The Adjustment Process of Ex-Buddhist Monks to Life After the Monastery

This study explores the adjustment process of five Western ex-Buddhist monks to life after the monastery, using an in depth case study approach and thematic analysis. Participants discussed their initial experience of leaving, the process of creating a new life and their relationship with the past. The findings indicated that while each case was unique, significant common themes emerged as features of the adjustment process. The adjustment had been multi-dimensional, challenging, difficult, confusing, complex and profound for the participants. They had to contend with issues of grief, delayed development, missing out on life experiences, difficulties with intimacy, money, identity, depression, anxiety and confusion. This was combined with the hope and promise of many newly found freedoms involved in establishing a new life and identity. Parallels are drawn to the experience of Catholic priests and nuns who have departed their Orders, Vietnam veterans, ex-cult members and individuals who have left total institutions where their identity and daily lives were highly prescribed. The adjustment experience of ex-Buddhist monks extends the literature on Buddhist monks and provides an example of a life transition of interest to the helping professions because of its potential relevance to a range of major transitions for which clients may seek assistance. Tim Mapel is a lecturer in the Bachelor of Applied Social Sciences degree at the Eastern Institute of Technology in New Zealand. He has a Master’s degree in counseling and works with individuals, couples and groups. He has a passion for the practice of mindfulness and for facilitating a sense of aliveness in people’s lives. He is an advanced Psychodrama trainee and spent 12 years living as an ordained Buddhist monk. Originally from Boston, USA he has lived in the UK, Switzerland, and now considers New Zealand home.     

THE ROLE OF CONSCIOUSNESS AS MEANING MAKER IN SCIENCE, CULTURE, AND RELIGION

Two hundred years ago, Friedrich Schleiermacher took critical issue with Immanuel Kant's intellectual notion of intuition as applied to human nature (Wellmon 2006). He found it necessary to modify—"hermeneutically," as he said—Kant's notion of anthropology by enabling it to include as human the new and strange human tribes Captain Cook found in the Pacific South Seas. A similar hermeneutic move is necessary if physics is to include the local contextual empirical syntheses of relativity and quantum physics. In this hermeneutical revision the synthesis is formed around the notion of a Hilbert Vector Space as the universal grammar of physics, adding to it the dynamic of the Schrödinger equation, and representing empirical "observables" by projection operators that map the subspaces of definite measurable values. Among the set of observable projection operators, some pairs share the same subspace, commute with one another, and share a common laboratory setting. Other pairs do not share this property and are described as being mutually complementary. Complementary symmetries introduce into the discursive language of physics the commonsense notion of contextuality. The new synthesis, proposed by Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, and (in his own way) Paul Dirac, brought physics into the community of common language and established it as a work of general human achievement. ¹     

SCIENCE AND RELIGION IN THE THEOLOGY OF DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

The German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer is not widely known for engaging with scientific thought, having been heavily influenced by Karl Barth's celebrated stance against natural theology. However, during the period of his maturing theology in prison Bonhoeffer read a significant scientific work, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker's The World View of Physics. From this he gained two major insights for his theological outlook. First, he realized that the notion of a "God of the gaps" is futile, not just in science but in other areas of human inquiry. Second, he felt that an infinite universe, as considered by science, would be self-subsistent and could exist as if there were no God. Bonhoeffer replaced Barth's radical critique of religion with the even more extreme view that it is a mere passing phase in history that grown-up humanity can dispense with. At the same time Bonhoeffer began an important critique of Barth's reaction, namely, the latter's retreat to a "positivism of revelation." While Bonhoeffer did not go quite as far as one might like, his approach opened up hopeful avenues for an answer to "the liberal question" and even a revived place for some kind of natural theology.     

QUINTUPLE EXTENSION: MIND, BODY, HUMANISM, RELIGION, SECULARISM

Extension of the system that includes the key substrates for sensation, perception, emotion, volition, and cognition, and all representational sources for cognition, supports the view that there is an extended mind and an extended body. These intellectual views can be made practical in a humanist system based on extensions and in religious systems based on extensions. Independently, there is also an institutional extension of secularism. Hence, I maintain, there are five principal forms of extension.     

Trauma and Grace: Psychology and Theology in Conversation

This paper explores the contours of a conversation between recent developments in trauma theory and Christian systematic theology. Toward this end, I examine three levels of theological discourse in a linear progression and responses based on the work of some trauma theorists: (a) twentieth century conceptualizations of divine revelation using the metaphor of a “bridge,” (b) configurations of evil, sin, redemption, and theodicies, and (c) the use of sacraments and iconography as vehicles of solidarity and flourishing. As a burgeoning area of inquiry in academic circles, trauma theory both resists and is in need of the discipline of theology. I conclude that trauma theory and theology are not antithetical disciplines, and a consideration of both brings greater insights than the disciplines considered alone.     

Listening to God: Using Meta–Terminology to DescribeRevelation in a Comparative Theistic Context1

Abstract : Starting from the assertion that comparative theology is inherently dialogical in nature, this paper examines the use of non‐confessional meta‐terminology and its application in interfaith dialogue. In so doing, it examines potential meta‐terms for describing revelation as related in the Bhagavad‐Gita, the Qur’an, and the Gospel of John, and concludes that non‐confessional terms aid in the dismissal of normative viewpoints, leading to greater appreciation of commonality and meaning in the truth claims of other faiths and dialogue partners.     

A Hymnal's Theological Significance

Abstract : A hymnal is a synthetic theological manual, which is a cue card to the church's sounding form. It lives in a stream with a soundscape, expresses a theological orientation, and stands as an ethical check and balance with a prophetic voice against the empire's addictions and entrapments.     

Baptist Hymnody in the Northern United States: The Case of E. H. Johnson's Sursum Corda

Abstract : Northern and southern Baptists in the United States differed at the turn of the twentieth century. Through their hymnals, especially Sursum Corda edited by E. H. Johnson, they embraced a form of historicism that attempted to recover an earlier time in the church. Gregorian and Anglican chants served as vehicles of historicist interest as did the parts of the historic Mass and traditional English hymns prevalent in Johnson's book. Northern Baptists also leaned toward an ecclesiology that held the ‘church as sacrament’. Hymn texts in Johnson's Baptist hymnal form a bridge between two ecclesiological outlooks by employing a pastiche of sacramental texts and texts based on a memorialist understanding of the Eucharist. This essay employs an interdisciplinary approach to looking at American hymnody involving theology, history, musicology, and liturgics.     

European Bioethics II--Disparate Hopes and Fears: An Introduction

This introduction supplies further bearing points for the conceptualmap, which the introduction to the previous issue on Europeanbioethics (2008/1) had provided for sorting out the variousdimension in which the essays collected in these issues resembleand differ from each other. Special attention is devoted tocommunication, as diverse Christianities attend to differentpurposes, problems, and opportunities for normatively engaging(persuading, influencing, ruling, opposing, and converting)their surrounding secularized cultures. These differences reflectincompatible ways of conceiving Christ's acts of healing, asthese provide a model for His disciples' bioethics. These differencesalso reflect diversely rationalist and noetic epistemologies.The subtext concerns the haunting question about the enduringsustainability of a specifically Christian bioethics in Europe.As Schotsmans opts for a Roman Catholicism that is not recognizedas such by his Magisterium, as Muller transforms Protestantisminto a religiously nonhostile laicity, as Messer and Silva daBarbosa hope for the prophetic impact of communal "cities onthe hill," and as the Orthodox pursue the conversion of WesternEurope in Greek, Russian, and Rumanian, ongoing Divine miraclespresent the most realistic hope.     

The Journal of Analytical Psychology's Internet Discussion Forum

Jan Wiener 'Confidentiality and paradox: the location of ethical space'
Hester McFarland Solomon 'Origins of the ethical attitude'