Celtic Saints and the Ecology of Death

Romantics mislead us when they depict nature as a garden where we feel at home. What drives nature is death, death with all its blood shedding pain. Death drives natural selection in evolutionary biology. The Celtic Saints in Ireland developed a rich spirituality that acknowledged the dominant role of death while trusting profoundly in divine providence.     

A Primer on Celtic Spirituality With Recommendations for Counseling Practice

Research suggests that expressions of Celtic spirituality are widespread among the U.S. populace (e.g., Pew Research Center, 2014; Sullivan, 2016). Adherents vary in their commitment levels, ranging from informal cultural participants to followers of structured forms of the faith tradition (e.g., Celtic Christianity, Wicca, Paganism). The counseling literature provides scant information on this movement and germane approaches to support clients who identify with this spirituality. To respond to this deficiency, we address the topic by contextualizing Celtic spirituality from definitional, historical, and thematic perspectives. Next, we consider implications for spiritually sensitive counseling practice. We include a case study, exemplifying potential adaptive counseling processes and interventions.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed:
William James, A Review of the Reviews of The Varieties of Religious Experience
Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions
Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology
James R. Nieman and Thomas G. Rogers, Preaching to Every Pew: Cross–Cultural Strategies     

Jung, Evans-Wentz and various other gurus

How did Jung become deeply concerned with Asian religions and particularly with the Tibetan Buddhism of a Welshman from Trenton, New Jersey? Could that man be considered one of Jung's gurus? This essay begins six years after Jung, at twenty, was admitted to the medical school of Basel University and became a member of the Zofingiaverein, a student society. The next year he gave the first of a series of lectures on the interpretation of Christ as the model of the ‘god-man’, like the Apostle Paul, Confucius, Zoroaster and the Buddha, who was ‘drummed into the Hindu boy’. (Jung's Zofingia Lectures were discovered only after his death, in 1961, and were published in English in 1983). The present essay discusses Jung's early Buddhist interest as displayed in The Psychology of the Unconscious (finally, in a revision, entitled Symbols of Transformation), in Psychological Types and later in his foreword of the Wilhelm translation of the I Ching. Jung was influenced by the gurus Richard Wilhelm and his son Hellmut, the scholar J. W. Hauer (with whom he later broke off relations because of Hauer's Nazi politics), the indologist Heinrich Zimmer, and the Zen master D. T. Suzuki. Walter Yeeling Wentz was born in Trenton in 1878 and brought up in his family's theosophist faith. The Wentzes moved to San Diego in 1900, and Walter added his mother's Celtic surname, Evans, to the German Wentz. He was educated at Stanford University and travelled in Europe, studying Celtic folklore, and widely in the Near East, Tibet, India, and Oxford – studying religions everywhere and editing Tibetan books. He lived his last decades in San Diego and conducted a correspondence with Jung, while living in a cheap hotel, or in an ashram.