A Strange Fire: an exploration of psycho‐spiritual development aided by Jungian analysis and Vedanta

This paper explores the process of psychological and spiritual development through a series of active imaginations arising from the author's ‘psycho‐spiritual quest’, a process of transformation in which the individual progressively frees themselves from the ego's identifications and may be afforded a vision of the ‘self as consciousness’, as described by Vedanta. The author describes how this quest was facilitated by the disciplines of Transcendental Meditation, Jungian analysis and Vedanta, and how these three disciplines can work together to foster psycho‐spiritual development. The paper aims to de‐mystify the actual experiences that can accompany these practices. The records of these active imaginations, tracing some key stages in this process, are then presented, with a commentary by Marcus West, linking them to Jung's concepts of ego and Self and recent understandings of consciousness and ego development. There is a discussion of Jung's conceptualizations of the ego and the Self and his rejection of the Vedantic understanding of the Self as consciousness. These views are then explored and a reconciliation is suggested through the understanding of the process of disidentification where the difference between Jung's view of the Self and that of Vedanta is understood to be due to the extent of disidentification from the contents of consciousness.     

Shoppers in the Spiritual Supermarket: A Quantitative Study of Visitors to Scandinavia’s Largest Alternative Fair

Presenting data from a quantitative survey (N=362) at ‘The Great Alternative Fair’ in Lillestrøm, Norway, this article explores the demographic and religious profiles of the ‘customers’ in the ‘spiritual marketplace’. Many adhere to ideas that are historically associated with different religious traditions. At the same time, there are strong positive statistical correlations between belief in alternative ideas, such as healing, reincarnation, channelling, and clairvoyance. This indicates that such ideas constitute a clustered and shared set of beliefs. Against this background, the article questions the widely held assumption that people who are oriented towards alternative spiritualities are independent of institutions and authorities and it argues that they are informed to a large extent by a set of collective resources. It is suggested that the marketplace, which constitutes a common framework of interaction, plays a key role in connecting various ideas and actors and in creating a common ideological profile.     

Message in a bottle: a comparative study of spiritual needs of children and young people in and out of hospital

Using the metaphor of a message in a bottle as a framework and sending an S.O.S. to adults, the question of what are the three biggest needs of children and young people was asked. Data consisting of 107 important needs of children and young people was collected from 36 children and young people both in and out of hospital: in hospital by chaplains and other health care professionals, and out of hospital by children and youth work undergraduate students. This was a convenience sample across the United Kingdom with the majority of respondents in the Midlands. The data were coded and then thematically analysed and separately compared to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Emotional needs was the largest theme for hospitalised children and young people and relationship needs for the non-hospitalised children and young people. For both groups Maslow’s level 3 need of belonging was the greatest averaging at just over half the needs shared. A discussion of the results of the analyses identifies some ways in which the needs of hospitalised children and young people may differ, identifying some implications for practice.     

The secular and the sacred: reflections on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age

Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age represents a remarkable achievement. Taylor insists in a reasoned way that the sacred continues to have an important and legitimate role, and challenges assumptions, whether based on Weberian or Durkheimian understandings of religion in society, that faith no longer has a place. In doing this, he distinguishes among different aspects of the secularisation thesis. In this article I assert that there is a coherence to Taylor’s body of work, including A Secular Age, and I trace certain themes, such as a concern with notions of the self, that run through his work. I also identify in Taylor’s argument links to the thought of thinkers like Blondel, Gilson, Maritain and Marcel, and to the notion of an apologetics of hope.     

Journeys With People Who Have Dementia: Connecting and Finding Meaning in the Journey

This article begins with a reflective journey with one person who was diagnosed with early onset dementia. It then turns to reflect on the subsequent journey of research with other people who have dementia and where they find meaning in life, through the process of spiritual reminiscence. The article views dementia through a theological lens that sees those who have dementia as people made in God’s image and the implications this has for the lives of those living with dementia and those who care for them. One of the important findings from research conducted in the small group process was that meaning was almost synonymous with relationship and connectedness for participants, just as it is for people who don’t have dementia.     

Appreciating a Scientist-Theologian: Some Remarks on the Work of John Polkinghorne

Perhaps the greatest irony about the contemporary religion-science dialogue is the fact that, despite their own strongly articulated denials, many thinkers implicitly accept the "warfare" thesis of A. D. White—that is, they agree with White that traditional theology has proved unable to engage science in fruitful conversation. More than most others, John Polkinghorne understands just how badly White misread the history of Christianity and science, and how much theology has been impoverished by its failure to challenge this core assumption of modernity.     

Imagining Membership: The Conception of Europe in the Political Thought of T. G. Masaryk and Václav Havel

A decade after the fall of Communism in Europe, the Czech Republic'smembership in the European Union is still a matter of a relatively shortwaiting period of 4 years. Not so the imagination of this membership andthe creation of a political concept created to promote this goal: thespecific Central European policy initiated by Thomas G. Masaryk andrevitalized by Václav Havel. Despite the deep differences in thepolitical thought and philosophical orientations of both Presidents, notto mention the historic rupture of 41 years of Totalitarianism, theirperceptions of Europe as an Imagined Community are identical.     

Dimensions of Religion and Spirituality: A Longitudinal Topic Modeling Approach

In lieu of the traditional text data analysis methods, structural topic modeling was utilized to analyze the text contents of 255 self-report inventories of religion and spirituality (R/S) published from 1929 to 2017. The study had two objectives: (a) to clarify and identify the latent dimensions of R/S inherent in the items of the measures; and (b) to examine and demonstrate the usefulness of a longitudinal topic modeling in the study of R/S. We identified 5,617 unique text terms from the measures and fitted topic models on those terms to extract latent dimensions called topics. We also simultaneously analyzed the longitudinal effect of publication decade (i.e., 1950s–2010s) on the topics. A topic model with three topics was chosen to best support the data: Experience of Transcendence (Topic 1), Engagement in Transcendence (Topic 2), and Essence of Transcendence (Topic 3). In addition, the longitudinal analysis revealed that Topic 1 showed a continual increase over the decades, while Topics 2 and 3 both demonstrated a gradual decrease, in effect matching the general trend of Topic 1's increasing popularity in society and the academia.