Speaking In Tongues Research Articles

‘Speaking in tongues’. Fixation on a non-native language at induction of anaesthesia.

‘Speaking in tongues’. Fixation on a non-native language at induction of anaesthesia.

Glossolalia and Temperature Change in the Right and Left Cerebral Hemispheres

A sophisticated infrared camera measured temperature changes presumed to be related to activation of either the right or left brain hemispheres. Measurements were taken before and after participants spoke in tongues and before and after they read aloud. Results indicated increasing activation of the right hemisphere relative to the left after speaking in tongues and the opposite relation after reading aloud.

Coming lnto Play: An Interview with Gloria Anzaldua

Contemporary Chicana poet, writer, and theorist, Gloria E. Anzaldua, was born in Texas in 1942. She is coeditor, with prominent Chicana feminist Cherrie Moraga, of the groundbreaking anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981) and editor of Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras (1990). A published author of poetry and prose, a university instructor of Chicano studies, feminist studies, and creative writing, and a political activist, Anzaldua is an important voice in the literary world today. Her best known collection of writings is Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), which was chosen as one of the 38 Best Books of 1987 by Library Journal. In 1986 This Bridge Called My Back received the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award. In 1991 Anzaldua received a National Endowment for the Arts award for fiction. She currently lives in Santa Cruz, where she is working on several projects, including a collection of theoretical essays, a manuscript of fiction, a children's book, and a novel. This interview is an edited transcription of a telephone interview conducted on February 17, 1995. Interviewer: Looking at Borderlands/La Frontera nearly ten years after its publication, is there anything you view differently? Were you to revise and republish it today, is there anything you would change? Anzaldua: Well, first of all, I think I would get a reader to proof the Spanish because at the time Aunt Lute didn't have the staff that could deal with the code-switching. So every time I read passages from Borderlands I see typos and spelling mistakes. My other concern was that Chapter Six, on writing and art, was put together really fast. In fact, all of the seven chapters were written after the book had already gone into production and I was trying to write an introduction. They were already typesetting the poetry, and the introduction became the seven essays. And [Chapters] Five and Six, the one on language and the one on art and writing, were the last to go in, and they were the roughest. And especially Chapter Six I felt like I was still regurgitating and sitting on some of the ideas and I hadn't done enough revisions and I didn't have enough time to unravel the ideas fully. I think that Chapter Six especially is an extension of Speaking in Tongues in This Bridge, and that what I'm writing now in Lloronas, some of the concepts that I'm working with of which one is nepantla, is kind of a continuation of these other two. I think my writing is always in revision, so that Borderlands built on La Prieta and some aspects of Speaking in Tongues; and the other theoretical work, Lloronas, is building on all of those that came before. If I had to do it differently, I think that I would distinguish a little bit more between the kind of historical, rational language of high theory and another kind of language which is the poetic language of myths and of collective self-expression. And maybe unravel some of the spirituality aspects in my work a little bit more. I think that between the times when you conceive of work and you have a deadline and before it gets too unwieldy you have to cut it off. And in terms of this historical, rational, logical, argumentative writing that is what is privileged right now in the academy, there is this other non-rational identity that I dwell in about three-quarters of the time. Three-quarters of the time I'm asleep, dreaming. Another eight hours I'm probably working in my head with words and images, and writing and making fiction, and kind of dreaming the stories into being. And then the rest of the time--I guess, what is left? Another eight hours?--probably out of that, half of the time I'm dealing with this historical, everyday life. And the other, I'm still in my thoughts, like I might be driving along and I might be thinking about other.... So it's like the `T' that I didn't deal with as much in these earlier works would come into prominence a little bit more in the subsequent work. …

German Narratives of Women's Divine and Demonic Possession and Supernatural Vision 1555-1800: A Bibliography

Possession: the use of a human body by supernatural forces, divine or demonic, to display a message for the chastisement, edification, and inspiration of others. Since recorded history, possession has included a range of physical symptoms, behaviors, and speech patterns that marked the possessed one as an outsider, possibly the vessel of God or the devil (Walker 5-7; Kieckhefer). The possessed writhed on their beds; con torted their limbs; ate needles, pieces of iron, and knives; vomited them up again; sweated blood; spoke in tongues; invented spontaneous songs, sermons, and exhortations; spewed curses at enemies of God or the devil; fell into death-like trances; and displayed superhuman strength. They spoke, chanted, and screamed words given them by an interior god or devil. They had visions of delight and horror. The stories of women's divine and demonic possession from the early modern era might not at first blush provide core texts for today's feminist scholars. Scholarly reservations about a feminist reading of pos session are numerous and well-founded. To begin with, women certainly were not the only ones who fell into possession, although in my experi ence they represent a substantial majority of the narratives in early mod ern Germany (see some corroboration by Midelfort). In addition, the possession narratives are not authored by women: in virtually all cases, their stories were told enthusiastically by their masculine religious advo cates, and then distorted by their orthodox enemies. The events related in these stories, to the modern mind, stem from a hodgepodge of socio economic dysfunction, class warfare, religious bigotry, early modern fraud and libel, mental illness, the outcomes of physical abuse and disease, and simple self-aggrandizement on the part of the participants.

Holdin’ Them Up

Book reviewed in this article:Gilane Tawadros, Sonia Boyce: Speaking in Tongues

“Latter Rain” Falling in the East: Early-Twentieth-Century Pentecostalism in India and the Debate over Speaking in Tongues

Looking back at the events that led up to the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles, California, the foremost revival of the century in terms of global impact, eyewitness Frank Bartleman announced that the “revival was rocked in the cradle of little Wales … ‘brought up’ in India” and then became “full grown” in Los Angeles, California. To the Pentecostal “saints,” as they commonly called themselves in America, the appearance of “Pentecostal” phenomena (for example, visions, dreams, prophecy, glossolalia, and other charismatic gifts) in India confirmed that what the Old Testament prophet Joel had foretold about the “latter rain” outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the end times (Joel 2: 28–29) was being fulfilled simultaneously in other parts of the world. As one songwriter put it, “The latter rain has come, / Upon the parched ground … The whole wide world around.”

Speaking in tongues

Speaking in tongues

The Pentecostal Missionary Union and the Fourfold Gospel with Baptism in the Holy Spirit and Speaking in Tongues: A New Power for Missions?

The Pentecostal Missionary Union and the Fourfold Gospel with Baptism in the Holy Spirit and Speaking in Tongues: A New Power for Missions?

Speaking in Tongues?

Speaking in Tongues?

"Reading Aright": White Slavery, Black Referents, and The Strategy of Histotextuality in Iola Leroy

“Reading Aright”: White Slavery, Black Referents, and The Strategy of Histotextuality in Iola Leroy 1 P. Gabrielle Foreman (bio) I Until fairly recently, time had not been kind to Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892). Though it was long considered the “first” novel written by an African-American woman, more often than not it was noted for only that. Countless critics of various methodological and ideological persuasions derided the novel for its seeming historical amnesia, myopia, and racial and sexual restraint. Almost all agreed on at least one thing: they considered Iola Leroy a failure both aesthetically and politically. Frances Smith Foster’s rediscovery of Frances Harper’s first three novels 2 and the convergence of the rapidly growing fields of African-American women’s writing, cultural studies and women’s history, has facilitated a growing reconsideration of Iola Leroy. It began to garner more serious attention in the mid-1980s just about the time its status as “first” was displaced by Emma Dunham Kelley’s novel Megda (1891) and then by the rediscovery of Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859). As the field of Black women’s literature consolidated, and as work on other early women writers’ strategies emerged concurrently, Iola Leroy was reprinted in 1987 for only the second time in ninety-two years and was placed in a literary and historical context that provided readers better access to Harper’s textual workings. 3 Still, Harper’s generic choices have been viewed as too sentimental, too imitative, while she continues to be chided, as a Black writer, for not being sufficiently “authentic.” Iola Leroy, supposedly, is disconnected from the “real” concerns of “real” African Americans at the turn of the century. While Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition (1901) has been seen as both artful and oppositional in large part because his mimetic, historical and intertextual referents—the Wilmington race riots, the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision, and Twain’s Puddn’head Wilson—are meant to be easily recognizable to a large group of readers, Iola Leroy has been dismissed for describing “no significant orbit.” 4 Even Deborah McDowell, who has skillfully illuminated the workings of other neglected novels, suggests that the characterizations [End Page 327] in Iola Leroy are lacking in “honesty and imagination” and that the novel is directed toward a readership “outside the black cultural community.” 5 Yet despite some critics’ continuing cavils, it has become increasingly clear that if readers heed both John Reilly’s familiar cautionary note not to conflate the “work of literature” with the “reality either of the exterior world or of the author—for to do so is to deny the text its epistemological status, its special function as an instrument of literary cognition,” 6 —and if they attend to the text’s socio-ideologic contexts and various social registers, we can better recognize Iola Leroy’s ignored dialogics. The text is compellingly artful in communicating differently to sets of readers who do not always enjoy shared fields of cultural knowledge or levels of literary sophistication. To some, Harper’s generic choices occlude her use of historical tropes that, I will argue, were crystal clear to a set of her contemporaneous readers. If, as Reilly points out, “works of [African-American] literature are dissolved into their referents,” 7 then Harper’s most “literary” moments—the places in her text where she queries the connections between “historical” and representational epistemology—are lost unless we acknowledge the reading cartography she provides, and map her literary use of the referents at work in what she calls the “invented phraseology” of Iola Leroy. 8 In “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics and the Black Women’s Literary Tradition,” Mae Henderson proposes a theory of interpretation in which Black women “speak from a multiple and complex social, historical and cultural positionality, which, in effect, constitutes Black female subjectivity.” 9 This is a tradition—one that often is said to begin with Zora Neale Hurston and to reach forward to writers like Toni Morrison—with which Harper is seldom identified, in part because Black female subjectivity as we now understand it critically is rarely central to Harper’s project. Henderson’s “speaking in tongues” is a...

Features associated with speaking in tongues (glossolalia).

Reports of the frequency, context, associated behaviours, feelings and meaning associated with glossolalia were collected from three groups of informants: speakers (N = 14, who practised glossolalia), witnesses (N = 15, who had witnessed but had never practised glossolalia), and controls (N = 16, who had neither witnessed nor practised glossolalia). All informants were practising Christians. Speakers reported glossolalia as a regular, daily, private activity, usually accompanying mundane activities, as a special form of prayer associated with calm, pleasant emotions. By contrast, witnesses and controls were more likely to describe glossolalia as an exceptional activity, usually occurring in the religious group, and associated with excitement. The views of witnesses were closer to those of speakers than were the views of controls. It is suggested that there may be two types of glossolalia, of which one is more likely to be associated with psychopathology.

In Response to Denis Hollier’s ‘Blanchot, Speaking in Tongues: Otherness in Translation’

In Response to Denis Hollier's Blanchot, Speaking in Tongues: Otherness in Translation Janet Bergstrom Denis Hollier begins his text with a question that functions, it seems, as a pretext or perhaps I should say as a screen, namely: should French literature be taught in translation? I should specify that he is asking whether it should be taught in translation in French Departments in the U.S., since in the Cinema Studies Department where I sometimes teach French or German literature in connection with film, this question would never arise. From then on written Professor Hollier's essay deals with literary language and its irreducibility through a discussion of two essays by Blanchot, in 1932 and 1947. Literary language, or was that object of study that fascinated the Russian Formalists (a number of whom worked in the cinema as well) and was subsequently, if I am not mistaken, imported into France in translation and even by foreigners. Mainly, Professor Hollier poses questions that arise from the first of Blanchot's essays in which we learn (if we are not Blanchot scholars, and I am poetic language, not) that Blanchot rejected Curtius's history of French literature in an essay whose title already more or less announced his rejection: French Culture Viewed by a German. In 1932, then, Blanchot rejects Curtius's claim that he could understand the specificity of French literature, that he could understand its clarity, its transpar- as a Ger- valued German poetry in its alliance with philosophy over French prose wasn't in a position to have an opinion about French literature. I am led to wonder, at this point, to what extent we are talking about linguistic specificity and to what extent, as we follow Hollier with Blanchot, we are talking about cultural specificity. Did Blanchot believe that it was Curtius's strangeness to the French language that made him an unlikely candidate for comprehending the opacity hiding behind, or screened by, the seeming clarity of Racine's or La Fontaine's writings or was it the fact that, as a German, he could never understand this literature from the cul- ency. By this, Blanchot apparently meant that Curtius man who presumably

Blanchot, Speaking in Tongues: Otherness in Translation

Blanchot, Speaking in Tongues: Otherness in Translation Denis Hollier Je voudrais, lui dit-elle, vous voir lorsque vous etes seul.... Je ne sais, lorsque vous etes seul, comment vous etes, plus invisible, plus terne, sans meme ces metaphores qui servent a parler du noir comme d'une couleur. Tout ce qui peut etre utile pour communiquer vous manque. Les pensees-passerelles, les articulations avec le monde, toutes les sonnettes qui a chaque instant permettent a l'homme dans l'abandon d'etre servi— sont bannies de votre isolement. Je reve a ce que pourrait etre le journal de ces quelques moments de votre vie. J'imagine que je decouvre les cinq mots que vous ayez jamais ecrits pour vous-memes et que vous portez sur vous.... Le seul etat civil qu'il soit possible de vous attribuer est celui d'un homme qui n'existe pas. Cet homme qui est ne le 30 fevrier, dans une province ou l'on parle sans accent, dans une grande ville ou la nuit.... Maurice Blanchot, Thomas l'obscur (1941) Mon etrangete avait pour cause tout ce qui faisait que je ne lui paraissais pas etranger. Maurice Blanchot, Thomas l'obscur (1950) I w i l l approach the question raised by m y subtitle— Other- ness i n Translation —from the most literal angle. Is it a crime against literature to teach literary texts i n another language from the one i n w h i c h they were written? What is the cost, for literature, of their being read i n translation? French departments do not h o l d exclusive rights to this issue. Everyone w o r k i n g i n a foreign- language department has been or sooner or later w i l l be led to raise this question, and w i t h o u t a doubt more than once. We are dealing, then, w i t h a matter of the most practical k i n d , even if the point of view I w i l l be taking on it is not itself particu- larly practical. M y remarks w i l l be restricted to the level of what—

Bodies, borders, and letters: Gloria Anzaldúa's “Speaking in tongues: A letter to 3rd world women writers”

Anzaldua argues that all writing should be connected and personalized like letters. Both the content and the form of Anzaldua's letter make it a text worthy of attention as well as a text suitable for challenging Euro‐Americans to rethink their approach to texts by people of color. This paper argues that a letter is a distinct rhetorical form that enables an author to suspend the non‐addressed audience in an a‐critical position, and that an alternative approach to rhetoric is to understand communication as embodied.

The ‘Toronto blessing’: A rumour of angels?

Abstract The charismatic renewal movement has long been identified with expressions of ecstatic and esoteric religion; speaking in tongues, prophecies and healings. Since 1994 the manifestations associated with the movement appeared to have grown in intensity as part of the phenomenon that has come to be known as the ‘Toronto Blessing’. The explanations offered for the ‘Blessing’ vary considerably. This article suggests that it can best be accounted for by the psychological pressures built up by the prolonged hope for revival within an eschatological framework. Secondly, that it can be explained by the increasing social marginalization of the movement in the marketplace of new religions. Thirdly, a key variable in understanding developments is the role played by John Wimber's Vineyard Fellowship which offers a unique response to the process of secidarisation by carrying both fundamentalist and modernist tendencies.

Personality, Mental Health and Glossolalia

AbstractThis article reports on a survey of young men and women training for Pentecostal ministry. The survey was designed to test the relationship between glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, and personality. Personality theory, briefly outlined below, is complex and divided into several schools. For this reason it is necessary to show how findings derived from one school may be interpreted differently by another. Nevertheless, the general outline of previous work is clear. Most critically important for young men and women preparing for Pentecostal ministry is the fact that some research has questioned the mental health of those who speak in tongues. This article is able to show that, on the contrary, those who speak in tongues in the current sample under study are less neurotic than the general population. In order to demonstrate the validity of this thesis, this article will first outline the optional psychological theories of personality with their explanations of mental health and mental illness, then delineate the findings of various psychological studies of glossolalia, and finally present the results of our study of Pentecostal ministry candidates from a data analysis of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire.

Speaking in Tongues

Speaking in Tongues

Speaking in Tongues: Deceptive Stories about Sexual Deception

L'A. tente d'elucider la signification profonde d'un mythe de l'Inde ancienne, celui de Samjna, appartenant a la mythologie des mascarades sexuelles. Ce mythe nous parle du caractere trompeur de la connaissance elle-meme, qu'elle soit sexuelle ou transmise par le langage. Meme la connaissance de Dieu reste illusoire

Do Whales Speak in Many Tongues?

Do Whales Speak in Many Tongues?

Do Whales Speak in Many Tongues?

Do Whales Speak in Many Tongues?