pure from the politics and every day work of the state. Thomas Jefferson, who is often attributed with developing this concept, took the position that the need for this separation was to protect the state from the church. Both positions often get articulated as if they are one concept in the United States. However, they are very different. This debate has carried itself in the current millennium into the work of the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives as well as the legislation known as Charitable Choice.     

A Mighty Fortress Is Our Atheism: Defining the Nature of Religiousness in the Elderly

SUMMARY

This article considers current trends in research on religion and aging. By considering the perspective of classical sociology, the author argues that we need to understand religion as a belief system with a particular function, rather than a belief system that necessarily contains certain specific beliefs or behaviors.     

Religious intellectual humility,attitude change,and closeness following religious disagreement

Abstract

This study explored the role of intellectual humility (IH) in promoting attitude change and relationship closeness in the context of religious disagreement. Participants (N = 174) completed a preliminary survey that assessed their attitude on several contentious religious issues (e.g. gay marriage, abortion). Participants who disagreed about a contentious religious issue were then paired and engaged in a 10-min discussion. After the discussion, participants completed a series of questionnaires. The greatest degree of attitude change was seen in pairs with mutually high levels of IH, in which the participant self-reported high levels of IH and also perceived the discussion partner to have high levels of IH. Higher perceptions of the IH levels of the discussion partner predicted higher levels of closeness and trust. We discuss limitations, areas for future research, and practical implications.     

Religious meaning making and attachment in a disaster context: A longitudinal qualitative study of flood survivors

ABSTRACT

The goal of this longitudinal qualitative study was to develop a grounded theory of religious meaning making and attachment in a disaster context. At 1-month (T1; n = 36) and 6-months postdisaster (T2; n = 29), we conducted in-depth interviews with a highly religious sample of adult survivors of the 2016 Louisiana flood, using a disaster-adapted version of the Religious Attachment Interview. We utilized Corbin and Strauss’s grounded-theory approach for data analysis. At both timepoints, results revealed that survivors who were theistic believers engaged in postdisaster religious meaning making in which they drew on benevolent God representations and theodicies to appraise the disaster’s cause, purpose, and religious-attachment effects, thereby contributing to positive religious-attachment outcomes (religious meanings made; e.g. renewed beliefs and experiences of God’s benevolence and providence). Findings are discussed in terms of theories and research on disasters, meaning making, and religious attachment, including implications for research and practice.     

Gods or rituals? Relational faith,spiritual discontent,and religious practices as predictors of hope and optimism

The current study investigates the incremental validity of a variety of functional religiosity variables such as religious practices, organizations, and self-designations as religious or spiritual, and content variables such as spiritual attachment to one's deity, meaning-making, values/beliefs, and faith maturity to predict unique variance in measures of hope and optimism, above and beyond the variance predicted by the five-factor model of personality. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that positive and negative relational percepts with a deity, religious denomination, levels of spiritual commitment and meaning-making predicted significant incremental variance in various aspects of hope and optimism, above and beyond the variance predicted by a measure of the five-factor model of personality. Private prayer, attendance at religious services, congregational support, and identity as a religious person did not predict incremental variance in overall hope and optimism. Exploratory analyses indicated significant gender differences in the patterns of incremental criterion validity of the religiosity variables. The results are discussed in light of expectancy-value models of religiosity.     

The politics of humanitarian intervention: a critical analogy of the British response to end the slave trade and the civil war in Sierra Leone

A leading scholar of humanitarian intervention, Brown (2002) Brown, C. 2002. “Humanitarian intervention and international political theory”. In Human rights and military intervention, Edited by: Mosley, A. and Norman, R. 153–69. Aldershot: Ashgale Publishing.  [Google Scholar] refers to British internal politics to satisfy the influential church and other non-conformist libertarian community leaders, and above all ‘undermining Britain's competitors, such as Spain and Portugal, who were still reliant on slave labour to power their economies, as the principal motivation for calls to end the slave trade than any genuine humanitarian concerns of racial equality or global justice’. Drawing on an empirical exploration, this article seeks to draw a parallel between this politics of humanitarian intervention which characterised the abolition movement, albeit rarely recognised in the academic literature, and the British intervention to end the almost 11 year civil war in Sierra Leone. The article concludes with a discussion on the implications of this politics of humanitarian intervention in the reconstruction of post-conflict Sierra Leone.     

National piety: Religious equality,freedom of religion and national identity in Finnish political discourse

This paper analyses the legislative discourse regarding a Members' Initiative to enact a law which was discussed in the Finnish parliament in 2006 and which proposed changes to the constitution and several laws, the purpose of which was to balance the privileged position that the Lutheran Church of Finland enjoys. The author uses critical discourse analysis to examine four different discourses emerging from the debate: inequality of religions in the eyes of the law; the ‘completeness’ of the freedom of religion in Finland; the justified hegemony of the ‘folk church’; and the church as a value base in a pluralising world. He argues that the discursive struggle between the different positions is a struggle between ‘minimalist’ and ‘maximalist’ definitions of freedom of religion and that the discussion represents a case of ‘national piety’, a conflation of discourses of religious equality, freedom of religion and national identity that reproduces the status quo.     

The semiotics of religion: Reflections from a semanticist

Robert Yelle's The Semiotics of Religion makes important contributions on two fronts. First, it offers powerful and compelling analyses of a considerable range of religious phenomena. Second, it advances significant theoretical and meta-theoretical frameworks that underpin those analyses. The theoretical framework is semiotic in its broad outlines, but the meta-theoretical one is more pragmatically oriented: i.e., don't be dogmatically committed to any particular theoretical doctrine, but rather use whatever resources help to shed more light on the subject matter. Despite that meta-theoretical positioning, several of Yelle's analyses remain stubbornly committed to a set of core doctrines that limit the extent of his investigations and lead to questions about the persuasiveness of certain details of his analyses. In other words, Yelle does not always follow his own meta-theoretical recommendations. The author diagnoses the source of those limiting assumptions and suggests some perspectives from within the philosophy of language more generally that might potentially serve to bring his method closer to his meta-theoretical ideals.     

Editorial

Mauss's contribution to his uncle's classical study, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, has not been widely acknowledged. It is, however, difficult to assess in the light of inadequate knowledge. This essay is an introduction to the study of the relation of nephew and uncle with regard to this problem. The difference between them as people and their achievements is first briefly considered. Then attention is turned to the way they approached the sociological study of religion. Only two aspects of religion have been selected. The first considers the problems in defining religion. Durkheim holds to the notion of the sacred and Mauss to mana as being central to a definition. The second area is ritual, where there is considerable agreement, although Mauss shows little interest in effervescence. In the final analysis, the two tend to show a complementarity in their work.