Charismatic Renewal Research Articles

A sacred social: Christian relationalism and the re‐enchantment of the world

AbstractThis article intervenes in an ongoing debate as to whether or not Christianity introduces individualism into the lives of its converts. Drawing on an ethnographic account of Emmanuel, a French Catholic Charismatic community, it demonstrates that, counter to the argument that in social cases where Christianity is central, individualism emerges as a prominent value, in some cases it is relationalism that shapes Christian ethical aspirations. I argue that differences observed across contexts in expressions of value and configuration of personhood may be the result of the varied manners in which divine presence is experienced and understood to inhabit the world across Christian communities. Bringing God into the centre of ethnographic analysis in accounting for these differences broadens the debate's comparative reach, while underscoring the manner in which divine agency shapes the ethical aspirations of religious persons and their orientations to social others. Considering the ethical and political implications that one's orientation to the social can have, further investigation is called for into the manner in which the divine is experienced and invoked in social and ritual life.

Social contacts and spending of leisure time of the elderly

The phenomenon of the aging of societies is now well-known, demonstrating its demographic, economic and social impact in many countries around the world. The increase in average life expectancy at birth and the low number of children have naturally triggered the emergence of declining, aging societies. All this has led to a number of tasks for policy makers, domestic and international organizations, primarily to promote active, healthy aging. This article describes some of the results of an empirical study of 167 people conducted jointly with St. Luke’s Greek Catholic Charity in the winter of 2019 in order to assess the situation and needs of the elderly. This article presents the results of our study, which focuses on community activities, leisure, and social relationships. During our analytical work, we found that those living in residential care homes are more open to community-based activities to maintain physical and mental activity.

Introduction to the Special Section on Book/Media/Resource Reviews for Gerontological Social Work Education and Discrimination and Disparities

In the Summer of 2020, years of racial inequity and the evidence of the racially motivated deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and others sparked a renewed movement toward action...

교회 갱신운동의 역사와 전도

When the Korean church has lost public trust and the possibility of evangelism decreases, there are lessons to be learned from the church renewal movement's history such as Believers’ Church, Protestant Monasticism, and Radical Christian Community. They pursued life not by living on tradition and doctrine but by faith. Through various challenges such as the monastic movement’s spirituality, the reinterpretation of the sacrament, and laymen’s preaching, they continued to agonize and sometimes struggle to practice a faithfully biblical life. In a world where individualism prevails, we must regain our identity as Christ’s body church and spirituality to guide seekers to the Gospel. “The reformed church must always be reformed” is currently valid for the Korean churches.

Victims or Burdens?: Angolan Refugees and Humanitarian Aid Organizations in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 1961-1963

The onset of the Angolan war of independence in 1961 set off a humanitarian crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo. By the summer of 1962, the number of Angolans refugees rose to nearly 150,000. The UN High Commission for Refugees [Caritas], the League of Red Cross Societies [LRCS], the Catholic charity Caritas, and Protestant church aid groups all provided aid to Angolans. However, the UNHCR and LRCS quickly viewed the Angolans as overly dependent on humanitarian assistance. Echoing colonial anxieties about unsettled African populations, secular and Catholic organizations tried to resettle refugees. UNHCR and LCRS staff blamed Angolan nationalist leaders for coercing refugees to stay in exile rather than return to their homeland, ignoring how refugees themselves described how Portuguese troops had indiscriminately tortured and murdered civilians. Protestant aid groups actively collaborated with the FNLA Angolan rebel movement, to the displeasure of other aid organizations who contended the Protestants violated the humanitarian ideal of neutrality. This case indicates tensions between humanitarian organizations that considered refugees as a burden in need of continued oversight with others who considered the Angolans as victims of colonialism deserving of help.

Iranian Education Modernization Strategy (Iran's Islamic Leader Renewal Movement in the Early 20th Century Study of Disclosure of Historical Facts through the Mass Media)

The modernization of Islamic education continues to be encouraged by structuring the Iranian education system based on the principles of Islamic teachings, without neglecting the modern education that has developed in the pre-revolutionary government, namely balancing religious education, science and technology. The process of modernization in Iran, especially those related to the modernization of Islamic education, educational renewal strategies, and aspects of being modernized are interesting to study. As an Islamic country that has successfully carried out a modernization revolution, it has made it equal to the western world. In this study, the authors tried to obtain material through information from the mass media, literature literature, namely collecting, reading and studying sources, obtaining material (library research) in the form of books. The method of discussion in this research is: Synthesis Analysis Method, namely by means of rational and abstract logical approaches to the objective of thinking inductively and deductively as well as scientific analysis.

Place-Based Philosophical Activism on the US–Mexico Border

AbstractBefore the Department of Homeland Security instituted the Migrant Protection Protocols in January 2019, as many as 1,000 Central American refugees passed each day through Catholic Charities’ Humanitarian Respite Center, where they received food, clothing, a shower, toiletries, and sandwiches for the road. Sister Norma Pimentel founded the Humanitarian Respite Center in 2014 to “restore human dignity” to refugees who had been degraded and vilified during their dangerous journeys north, not least by way of their processing by the US government. Sister Norma has inspired countless people, including me, to engage with the community as a form of place-based philosophical activism, that is, of situated and engaged teaching, scholarship, and service. In this essay I read Sister Norma as a feminist pragmatist in the historical and philosophical lineage of Jane Addams, and I aim to provide an example of how a feminist-pragmatist approach can support and encourage philosophical activism in our communities. Feminist scholars can learn from feminist pragmatism the importance of “being-with,” “sympathetic understanding,” and “a larger social impulse.” Feminist pragmatism encourages academics to become place-based philosophical activists who use their teaching, research, and service in order to press for social justice.

Congregacionais e a Renovação Espiritual no Nordeste

In the mid-1960s, a climate of religious ferment spread through Protestant churches throughout Brazil, calling for a spiritual renewal. This yearning took shape through the Spiritual Renewal Movement, reshaping facets of Brazilian Protestantism. In the Northeast, the renewal movement reached Protestant pastors and faithful, among whom Baptists and Congregationals played a singular role in its consolidation and diffusion. Congregational leaders, especially from Paraíba and Pernambuco, immersed their communities in that “movement of the Spirit”. In order to understand this religious movement and its dynamics, we undertook research, from which we write this article. Our aim, through this article, is to present a brief historical-sociological overview of the religious renewal of congregationalist sectors in the Northeast.

“Hidden religious landscapes”: Religious minorities and religious renewal movements in the borderlands of the Serbian and Romanian Banat

The paper explores the ways religious grassroots actors in the borderlands contribute to the new understanding of cross border regions and religious groups in the space between the Serbian and Romanian Banat from the perspective of the anthropology of borders. The border region included in this paper was the place of interreligious and interethnic encounter, where religions and languages mixed and there was a continuous interaction between Orthodox Christians, Catholics and Protestants. By studying the region that had strong cultural, historical and religious connections, the aim is to provide new insights on the borders and religious groups that are understudied. This article explores the ?liminal? character of religious identities, development of renewal movements and crossing symbolic boundaries with the examples of the ?home-grown? religious movement of the Lord?s Army (Rom. Oastea Domnului) emerged in the first decades of the 20th century.

Professor Anna Mrozek-Dumanowska – Obituary by Professor Jerzy Zdanowski

Professor Anna Mrozek-Dumanowska was a philosopher and orientalist (Arabic studies) by education. She studied both faculties at the University of Warsaw. She researched the field of sociology and religious studies. The Professor’s scientific achievements include monographs, editorial teams, articles, book chapters, papers at national and international conferences, research projects, reviews of dissertations and publications, and editorial issues of our journals. Her many-sided interests were particularly worthy of attention: initially, they included Arab philosophy, relations between Islam and Christianity, and nation-building processes in Africa; later contemporary Islam and its social functions, and subsequently phenomena on the border of religion and magic and movements of religious renewal.

Luther, Barth, and Movements of Theological Renewal (1918–1933) ed. by Heinrich Assel and Bruce L. McCormack

Luther, Barth, and Movements of Theological Renewal (1918–1933) ed. by Heinrich Assel and Bruce L. McCormack

ПРОБЛЕМА ЧЕЛОВЕКА В РОССИЙСКОЙ ПСИХОЛОГИИ И ЗА ЕЕ ПРЕДЕЛАМИ

The problem of a person in psychology, its formulation and solution are rooted in the development of human and social sciences in general. In Russia, the formation of these sciences had a difficult history. The specificity of Russian modernizations and waves of enlightenment manifested itself in the borrowing of models and intellectual traditions, in the domination of the state over society, in the priority of the instrumental aspects of development over the humanitarian, as well as in the inconsistency and incompleteness of cultural and psychological processes associated with the transformations of the person himself. If the result of the European Renaissance was the emergence of a new type of personality, which then followed the paths of reformation, modernization and enlightenment, then the Russian Renaissance had a weakly expressed form, and its meaning consisted not only in a turn towards man, but also in the revival of European humanitarian values in Russia. The processes of humanization of society, anthropologisation of life and individualization of culture, initiated by the Renaissance spirit, had in Russia the character of constantly renewed, dispersed and latent movements. It is shown that anthropological problems were developed not only in the well-known works of N.G. Chernyshevsky, P.L. Lavrov, K.D. Ushinsky, in the approaches of V.M. Bekhterev, B.G. Ananyev and S.L. Rubinstein, but also in the unobvious activities of G.G. Shpet and GAKhN scientists, in the study of issues of art and architecture, in journalism and literary work. From the standpoint of retrospective and genealogical analysis, it was found that the anthropological turn was carried out throughout the twentieth century, manifested in the development of personality psychology, the psychology of the subject, as well as in the existential and philosophical approaches of postsoviet psychology. The expression of the anthropological approach in psychology was not only the movement towards the construction of human psychology, but also the emergence of the psychology of everyday life, focusing on the changes of the present and the ethnographic diversity of human existence.

Latino Catholics and Parish Boundaries: Notes from Chicagolandia

Latino Catholics and Parish Boundaries:Notes from Chicagolandia Deborah E. Kanter14 Parish Boundaries offers an engrossing, magisterial account of U.S. Catholic life in the twentieth century through the 1960s. In John McGreevy's capable hands, the history of parishes in Buffalo, Milwaukee, New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere makes for a surprisingly unified narrative about the ways that "black" and "white" came to the forefront of "the Catholic imagination."15 The book, however, only sparsely considered the experience of Latinos, a group poised today to become the majority of the Catholic laity. As we reflect back on McGreevy's work, I would like to draw upon my own work to invite us to dig deeper into how Latino Catholics fit into the Parish Boundaries story. As I began to research the history of Chicago's Mexican churches, McGreevy offered an indelible lesson in how a parish meant more than a church to local people. I shifted my attention from the church building and, when visiting, I prowled the entire block, spying the rectory, school, sometimes a gym, and always a convent. With the parish as my lens into ethnic identity and community formation, I wrote Chicago Católico: Making Catholic Parishes Mexican, which argues that Mexicans who settled in Chicago were fortunate to arrive in a multi-ethnic, Catholic city.16 In the 1920s, two national parishes were established to welcome the "Spanish speaking." When subsequent waves of Mexican immigrants and their children arrived in areas like Pilsen, they took over existing parish structures (built by European immigrant predecessors) and created more refugios. In more recent decades, arrivals from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Guatemala, and beyond inherited a church shaped by the story that McGreevy tells, while also invigorating Catholic Chicago. Since the 1990s new Latin American devotions have emerged in the parishes, annual processions once again wind their way through city streets, and the sanctuary of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Des Plaines, northwest of the city, welcomes [End Page 14] teeming crowds of the faithful.17 At the same time, Latinos also inherited an archdiocese in contraction, weighed down by huge, aging physical infrastructure that had been built for densely populated, ethnically diverse, Catholic neighborhoods. Step back a century. As Mexicans presented a new immigrant stream in Chicago and other Midwestern cities, social workers, landlords, bishops, teaching sisters, and priests all found themselves asking where these newcomers fit. What happened when Latin Americans and their children moved into a neighborhood, testing parish boundaries as fellow Catholics who were not Black, but not perceived entirely as white either?18 McGreevy devotes two pages to the postwar Latino growth in which he summarized that Euro-Americans proved more accepting of Latinos than African Americans. Based on secondary sources, he further surmised that Mexicans were relatively accepted, while Puerto Ricans in places like New York "faced more barriers." McGreevy contended, correctly I believe, that Euro-American parishes initially had tenuous ties with Spanish-speaking newcomers.19 In my own work, I found that Euro-American laity and clergy were not necessarily hostile to the new Mexicans in the pews, but the parishes hardly welcomed the new arrivals. In time, Catholicism offered common ground between Euro-American clergy and laity and their newer Spanish-speaking counterparts.20 The desire to maintain parish structures explains Euro-Americans' willingness to live with Mexican newcomers. Priests came to understand that Mexican Catholics could become part of the parish structure. If they developed loyalties to a fading Czech or Croatian parish, if they enrolled their children at the school, if they dropped a dollar into the weekly collection, the Mexicans would enable an aging parish to keep its doors open. Even so, these new parishioners often opted to attend Mass or Holy Week liturgies at a Spanish-speaking church. Chicago Catholic Charities reported in 1955 on the recent arrival of Mexicans in the majority Slavic Pilsen neighborhood. "Mexicans are still viewed as `invaders' by the older residents . . . However, the Mexican is considered a much lesser evil [End Page 15] than the surrounding Negroes."21 In the shadows of Spanish-speaking integration often lay the specter of "Negro invasion." The history of Latino Catholics offers a...

Transatlantic Railroad

Transatlantic Railroad Mary Burke (bio) This story was first published in the Irish Times on 18 May 2018, immediately prior to the referendum on the Eight Amendment, and is reprinted with permission by the author and original publisher. It has been revised here for publication in Éire-Ireland. Set in 1992 and told through the first-person perspective of a young woman who is pregnant, the story narrativizes a little-known transatlantic journeying that Irish women made to the United States in the later stages of the twentieth century. Organized by Catholic organizations, women with unplanned pregnancies were sent to stay with Catholic host families for the duration of their pregnancies, and after birth the babies were then subsequently adopted in the United States. "Transatlantic Railroad" thus contributes to the historical accounting of the many exilic journeys that women have had to make from Ireland as a direct result of the illegalities of abortion services and the absence of comprehensive reproductive health care and medical services there. ________ It is 1992. Too late in the century to be running away for the reason I am running and too late to be running so far. 500 years after Columbus and 400 years after the first university on Irish soil, from what I'm reading in the in-flight magazine. You'd think both Ireland and America would know better by now than to be transporting young women in my situation. And I am 20. You'd think I'd know better by now than to have agreed to being transported. Up the pole. Bun in the oven. In trouble. I'm making a list in the journal the agency wants me to keep of all the vague terms the Irish have for unwanted pregnancy. The journal has a picture of the Virgin Mary on the cover with her hands clasped [End Page 159] and her eyes thrown up to heaven, looking like this whole sorry business was sheer embarrassment. Never has a spokeswoman been so badly matched with her charity. ________ A "host family" the agency called them. They are the host and I am the parasite. The foolish single Irish girl who got herself knocked up. (Knocked up. I must add that one to the list.) The Catholic agency that arranges for holy shows like me to hide out with a pious family until the baby has been quietly born and adopted by another Catholic family gave me a choice of available hosts: a farming family in Cavan or an Irish American family in Connecticut. Some local Catholic charity in Connecticut would take care of my expenses. ________ Connecticut. In America, no less. ________ Jesus Christ! Did they really think I'd choose a farm in Cavan over some place in America? I think I know Connecticut from the telly. Near New York. Rich. Big cars. Mansions. Macy's and Blooming-dales on the main streets of fancy towns. ________ My hosts are Mr. and Mrs. Murphy. "Welcome, Orla," Mrs. Murphy says at Arrivals, with what seems to be genuine warmth. Maybe this is going to be okay. But my heart sinks as they drive me from JFK Airport. With every few miles northward, we seem to get farther and farther from the possibility of department stores. We pass what they tell me with obvious pride is a large and famous Connecticut public university, but it is in the middle of nowhere. There are cows grazing in fields around the campus. In the name of God, where were the nightclubs and pubs that always huddled close to campuses? They talk at length about the Catholic church in their neighboring town. It seems I will be brought there every Sunday. I begin to see tractors on the road as we approach what they called their hometown. I had travelled thousands of miles to get away from tractors on the road and seeing cows up close. Why hadn't I looked up Connecticut in the World Book Encyclopedia at home? And that word "hometown" that they keep using. Once we approached the place I can see that this wasn't what I would've called a "town." If you call something...

Los viajes de Paulo Freire a España (1984-1994) y la consolidación del ámbito académico de la pedagogía social a partir de los años noventa

Paulo Freire's ideas came to Spain since the 1970s. The first reception spaces were the popular education projects that were being promoted by progressive sectors of the Church and also by the Pedagogical Renewal Movements. Later Freire's ideas were received in the academic field of pedagogy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Freire's trips to Spain between 1984 and 1994, four trips that are studied in detail in this article, are a key historical source for studying of the presence of the Brazilian pedagogue's thought in the Spanish Faculties of Education. The central hypothesis that we develop in this work is that taking Freire's work as a reference, social pedagogy managed to dig its own space in the academic field of pedagogy in Spain. Keywords: Paulo Freire. Spain. Social Pedagogy. Popular Education.

Does the Civic Renewal Movement Have a Future?

AbstractA civic ideal is an ideal of deliberative self‐governance. People who participate in discussing what their own groups should do are being civic. Civic venues, institutions, and habits have waned since the mid‐1900s. In the 1990s, a movement arose to restore them, under the banner of “civic renewal.” This movement was carefully nonpartisan, often impartial about specific issues, and interested in creating alternative settings that could complement such basic political institutions as Congress and elections. As the condition of democracy has worsened in recent years, this approach looks inadequate or irrelevant. The most promising sources of civic renewal now are parties and social movements that have substantive agendas, such as racial justice, and that improve civic life as a collateral benefit.[Correction added on 27 September 2021, after first online publication: In the abstract, “mid‐1990s” has been changed to “mid‐1900s”.]

The Notions of Fūkei, Ba, and Fukkō in a Community Art Project

This essay shows how a specific understanding of landscape (fūkei) as an agricultural landscape associated with the collective imagination, memory, and the activities related to vegetable farming enabled artist Taho Ritsuko to engage survivors of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, which struck Osaka-Kōbe in 1995, in a movement of reconstruction and renewal (fukkō). The project involved the survivors in the entire process, from conception to realization, of a work intended for a communal outdoor space in the danchi (a new public housing complex) where they were being relocated. The project gained renown in Japan for the political and administrative battle won, which gave the survivors the right to independently cultivate part of the public land in the Minami-Ashiyahama district. By involving them in a creative process that became political, the artist aimed to encourage their interaction and create an active co-presence consistent with the notion of ba (scene, place, or field). Composed of two landscape sculptures, the work was integral to the process of forming and establishing a community.

Dwa kościoły. Budownictwo kultowe w międzywojennych Niemczech jako przestrzeń modernistycznych eksperymentów

The time between WW I and II was a period of intensive development of church architecture in Germany. In the new situation after the defeat in WW I on the wave of Christian renewal movements, the concept of the church as a building corresponding to its functions, as an object expressing the character of religion and the vision of a congregation as a community in modern society was re -formulated. The dynamically developing church architecture was an area of intense experiments (especially in the 1920s.), creating new forms, as well as devising new iconography by Rudolf Schwartz, Otto Bartning, or Dominikus Böhm. The paper draws attention to a certain community of the main antagonized Christian and Protestant denominations on the example of two buildings erected on the eastern periphery of the then Germany (from 1945 constituting the western part of Poland): the Catholic Church of St Anthony in Schneidemühl (now: Piła, Hans Herkommer, 1928–1930) and the Protestant Cross-Church in Stettin (now: Szczecin, Adolf Thesmacher, 1929–1931). The first was built in a small town as a representative seat of the Prelature, a branch of the Catholic Church in the Protestant region, near the then border with (revived again) Poland. The building is a continuation of an innovative and conservative concept realized by Herkommer at the Frauenfriedenskirche in Frankfurt am Main (1927–1929), and is a testimony to the search for forms expressing the rationalist aspirations for the renewal of the Catholic Church, however without abandoning the main principles of the Tradition. For this purpose, Herkommer applies ‘industrial’ forms used in the Bauhaus circle, creating a clearly avant-garde building: not only in the local context of a small border town of eastern Germany, but also in the Catholic tradition of sacred architecture. Hiring an avant-garde architect and using modernist forms was the decision of one man: Monsignor Maximilian Kaller, the leader of the Prelature. The Church of the Cross in Szczecin was raised in a luxurious district of a great Protestant city, so it was the parish church of the Protestant elite. Although built of brick and clearly referring to the tradition of the Gothic architecture of this region, the Church of the Cross also reveals its striving for the maximum reduction of forms and the use of the language of abstraction. When building a Protestant church, Thesmacher resorted to forms applied primarily in Catholic architecture, especially to the forms used by Herkommer. Thesmacher created a facility expressing attachment to the local tradition and manifesting the modernity of the Evangelical church in Pomerania. As a result, both churches are a testimony to functionalist aspirations, although, of course, the functions differed from those on which, for example, the founders of the Bauhaus were focused.

Movimentos de Renovação Política e a Participação Cívica no Brasil

O presente trabalho apresenta os dados e análises iniciais de uma pesquisa sobre os movimentos de renovação política no Brasil. Para isso, faz um mapeamento e analisa o surgimento de movimentos da sociedade civil - Acredito, Agora e Renova BR - cuja ação propõe repensar novas formas da representação política. Os grupos analisados têm se organizado de modo a recrutar e formar jovens interessados na política com intuito de ocupar cargos eletivos nas esferas executivas e legislativas. Essas organizações se baseiam em modos online e offline e atuam na formação de cidadãos representantes da “nova política”, ideia que vem se desenvolvendo desde as Jornadas de Junho de 2013. Metodologicamente, o trabalho apresenta um breve debate sobre os conceitos envolvidos e a ação destes movimentos políticos. Faz ainda um mapa inicial da rede destes grupos, suas relações com outros atores da sociedade civil bem como o papel que desempenharam nas eleições de 2018.

Understanding stakeholder positionalities and relationships to reimagine asylum at the US–Mexico border: Observations from McAllen, TX

This paper draws on observational research conducted in McAllen, Texas, during the summer of 2019, of three major stakeholder groups involved in asylum management: Catholic Charities Humanitarian Respite Center (HRC); federal government agencies; and the McAllen community. Each group holds a unique, pluralistic perspective on migration, informing intra-group relations and exposing uneven power dynamics between them. Our analysis is contextualized by a local voice, a former long-term volunteer at the HRC, who speaks of the evolution of the McAllen border in her lifetime, as well as federal authority over McAllen and the HRC to process asylees. We dissect how this power dynamic produces a highly violent, detention-dominant immigration landscape in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV), antithetical to the practiced intersectional culture of voces locales. We reimagine how the US responds to asylum seekers by offering a community action-based framework, where these pluralistic perspectives are equitably valued. Based on interactions and conversations had with each group, we advocate a paradigm shift reflective of La Frontera’s (The Border’s) intersectional identity. This can be achieved by prioritizing voces locales and building capacity for the humanitarian sector, which is already doing critical work at the southern border. We look to contemporary movements like “Defund the Police” as examples, where divesting from the status-quo system of oppression can nurture reparative justice and empowerment to the RGV. In reimagining a more adaptive, asylum justice-oriented paradigm shift, we also recognize the need to abandon the government-controlled deterrence paradigm, which repeatedly causes tremendous harm.