Experience Of Grace Research Articles

The Sacraments of Initiation as ‘Proof of Concept’ for Bernard Lonergan’s ‘Four-Point Hypothesis’

Abstract This essay endeavors a correlation between Bernard Lonergan’s ‘four-point hypothesis’ – a theological proposal integrating trinitarian theology and the supernatural order of ‘created grace’ – and the sacraments of initiation. The same formal structure that Lonergan discerned in the experience of grace, itself a means of participation in the life of the Trinity, is replicated in the sacramental reception of that grace in those ritual acts whereby one is made a Christian. This at once serves as a ‘proof of concept’, lending credence to the Lonerganian proposal, and provides a speculative framework for understanding how it is that the sacraments introduce Christians into the divine life.

The Anvil, the Ascent, and Enoch

First Enoch, a pseudepigraphical work from the Second Temple period, contains visions of the natural and supernatural world that cause the visionary, Enoch, to understand anew the beyond-human world. Written during a time of environmental devastation, 1 Enoch can be a resource for helping today’s readers rewild our religious imaginations, our understanding of worship, and our relationship with nonhuman creation. This essay offers a reflection on how the Book of the Watchers in 1 Enoch and the author’s failed attempts to reach a mountain peak helped the author better understand the unseating of humanity as the center of creation as an experience of grace.

Psychometric evaluation of the bottom-up developed Experiencing Grace Scale

The experience of grace is currently attracting increased empirical interest. Validated instruments to assess aspects of the experience of grace in a secularized context are scarce which limits current psychological research on grace in other than highly religious populations. We present a bottom-up construction of the Experiencing Grace Scale (EGS) and evidence supporting its reliability and validity. Confirmatory factor analysis showed a good fit for the four subscales: Appraising Grace, Giving Grace, Receiving Grace, and Divine Grace. Reliability analysis showed overall good internal consistency and test–retest stability. Convergent validity was demonstrated by means of expected associations between subscales of the EGS and other relevant measures. Predictive validity was confirmed by associations between subscales of the EGS at measurement Wave 1 with mental well-being scales at Wave 2. The EGS contributes to further research on the experience of grace and its relationship to other psychosocial variables in the field of positive psychology.

An Undeserved Gift from God: Conservative Christian Experiences of Divine Grace

The reception of God’s grace is a salient spiritual experience and is one that lies at the heart of Christianity. The present study sought to address a gap in the psychological literature pertaining to the experience of divine grace among Protestant Christians in a qualitative study with 30 adult self-identified Protestant Christians. By using Strauss and Corbin’s grounded theory data analysis, themes emerged to reveal how these Christians conceived of and experienced grace. Specifically, results indicated that these Christians most often spoke of “undeservedness” as the primary characteristic from which all other conceptions of grace flowed. The notion of grace being God’s undeserved gifts framed four important dimensions of the conservative Protestant understanding and experience of grace: (a) it specified components of salvific grace, (b) it identified an ongoing grace, (c) it cultivated specific outcomes, and (d) it highlighted distinct obstacles that make it difficult to grasp God’s grace. These findings expand the current body of literature regarding religiosity in that they highlight the primacy of divine grace as central to the religious experience of conservative Christians.

On a theology of social work: Historical teachings in contemporary clinical applications

ABSTRACT A Christian identity, coupled with clinical social work, can offer a unique lens through which continued clinical work around trauma and healing is both informed and directed. I have leaned heavily on a theology of social work, which fuses clinical knowledge with Christian teachings on healing, sin, and grace. Of paramount importance, however, has been the translation of traditional understandings of these concepts into modern comprehensions and contemporary language, based on well-informed developmental interpersonal neurobiology research, and nearly twenty years of clinical encounters. Through clinical vignettes, a clarified perspective and application of historical Christian teachings is offered, one that esteems relationality and the therapeutic alliance, prioritizes the intersubjective experience, contextualizes contemporary culture, and embraces the principal tenants of attachment theory as foundational to our understanding of the lived experience of grace and healing clarified in the scriptures.

A FASCINATING SYNTHESIS OF SCIENCE, THEOLOGY, AND SPIRITUALITY: ST. GREGORY PALAMAS

As a prominent Church father, mystical theologian and incisive polemicist, St. Gregory Palamas has realized a «Summa Theologica» of his epoch, but one that has surpassed not only the thinking of contemporaries, but remained, to this day, a synthesis of philosophical and theological knowledge, at least for the Eastern Christianity. He pointed out with clarity the independence of theology from philosophy or from any other field of research. One of the most important instruments with a view to knowing God is prayer and Palamas began to write under the pressure of defending the hesychastic method of prayer. He proves that true communion with God was possible through sanctification and that God's vision through prayer was a sign of this spiritual communion. In Palamas' very coherent theological thinking, Christology corresponds to his anthropology, and both to his mysticism. St. Gregory strongly depreciated the value of intellectual effort, maintaining the primacy of direct illumination over scientific reasoning. Thus, prayer and asceticism engender love, which leads to illumination by God and participation in the divine life. He tries to make sense of mystical experience in the scientific and philosophical language of his day. Paradoxically, almost every attempt arrives at establishing that the spiritual cannot be grasped by man's natural intellectual capacity, nor expressed in philosophical language. But the spiritual man can be the partaker of this experience through the experience of grace, as divine uncreated energy, the true "face" of God accessible to human contemplation. The Archbishop of Thessaloniki, who realized a synthesis of Science, Theology, and Spirituality outlines the relation between them as follows: Science explores the world and leads to technological inventions; Theology interprets reality within the Christian framework, evidencing the glory of God as reflected throughout his creation; and Spirituality is the privileged path toward personal transformation. The debate about Palamism is likely to continue for some time. His version of theosis (deification) was enshrined in Orthodox teaching as a result of his canonization, but among the intellectuals for whom it was intended it remained controversial, despite its grandeur.

Internal Difficulties in the Theology of Karl Rahner

AbstractCriticism of the theology of Karl Rahner is most often made from bases external to his thought. When the ever greater ascendancy of transcendentality in Rahner’s thought is juxtaposed with areas of his theology concretely differentiated by symbol and history, however, internal difficulties arise that jeopardize the coherence and integrality of his work. Following an analysis of the predominant role of transcendentality in Rahner, three particular areas of such internal difficulty are considered: (1) the irreconcilability of the reciprocally constitutive dynamics of the Realsymbol with the fundamentally unidirectional operation of transcendental grace, (2) the disjunction entailed in the experience of grace as conscious yet unreflexive knowledge (Erkenntnis), and (3) the incommensurability of an historically developmental self‐communication (Selbstmitteilung) of the economic Trinity with an a priori, always already self‐communication (Selbstmitteilung) of God in grace. By rendering transcendentality ever surpassing in its reach, Rahner ultimately exposes other corners of his theology to the point of provoking internal disjunction that his transcendental overextension leaves him unable to resolve.

A Lay Definition of Grace: A Quantitative and Qualitative Content Analysis

ABSTRACT Grace is a central theme in religious traditions but receives only recently attention by psychologists. Conceptualizations of grace seem predominantly constructed within theological and theoretical frameworks, whereas these conceptualizations may be poorly aligned with the definitions of grace of lay persons. This study clarifies the concept of grace and creates a bottom-up definition, based on the understanding of non-experts in a secularized society. A total of 456 Belgian adults (64% female, mean age = 50.04) provided descriptions of grace in an online survey. A multidisciplinary coding team conducted quantitative and qualitative content analysis (Nvivo). The following themes and categories emerged (1) virtuous qualities: grace is recognized in a multitude of good qualities with forgiveness as the ultimate example; (2) extra-ordinary gift: grace is something you receive unmerited, the nature of the giving goes beyond mere fair exchange; (3) transcendent and immanent setting: grace is encountered in the realm of the divine as well as in human relationships and daily life; (4) profound experience: the giving and receiving of grace entails an articulated personal involvement leading to new beginnings and freedom and (5) profound feelings: the experience of grace is accompanied with positive feelings and states often preceded by negative feelings and states. Distribution of categories by respondent’s age, gender, and religiosity showed robustness of underlying characteristics in the definition of grace. However, significant group differences are found: believing and older participants described more often extra-ordinary and transcendent characteristics, whereas nonbelievers used more referrals to faults and forgiveness. Believing people used more positive feelings and women used more virtuous qualities in describing grace. The importance of further investigating the psychological dynamics of grace and its capacity for enhancing well-being is highlighted.

Experiencing Grace: A Thematic Network Analysis of Person-Level Narratives

AbstractThe aim of the present study is to clarify the lay experience of grace through person-level narratives. This empirical qualitative study follows a bottom-up approach, not restricted by specific theoretical assumptions, and includes a large and heterogeneous group of Belgian participants. The sample (recruited online) was composed of 456 participants (64% women, mean age = 50.04, age range from 18 to 93 years). Data consisted of 456 written narratives describing the experience of grace. They were analysed using a thematic analysis and thematic network approach with the help of a qualitative data management package Nvivo 12 pro. The resulting thematic network visualizes the experience of grace in the flow of time with (a) antecedents, grace can happen anywhere and anytime, but difficulties often precede grace; (b) the core experience is one of receiving an unmerited free gift in response to failure or brokenness or as an encounter with goodness and beauty, and this can be given by the divine or by other people and lastly (c) consequences entails a transformation at the intrapersonal, interpersonal and/or situational level. Our approach allows for an ecological and bottom-up understanding of grace as experienced nowadays in a secularized country and can empirically inform future studies about the connection between grace and psychological flourishing.

Motivation for Longevity Across the Life Span: An Emerging Issue.

Over the past decades, increases in life expectancy in most modern societies have raised questions about whether and to what extent individuals value possible extensions of their personal lifetime. In this vein, a new field of research emerged that investigates the determinants, concomitants, and consequences of longevity values and personal preferences for an extended lifetime across adulthood. Based on a review of available theoretical and empirical work, we identified 3 mindsets on the challenges and potentials of human longevity common in research as well as personal views: (a) an essentialist mindset that builds on ideal principles of an infinite life, aimed at conquering or significantly postponing a biologically determined aging process, (b) a medicalist mindset that appraises aging as being primarily based on quality of health, and (c) a stoicist mindset that associates longevity and lifetime extension with the experience of grace and meaning. In this regard, we submit that motivation for longevity and its behavioral consequences differ depending on what mindsets individuals adopt in a given developmental context. We suggest that mindsets of longevity motivation are embedded in personal belief systems (e.g., death acceptance) that may depend on health, and on context influences (e.g., culture). Mindsets of longevity motivation may be related to differences in health behavior and late-life preparation. We illustrate such ideas with an exploratory analysis from a cross-cultural data set. We discuss the possible implications of these mindsets of longevity motivation for the aging sciences, and with regard to individual ways of approaching old age.

Modern Transformations of sādhanā as Art, Study, and Awareness: Religious Experience and Hindu Tantric Practice

“My first raising of the kuṇḍalinī was hearing Ma [her teacher] speak about art.” The experience of the awakening of śakti within practitioners in contemporary cultures occurs both in traditional religious settings and within novel circumstances. Traditional situations include direct transmission from a guru (śaktipāta), self-awakening through the practice of kuṇḍalinī-yoga or haṭhayoga, and direct acts of grace (anugraha) from the goddess or god. There are also novel expressions in hybrid religious-cultural experiences wherein artists, dancers, and musicians describe their arts explicitly in terms of faith/devotion (śraddhā, bhakti, etc.) and practice (sādhanā). They also describe direct experience of grace from the goddess or describe their ostensibly secular teachers as gurus. In contemporary experience, art becomes sādhanā and sādhanā becomes art. Creativity and artistic expression work as modern transformations of traditional religious experience. This development, while moving away from traditional ritual and practice, does have recognizable grounding within many tantric traditions, especially among the high tantra of the Kashmiri Śaiva exegetes.

Response: Postexceptionalist Puritanism: Rocking the Foundations

Response: Postexceptionalist Puritanism: Rocking the Foundations

Sacred Heart, Beatific Mind: Exploring the Consciousness of Jesus

Traditional Christologies have focused attention on the question of Jesus’ beatific knowing. On the other hand, recent explorations into Spirit Christology raise different questions about his affectivity. Both issues highlight a concern with Jesus’ psychological experience. The present article proposes that both these issues can be fruitfully examined through the lens of the psychological analogy for the Trinity. In particular, Bernard Lonergan’s developments of the analogy drawing as they do on the experience of grace, shed a new and helpful light on the question of Jesus’ knowing and loving. This approach alleviates some of the more problematic aspects of the traditional approach to Jesus’ beatific vision, while also providing a more solid trinitarian basis for Catholic devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Grace of God: A Phenomenological Inquiry

Grace, in the Christian understanding, is the unconditional love, the free, and undeserved favor of God. Grace, in this context, is not of man, but of the Divine through which the knowledge of truth is gained— truth that surpasses man’s natural knowledge and experience; by which the soul is likened to the Divine. In this paper, an attempt is made to decipher (through phenomenological inquiry) the experience of grace in the life of a middle-aged individual and how it provide resilience in the functioning of ones’ everyday life. The paper also discusses the possibility of the essential nature of the experience of Gods’ grace as it look into the subjective experience of the individual.

Intelligent products: The grace experience

Product intelligence is a new industrial manufacturing control paradigm aligned with the context of cyber-physical systems and addressing the current requirements of flexibility, reconfigurability and responsiveness. This paradigm introduces benefits in terms of improvement of the entire product׳s life-cycle, and particularly the product quality and customization, aiming the customer satisfaction. This paper presents an implementation of a system of intelligent products, developed under the scope of the GRACE project, where an agent-based solution was deployed in a factory plant producing laundry washing machines. The achieved results show an increase of the production and energy efficiency, an increase of the product quality and customization, as well as a reduction of the scrap costs.

Rock on, Ancient Queen

Jungian analyst Mary Jo Halley Spencer reflects on her life as she approaches her 100th birthday. She discusses two significant experiences in her childhood and her individuation process. She also explores the experience of grace, finding Jung, her analysis with Dr. Joseph Henderson, and the individuals who impacted her most.

『共通の信仰』 と 『道徳的人間と非道徳的社会』

In Moral Man and Immoral Society, Reinhold Niebuhr dismissed John Dewey as a naïve moralist who, not seeing the irrational character of the behavior of all human collectives, overestimated rational experimentation, and identified God and the world, the ideal and the real. Niebuhr asserted that the responsible Christian had to accept the use of force. However, he refused to regard politics only as a struggle for power. He tried to find a way out of the “endless cycle of social conflict.” Niebuhr stressed that the experience of grace would “create the attitudes which transcend social conflict and mitigate its cruelties.” In Common Faith, Dewey defined the religious as the unification of the self and of the self and the universe. For Dewey, democracy embodies the religious. It is religious because it bases on faith in the ability of human nature to achieve freedom for individuals accompanied with social stability built on cohesion instead of coercion. Despite their differences in political orientation, Dewey and Niebuhr relied on the nature and destiny of man who could create their own world.

Grappling with die letzte Dinge

Freud's initial critical attitude towards religion is well known: religious belief was associated with infantilism, and religious teachings violated the principles of reason. This article brings forth certain nuances in Freud's views on religion. Why was it that he, a “godless Jew”, but a self-declared agnostic, never brought to a closure his preoccupation with God and interest in religion? An increasingly sympathetic approach to religion can be discerned in contemporary psychoanalysis. The author critically discusses these early and late trends, including the position of Jung with regard to religion. Making use of the writings of Françoise Dolio and the novelist Flannery O'Connor, he emphasizes the unfeasibility of a psychology of religiousness, the partial overlap between a personal psychoanalysis and certain spiritual experiences, and the superiority of literature to psychoanalytic theorizing in conveying the experience of grace.

From Grace Alone to Grace Alone: Male Body Image and Intimacy at Princeton Seminary

This essay explores recent literature on male body image and reports the findings of empirical research of male body image on the campus of Princeton Seminary. While the author did not find that Princeton Seminary men suffer from what is being called the “Adonis Complex” in any pathological sense, the author did find that the “talking taboo” among seminary men regarding intimate matters is still operative and that these men seem to be longing for male intimacy, as evidenced by their eager and voluntary support of my study. Surprisingly, the author found that, during the course of his interviews, theological language about grace seemed to be subverting the experience of intimacy and, ironically, the experience of grace itself.

Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest: The None Zone by Patricia O'Connell Killen, Mark Silk

completion of the transcontinental railroad in May 1869 and concludes with a summary of the use of the trailsas settlementandmilitary routes into the 1890s. This book isa straightforward historyof the development, use, and impact of the overland trails that avoids a dramatic focus ? taken by most popular works? on the hardships, dif ficulties, and daily experiences of traveling the overland trials. It ismore about why and how the trailsdeveloped than about what it was like to travel over them. Individual experience on the trails isnot entirelyneglected; excerptsfrom diaries and reminiscences are liberallysprinkled throughout thebook. Sometimes quite lengthy, these excerpts provide personal accounts that enhance the author's historical discussion, but theyare not themain focus. In a rare departure from traditional trail histories, the last chapter,"Rebirth of theTrail," brings the storyup to thepresent.Dary discusses how Ezra Meeker's effortsatmarking and pro moting theOregon Trail were instrumental in revivinginterestin it,leading toHollywood films that romanticize it,Congressional measures that memorialize it,the formation of historical associations thatpromote and preserve it,and the proliferation of interpretive centers along the corridor of trails.This delineation of the continuous chain of reinterpretation of the Oregon Trail through successive generations demonstrates how theOregon Trail continues tobe relevant and vital today. The Oregon Trail iswell written and read able. Particularly useful are the appendixes on historic landmarks andmajor routes of theOr egon and California Trails. A glossary of terms and concepts isalso helpful.Knowledgeable trail enthusiasts will notice some misspellings on themaps and in the appendixes and glossary, aswell as notable factual errors in the text.This comprehensive and detailed book summarizes and touches upon the highlights of the im mensely complex western emigrant trailsera. It provides an overview for the general reader or student of thedevelopment of theOregon Trail and subsequent destination trails. It is also an encyclopedic compilation of facts,names, and dates that will be a useful referenceforinterested readers and trailbuffs. ReligionandPublicLifeinthe Pacific Northwest: TheNone Zone Edited by Patricia O'Connell Killen andMark Silk Rowman and Littlefield, Charlotte, N.C., 2004. Tables, bibliography, index. 204 pages. $19.95 paper. Reviewed by FerencM. Szasz University of New Mexico, Albuquerque Whenever one studies the nineteenth centuryhistoryof thePacificNorthwest, onemeets representativesof the major religious traditions: Jason Lee (Methodist), Dr. Marcus and Narcissa Whitman (Congregationalist), Sheldon Jackson (Presbyterian), and Joseph Cataldo (Roman Catholic). Vital though these denominations stillare, theyno longer even be gin to shape the religious contours of theregion. In fact,awhopping 62.8 percent of people who live inthePacificNorthwest are listedas "nones," that is,not affiliated with anyorganized religious group. This statisticreflectsthehighest percent age in thenation, and itsexplanation involves a very convoluted tale. The nine essays in this slim volume go a longway toward explaining this situation. The book is the first in a projected nine-volume series designed to analyze the role of religion in shaping each of themajor regions of the Reviews 503 nation. A blend of history and sociology, the essays all draw heavilyfrom twomassive setsof recent statistics:a national surveyofmembers as claimed by thevarious American denomina tions; and another extensive telephone survey thatallowed people to self-identify by responding to thequestion, "What isyour religious tradition, ifany?" Interestingly, the two setsofdata do not exactly match. Farmore people claim tobelong toa tradition (say,Baptist) thanare listedby the churches themselves.The meaning of thisrather pronounced discrepancy isnot precisely clear. Rather thango denomination bydenomina tion,theauthorsdivide theregion intofourover lapping religious"clusters": mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Jews;the sectarian entrepreneurs who meld an exclusivist evangelical theology withmodern organizational and communication techniques; people of thePacificRim,which in eludesNative Americans andAsian immigrants; and the "Secular but Spiritual" group that con stitutesthevastmajority. Taken together,the authors have craftedan intriguing portraitof a region locked inreligious transition.Dale Soden showshow the relatively smallmainline groups have been crucial in es tablishing schools, colleges, and hospitals and in leading crusades forracial justice and economic equality.These groups have also been active in marshalling protests against intolerance, war, and nuclear armaments. James Wellman, Jr., analyzes thesaga of thenew,dynamic Protestant church leaderswho have createdmega-churches and command a greatdeal ofnewspaper public ity. He suggeststhattheirinsistenceon having an experience of grace, theirdoctrinal certainties, and theirstrictrules of lifehave great appeal in an "anything goes," postmodern world. Lance...