Migration for love? Love and intimacy in marriage migration processes

According to Australian regulations, the right to marriage migration applies only to genuine relationships. Marriage migration couples must demonstrate to state agents the authenticity of their romantic attachments in order to achieve a positive outcome in their applications. This article examines how love and intimacy in the context of Australian immigration regulations are interpreted by Thai women who originate from a non-Western culture. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic work with 15 Thai women marriage migrants, this article illustrates the ways in which the practical actions of caring and sharing are mobilized as important strategies for expressing real love and intimacy in marriage migration processes. Thus, although these women narrate their migration experiences as based on love and intimacy, such narratives are not free from global economic and structural inequalities. Women's constructions of love and intimacy presented here can transform over time in response to new personal experiences, changing social contexts and fluctuating circumstances in the processes of marriage migration.     

Emotional Attachment and Its Limits: Mengzi,Gaozi and the Guodian Discussions

Mengzi maintained that both benevolence (ren 仁) and rightness (yi義) are naturally-given in human nature. This view has occupied a dominant place in Confucian intellectual history. In Mencius 6A, Mengzi’s interlocutor, Gaozi, contests this view, arguing that rightness is determined by (doing what is fitting, in line with) external circumstances. I discuss here some passages from the excavated Guodian texts, which lend weight to Gaozi’s view. The texts reveal nuanced considerations of relational proximity and its limits, setting up requirements for moral action in scenarios where relational ties do not play a motivational role. I set out yi’s complexity in these discussions, highlighting its implications for (i) the nei-wai debate; (ii) the notion of yi as “rightness,” or doing the right thing; and (iii) how we can understand the connection between virtue and right action in these early Confucian debates. This material from the excavated texts not only provides new perspectives on a longstanding investigation of human nature and morality, it also challenges prevailing views on Warring States Confucian intellectual history.     

Association of hypertension-related distress with lack of self-care among hypertensive patients

Research on factors associated with poor adherence to self-care focuses primarily on psychiatric emotional disorders such as depression and anxiety, whereas non-psychiatric chronic-disease-related emotional distress has received little attention in hypertensive patients. The objective of this study was to evaluate the association of hypertension-related distress with the lack of self-care including low adherence to pharmacological treatment, lack of regular physical activity, low intake of fruits and vegetables and frequent intake of high-salt foods. A cross-sectional survey was conducted in 2014 in two family medical units affiliated with the Mexican Institute of Social Security. The study included 487 hypertensive patients >19 years of age. The conceptual framework for the study was based on the Health Promotion Model. The analysis included multiple Poisson regression models. We found that 21.1% of participants had hypertension-related distress. Low adherence to pharmacological treatment was identified in 45.8% of patients, whereas 46.8% lacked regular physical activity, 30.8% reported a low consumption of fruits and vegetables, and 54.6% frequently consumed foods high in salt content. Hypertension-related distress was associated with lack of regular physical activity and low intake of fruits and vegetables. These findings highlight the importance of addressing distress in order to improve self-care of hypertensive patients.     

Synagogues without rabbis or Christians? Ancient institutions beyond normative discourses

Abstract

This article focuses on a problem that tends to afflict, especially but not exclusively, historical narratives involving written sources celebrated as normative texts in contemporary religious communities. The religious authority ascribed to such texts is often entangled in claims about historical phenomena, resulting in ideological support of specific narratives nourished within religious communities as not only religiously significant but also historically true. Such assumptions in turn sustain aspects of religious identities and thus fulfil the social function of maintaining the status quo within and between communities. Because of their contemporary usefulness, these types of normative narratives are liable to bleed into scholarly reconstructions too, complicating the academic search for historical scenarios untouched by the needs of societies unknown to the ancients. This study aims to illustrate the problems involved through an exercise in which sources that speak to a specific historical question – the nature of ancient synagogues – but which later attained normative status within religious communities, are removed from the historical archive. The reconstruction offered, based on sources with no direct relationship to the continuing histories of Judaism and Christianity, yields a very different picture than the one commonly embraced today. The exercise also indicates the value of re-reading the sources previously removed from a new perspective, which may enrich the religious communities in question as they seek to understand their own history and identity, as well as one another.     

Conversation with 2016 American Academy of Religion Excellence in Teaching Award Winner Joanne Maguire Robinson

This conversation between the editors of Teaching Theology and Religion and Joanne Maguire Robinson continues an occasional series of interviews that has previously featured Jonathan Z. Smith, Stephen Prothero, Mary Pierce Brosmer, and Mary Elizabeth Mullino Moore. The exchange takes as its point of departure the teaching statement that Professor Robinson produced in support of her candidacy for the American Academy of Religion's Excellence in Teaching Award. Issues addressed include the impact of institutional context on one's teaching, teaching the humanities in universities that are ever more focused on job training, making the transition from a graduate program focused on research to teaching undergraduates who are unlikely to take even a second course in the study of religion, and ways in which women are challenged to navigate multiple responsibilities while striving to make their way in a male‐dominated academy.     

Taking a children’s rights perspective on children’s spirituality

Abstract

The right to spiritual development has had little attention in public educational policy. This is more challenging, considering the fact of increasing religious diversity and the focus on spirituality and religion in that context, as well as the way the spiritual is mentioned in documents on children’s rights. This article traces the development from the first documents on the rights of the child and responses to these documents. It is argued that educational policy and practice should pay more attention to the way children’s spirituality is included in the documents. This is an issue of general education as well as of moral philosophy. The article concludes with a claim: spiritual development is a matter of survival and flourishing as human beings, and considering this in the framework of children’s rights could mean exploring spiritual sources in one’s own faith as well as in other faiths.     

Cultivating Christians: North American family cultures and religious identity formation

North American Christian families face many challenges as they try to live faithfully in an intercultural, multi-religious, secularising world, particularly with regard to the formation of religious identity in children. Answering the question of how children become Christian is more complicated today than it was for previous generations because adults cannot assume that the Christian vestiges of a civil religion will be sufficient to help children embrace a robust sense of themselves as God’s beloved and called people in a divinely created world. Thus, this essay explores what social science research and theological reflection might offer religious leaders as frameworks and tools for encouraging family cultures that cultivate young Christians, focusing particularly on strategies for sharing religious language, communicating beliefs and values, modelling spiritual practices, encountering symbolic images, and participating in congregational life.     

Between God and self: exploring the attachment to God and authenticity/inauthenticity tendencies of South African Christian youths

The paper explores the relationship between attachment to God (AG) and authenticity/inauthenticity among Christian youths in relation to a range of socio-demographic variables. Cross-sectional data were collected from 100 South African Christian youths using measures of AG and authenticity/inauthenticity. The correlation results reveal that feelings of insecurity in terms of having anxiety in a relationship with God is positively related to self-alienation (feeling out of touch with oneself) and accepting external influences (conforming to the standards and expectations of others), but negatively correlated to authentic living (being in tune with one’s self). Feelings of insecurity in terms of avoidant God-attachment was also related to self-alienation. In addition, demographic differences were observed for gender and church denomination. These results suggest that insecurity with God may either be linked to feelings of authenticity or self-estrangement among Christian youths and have broad implications, both for clinical usage and further cross-cultural research.