Getting it right: a reply to baum

In this reply to Baum, I emphasize that the failure to understand the processes associated with scientific verbal behavior may result in scientific statements like the generalized matching law that do not accurately reflect cause-and-effect relations.     

Mindfulness and Contemplation: Secular and Religious Traditions in Western Context

This article considers the growth of mindfulness as a secular practice embedded in a culture that is pluralistic but still primed by Western religion and spirituality. Eastern and Western meditational practices are compared and contrasted for greater understanding of the strengths of each. Western contemplative practices are described as an attentional training process with common factors related to mindfulness. Even as Eastern and Western meditational forms are distinguished, the shared concerns of those who value a religious–spiritual perspective in counseling are raised. Ethical implications are discussed related to informed consent, competence, and multicultural awareness.     

Center,Light, and Sound: The Psychological Benefits of Three Distinct Meditative Practices

Meditation has been a popular topic in counseling and psychological research in recent years. However, other meditative practices have been gaining exposure recently of which counselors may not be aware. The current article provides a brief overview of 3 meditative practices: centering prayer, jyoti meditation, and acem meditation. The purpose of this article is to provide counselors with introductions to alternative meditative practices that may be otherwise overshadowed.     

A Survey of Recent Scholarship on the New Testament and Aging and Suggestions for Future Research

ABSTRACT

This article has a double agenda. In the first section, it identifies and selectively surveys nine areas that have figured prominently in recent scholarship on aging and the elderly in the New Testament. In the second section, it identifies areas for future research. Particularly emphasized is the challenge of exploring the relationship between the New Testament material and the Greco-Roman world. In order to do this, it is necessary to identify attitudes, roles, and practices that surround aging and the elderly in that cultural context. Some resources and questions that may serve as starting points for further research are indicated.     

Praying to Die

Prayer has long been a staple in the proverbial Jewish medical toolbox. While the vast majority of relevant prayers seek renewed health and prolonged life, what might prayers for someone to die look like? What ethical dimensions are involved in such liturgical expressions? By examining both prayers for oneself to die and prayers for someone else to die, this essay discerns reasons why it may be good and even necessary to pray for a patient's demise.     

THE PLACEBO EFFECT: WHAT'S INTERESTING FOR SCHOLARS OF RELIGION?

Abstract. The placebo effect these days is no longer merely the insubstantial, subjective response that some patients have to a sham treatment, like a sugar pill. It has been reconceived as a powerful mind‐body phenomenon. Because of this, it has also emerged as a complex reference point in a number of high‐stakes conversations about the metaphysical significance of experiences of religious healing, the possible health benefits of being religious, and the feasibility of using double‐blind placebo‐controlled trials to investigate the efficacy of prayer. In each of these conversations, the placebo effect is always pointing toward some larger issue, serving some larger agenda. The agendas, though, tend to pull in different directions, leading to a situation that feels at once fractured and stalemated. This essay reviews the main areas of interest, and proposes some specific issues where humanistic scholars of religion in particular might be able to introduce constructive and creative new perspectives.     

PRAYING TOGETHER: CORPORATE PRAYER AND SHARED SITUATIONS

In this article, we give much needed attention to the nature and value of corporate prayer by drawing together insights from theology, philosophy, and psychology. First, we explain what it is that distinguishes corporate from private prayer by drawing on the psychological literature on joint attention and the philosophical notion of shared situations. We suggest that what is central to corporate prayer is a “sense of sharedness,” which can be established through a variety of means—through bodily interactions or through certain environments. Second, we argue that corporate prayer, when understood as a kind of shared situation, enables common knowledge, as well as a kind of alignment between participants. Through this process, participants’ attention is focused on the same target and affiliation between participants increases. Thus, we suggest, one benefit of understanding corporate prayer as a shared situation is that it establishes and deepens a sense of community in such a way that common purposes and goals can be enacted more effectively.     

Prayer spaces in schools: a subversion of policy implementation?

Based on a major evaluation project, this article presents an emerging theme from research on the activities supported by Prayer Spaces in Schools, an organisation supporting ‘pop-up’ prayer spaces in schools across the UK and internationally. Evaluating the activities primarily in terms of their possible contribution to spiritual development, a number of important issues arose relating to policy on education and religion. This article focuses on how some engage with these prayer spaces as a way of reimagining and renegotiating educational policy. Based on data gathered from interviews with staff and students (aged 7–16) across seven schools in England, questionnaire responses from 555 students across 15 schools and feedback from two prayer spaces conferences, a hermeneutic approach is used to compare the interpretations of staff with those of students and the implicit positions of policy documents. This article explores various forms of policy implementation and how staff engagement with prayer spaces can be seen as a form of subversion, with staff tactically subverting policy implementation sometimes in order to promote the very intention of those policies – a form of what we refer to as subversive obedience.     

The Price of Being Conciliatory: Remarks about Mellon's Model for Hospital Chaplaincy Work in Multi-Faith Settings

The intimate connection, within Christianity, of theology andethics is invoked, and the ethical differences between Christiandenominations are exposed, as they present themselves inMellon'scase studies, in order to call attention to the unsolvable dilemmain which hospital chaplains find themselves, if they understandtheir role in a merely conciliatory fashion as that of a "comforter,mediator, educator, ethicist, and counselor". As witnessed bythe Calvinist and Anabaptist traditions Mellon introduces, conceptssuch as "the patient's good" can mean radically different thingsin these theological contexts. Attempting to merely mediatebetween such positions in a spirit of merely generic prayerand on the basis of a merely psychological notion of well-beingposes a risk to chaplains' spiritual integrity and faithfulnessto their mission.     

Churches in solidarity with the divided Korean Peninsula

This article explores God’s mission of reconciliation through the ecumenical efforts for peace, reconciliation, and reunification on the Korean Peninsula. It consists of three parts. The first section explores reconciliation as a means of overcoming the division system in Korea. The second section offers reconciliation as a peace process in the Korean context. The third section highlights the engagement in the reconciliation as a spiritual journey from the World Council of Churches’ global prayer campaign, which is a Christian pathway toward a peace system in the Korean Peninsula. In particular, this article demonstrates that prayer is not a strategy in our work of advocacy but a spiritual mandate and movement toward peace and justice cultivating reconciliation.