Midst Of Struggle Research Articles

Experiential Avoidance Mediates the Relationship between Prayer Type and Mental Health before and through the COVID-19 Pandemic

The practice of prayer has been shown to predict various mental health outcomes, with different types of prayer accounting for different outcomes. Considering the numerous stressors facing seminary students, which have only intensified throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, prayer may be a common coping strategy for students who study theology, spiritual growth, and leadership. The present study investigates the role that different types of prayer may have in reducing anxiety, depression, and work burnout among seminary students. Experiential avoidance is proposed as a mediator such that specific types of prayer contribute to greater spiritual and characterological formation through staying engaged in the midst of struggle. Longitudinal data was collected from 564 graduate seminary students from 17 institutions accredited by the Association of Theological Schools. Based on previous research, we hypothesized that experiential avoidance would mediate the relationship between colloquial, liturgical, meditative, and petitionary prayer types and the negative mental health outcomes of anxiety, depression, and work burnout. Results confirmed significant negative relationships between colloquial, liturgical, and meditative prayer types and all three mental health indicators, fully mediated by experiential avoidance. Petitionary prayer was not significantly related to lower levels of mental health. These results indicate that engaging in certain prayer practices may be a protective factor by facilitating experiential engagement.

Internal Colony as Political Perspective

In the midst of struggles against racial oppression in the United States that intensified in and around 1968, activists developed the theory of the internal colony to contend that US imperialism was essential to understanding racial oppression in the heart of empire. The theory of the internal colony foregrounded alliances with struggles for national liberation abroad, articulated through an internationalist and Third Worldist position. This essay is a critical evaluation of the theory of the internal colony as a political perspective, its use and circulation within militant movements against racial oppression during the long 1960s, and its cultural and theoretical resonances today. Through the work of Robert L. Allen, the essay argues that the internal colony was a crucial lens through which to read both the rise of law and order and neoliberal political formations. Furthermore, drawing on the critiques of imperialism and finance, first developed by Lenin, that inspired movements for Third World emancipation through dependency theory from Latin American scholars and the theory of neocolonialism developed by Kwame Nkrumah in the 1960s, the author argues for a reevaluation of the theory of the internal colony in the context of contemporary financialization in the United States and elsewhere as a way to reinvigorate theories of geographical dislocation that remap solidarities in struggles against the financial dispossession today.

Coexistencia de la iglesia y el Estado en Colombia durante el siglo XIX: una revisión a partir de la consolidación del concepto de familia, de la idea de feminidad y la problemática esclavista

El presente artículo de reflexión se propone examinar las tensiones que existieron en Colombia, durante el siglo XIX, y en medio de las luchas partidistas entre liberales y conservadores, para definir tanto el concepto de nación (laica o católica) como la conformación de la familia entendida como núcleo fundamental de la sociedad. Asimismo, se propone revisar la sanción de leyes de manumisión esclavista en medio de la pugna entre Iglesia y Estado. Finalmente, se analizará el rol social y demográfico adjudicado a la mujer.

A Music Lesson on Resilience: Alice Herz-Sommer, Her Piano, and the Capacity to Survive

The life of Alice Herz-Sommer, a Holocaust survivor and concert pianist, illustrates how music has the potential to cultivate personality traits that lead to resilience. The act of listening to or making music serves to transport an individual to a peaceful, timeless, and wondrous place. Music, when incorporated into the art of pastoral care, can assist individuals to have a renewed sense of hope in the midst of struggle and trauma.

Behavior of pediatric medical residents during a clinical simulation of a violent mother in a pediatric emergency.

Physicians are frequently victims of both physical and verbal violence. Specific training is required for staff so that they are able to deal with these situations. To assess the clinical management and behavior of pediatric medical residents towards a violent mother during a pediatric emergency simulation. To assess the clinical management and behavior of pediatric medical residents towards a violent mother during a pediatric emergency simulation. Sixty-eight pediatric medical residents divided into 15 groups were observed. Twelve handled the episode appropriately; only two groups asked the security staff to remove the mother from the scene (recommended behavior). Other two groups managed to remove the mother from the clinical scenario but in the midst of struggles. Out of all physicians, 54.4% (n = 37) came into physical contact with the mother, and 95.6% had not previously received guidelines on how to manage violent situations. Only a few groups managed to remove the violent mother from the scene. Unconsented physical contact with the mother was one of the most commonly observed behaviors. A lack of institutional guidelines on how to handle violent situations was detected. patient simulation, violence, workplace violence.

AS REIVINDICAÇÕES DOS TRABALHADORES RURAIS ASSALARIADOS DA LAVOURA CANAVIEIRA: A GREVE DE GUARIBA DE 1984 E A LUTA POR TERRA NO INTERIOR DO ESTADO DE SÃO PAULO

DOI: 10.12957/geouerj.2015.8252 A decada de 1980 foi marcada por uma serie de reivindicacoes publicas de trabalhadores rurais assalariados da lavoura canavieira no interior paulista. Esse artigo aborda elementos que permitem entender os motivos que levaram a eclosao da Greve de Guariba de 1984 e, a partir da conscientizacao/mobilizacao emanada nessa manifestacao, muitos lideres surgiram no bojo das lutas, a fim de suscitar a reflexao aos trabalhadores sobre as condicoes exploratorias a que eram submetidos nos canaviais. Alem da obtencao de direitos trabalhistas, a luta por Reforma Agraria na regiao foi um dos importantes fatores a se considerar nesse contexto. Sendo assim, decorrente desse processo, a conquista do Assentamento rural de Corrego Rico, situado em Jaboticabal-SP, municipio vizinho a Guariba, tera uma discussao recorrente nesse artigo.

Islam Politics in Soeharto Era (1968-1998)

<p>HMI was founded on February 4, 1947, in Yogyakarta town when Indonesian nation was in the midst of struggle for defense of independent proclamation from the menace Dutch colonialism which was trying to reoccupy the country.</p><p>Several Muslim University student studying in Sekolah Tinggi Islam (STI, Islamic High School) felt inspired to establish a Muslim student organization, letter called “Himpunan Mahasiswa Islam“ (HMI, or Muslim University Student Association). One of the was Lafran Fane who was regarded the founding father of HMI. They were highly concerned over the problems of Muslim community, particularly, the Muslim University students. Also they had a commitment to the problem facing the entire Indonesian people.</p><p>The objective of HMI was put forward first by Lafran Fane on the association oh “Persatuan Pelajar Indonesia” (PPI, or Islamic Student Union) conference held in Ponorogo, from 4<sup>th</sup> to 6<sup>th</sup> November, 1947. He declared.</p><p>As a coordination institution that called upon the student to study and comprehend the Islamic doctrine. As scholar and citizen they should have balance of duty between here and hereafter. Reason and emotion, faith and knowledge and they should be ready to face the menace originated from western education system. Islam should flourish at mass level and spread among student masses outside of the STI.</p><p> </p>

Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War by Jonathan H. Ebel (review)

Reviewed by: Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War by Jonathan H. Ebel Bradley Carter Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War. By Jonathan H. Ebel. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2010. The paucity of scholarship addressing the role of U.S. religion in the First World War underscores that conflict’s secondary status in the American imagination, both popular and academic. As the centennial of the start of what was the twentieth century’s defining (and at the time humanity’s deadliest) conflict approaches, “the Great War” is garnering renewed attention. Jonathan Ebel’s Faith in the Fight is an important and welcome addition to a subject too long neglected. Faith in the Fight examines how various groups of Americans used religious “ideas, images, and beliefs” to make sense of the war, their involvement in it, and its inevitable life-changing and life-ending consequences (3). Noting that traditional studies “of America’s wars tend to ignore religion” and those of “religion tend to ignore war,” Ebel proposes to study the “religious thoughts and lives of soldiers and war workers” (both men and women) in order to “make more intelligible both . . . the appeal of war and memories of war, and the more specific religious and political events and movements in twentieth-century America” (3). This interdisciplinary approach, taking seriously the role of vernacular religion in wartime meaning-making, [End Page 73] is the work’s greatest strength. In eschewing an older “history of theology” approach, and an excessive focus on official, institutional religion in favor of a close reading of the “letters, diaries, and memoirs” of combatants and non-combatants alike—alongside popular wartime publications and other “public literature” such as “The Stars and Stripes”—and coupled with post war surveys, most notably one of “14,000 former soldiers, 2,400 of whom were African American,” Ebel demonstrates how religion “provided a vocabulary to help render the war experiences meaningful” (12, 16). Indeed, he illustrates how the “war provided an arena in which faith could be lived out” with religion simultaneously doing “a great deal of the work needed to romanticize war,” allowing “many soldiers to ignore or glorify war’s horrors” (16). Ebel’s work is at its best when limning the cultural contexts and constraints of sense-making. When exploring how notions of Progressive-era “muscular Christianity” informed notions of the Great War’s moral goodness, or how wartime ideas of redemptive violence were more problematic (and complex) for African Americans in Jim Crow America, Faith in the Fight excels. Ebel’s attention to racial differences in appropriating and applying a shared religious vocabulary within a DuBoisian “double consciousness” is illuminating. He notes how the “Christ imagined by black soldiers and war workers offered salvation in the midst of struggle, suffering and sorrow, but unlike the Christ proclaimed by many white soldiers did not require sanctification of the Pharaoh nation” (126). Indeed, the ability of vernacular religion to simultaneously enable wartime disappointment, disillusionment, and re-illusionment within and across differing racial and cultural-historical contexts represents the book’s greatest achievements. So too is Ebel’s chapter on the “Soldierly heaven,” “There Are No Dead” (145). Religion—institutional, as well as the popular, “lived” expressions at the heart of Ebel’s book—are understandably central to both contemporary and ex post facto endeavors to render sensible “the industrialized depersonalized violence” of the Great War (54). While Ebel is to be commended for going beyond the basic theological questions of theodicy (“why does God permit suffering?”) to show how “soldiers and war workers” made “sense of death and survival” (56), his appropriation of Rudolf Otto’s theology of the “Numinous” in the second chapter is perhaps the book’s weak point. That war’s horrific realities are often simultaneously “awful” and “awe-full” while (seemingly) resistant to ordinary sense-making—better suited to the deployment of religious vocabularies of transcendence and mysterium—should be obvious enough. Ebel’s otherwise thoughtful and provocative discussion is only slightly bogged down by this theological contextualization amidst an otherwise informative historical and cultural framework. Nevertheless, Faith in the Fight is a...

Whose Occupation? Homelessness and the Politics of Park Encampments

As a progressive policy platform and radical political programme, the right to the city suggests that the formulation of specific policy demands for affordable housing, free transit or municipal services can advance in tandem with a shared political understanding of the underlying roots of inequality and exclusion. The right to the city offers a useful, twofold challenge to the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement: to more clearly motivate its tactics in the reclamation of city space; and to cultivate openness to collective political transformation in the midst of struggle. This paper argues that the practical questions associated with OWS encampments—and particularly, the relationship between public space occupations and homelessness—are an opportunity to advance a shared political analysis across an ideologically and tactically fragmented left.

Gandhi’s West, the West’s Gandhi

Gandhi had a life-long engagement with “the West.” He was educated in Britain, had close Jewish friends in South Africa, and engaged in discussions with Christian clergymen for much of his life. In the midst of struggles against racism and colonialism, Gandhi never lacked friends and admirers in Britain, Europe, and the U.S. Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Ruskin—the “Holy Trinity”—are widely believed to have influenced him, but the idea of “influence” has less analytical purchase than is commonly believed. Taking Thoreau as an illustration, this paper suggests that a different hermeneutics of reading is required to understand the structures of feeling shared between Gandhi and his many interlocutors in the West. Wedded to the idea that freedom is indivisible, Gandhi constructed a West with which he could strike common ground, and his sojourns in the Other West form an astounding chapter in interculturality. The West’s Gandhi, on the other hand, is arguably a sanitized figure, the apostle of nonviolence and the prophet of peace. True, two generations of African-American leaders and intellectuals wrestled with Gandhi’s ideas before they appeared to be embodied in the person of Martin Luther King. Gandhi is acknowledged in the West as a supremely world historical figure, but this Gandhi is not easily reconciled with the emphatic critic of nearly all the critical categories of modern political thought. This paper concludes with an assessment of Gandhi’s challenge to the idea of “global history,” pointing to Gandhi’s suspicion of the view that all our universalisms are to be derived from the West, and it places for consideration the idea that his most enduring contribution may be his relentless questioning of the presuppositions of modern knowledge systems.

Toward New Histories of the Civil Rights Era

THE NOTED DIPLOMATIC HISTORIAN JOHN LEWIS GADDIS HAS OBSERVED that writing in the midst of struggle can lead to lack of scholarly detachment and asymmetrical approach. Cold war scholars, according to Gaddis, reflected the contemporaneous debates rather than viewing them with the detachment that comes after the end of era; they viewed events from the inside instead of from the outside. Late in the long-running cold war, many scholars did not know how to get perspective on foreign policy because they had never experienced anything but the cold war. Gaddis also argued that writing about the cold war tended to give side disproportionate attention and neglected both the interaction between the two sides and the role of ideas in the confrontation. The result, Gaddis concluded, was an abnormal way of writing history itself With the end of the cold war, however, he expects the historiography to revert to more normal history because historians will treat the cold war as a discrete episode.... within the stream of time.(1) Cold war historiography is not unique. Before the end of the cold war, civil fights scholarship, like much of contemporary history, shared some characteristics with histories of the cold war. Writing in the midst of the ongoing struggles for racial equality, historians have often lacked detachment because of their profound and justifiable moral commitment to the aims of the civil fights movement. In addition, as Gaddis suggested about cold war experts, few scholars of the black freedom struggle have had any personal experience of world apart from the movement; individuals born since 1940 can scarcely recall period before the movement gained widespread publicity. Historians of the movement have also generally taken asymmetrical approach to the campaign for equal rights. They have tended to emphasize one side of the struggle, the movement side, and to neglect their professional obligation to understand the other side, the segregationist opposition. To explain the most profound change in southern history, historians have resorted to telling the story from vantage point within the movement; only rarely have they sought detached view or broader perspective that would necessarily encompass all of the South to explain the momentous changes in racial relations. They have written about the movement essentially from the perspective of the movement without fully considering the larger history of the South during the entire era. As result, important parts of the story remain untold.(2) Unlike their cold war colleagues, however, civil rights scholars have not yet developed clear schools of interpretation or consistently clashing interpretations; nothing comparable to the orthodox, revisionist, and post-revisionist interpretations of the cold war yet exists in the writings on the movement.(3) Research that has covered topics for the first time has had no earlier interpretations to revise or refute. Writing on the movement has, nonetheless, involved implicit disagreement on number of issues. Scholars have variously suggested, for example, that the movement actually began in the 1930s with the New Deal, in 1954 with the case of Brown v. Board of Education, or even in 1960 with the sit-ins. By the focus of their works, historians have also placed different emphases on the roles of the federal government, major protest organizations, and prominent leaders, and they have stressed the efficacy of different strategies and tactics--violent or non-violent action, litigation or mass protest, national or grassroots efforts. Students of the movement have also reached conflicting conclusions about the results of the civil rights movement. Seldom have the disagreements among scholars become explicit in their publications; more commonly they are implied or have to be inferred by their more experienced readers. Having yet to develop thorough, critical, and radical interpretations of the civil rights struggle, historians have tended to share sympathetic attitude toward the quest for civil rights They also lack the advantage recently gained by diplomatic historians with the end of the cold war, and they cannot, and do not want to, declare the straggle to be over because racial discord has not ended and racial justice has not been achieved. …

THE GOSPEL/CULTURE ENCOUNTER AT SALVADOR:REFLECTIONS ON A BIBLE STUDY GROUP

Introduction The World Council of Churches' (WCC) conference on world mission and evangelism in Salvador, Brazil, presented me with an opportunity not only to make a personal contribution on the interface between gospel and cultures, but also to be enriched by others. an indigenous person, experienced this encounter with world Christians as a source of hope in the midst of struggle. thrilled to see so many indigenous people present and participating, many of whom had attended the pre-conference consultation organized by the Indigenous Desk of the WCC. Several indigenous persons were assigned to lead small group Bible studies; in my case, in Spanish. also involved in exciting small group discussions in the sub-section to which assigned. found the interaction within two multi-ethnic, pluricultural, and multilingual groups quite challenging, and hope the other participants did too. Rather than risk giving my own, necessarily biased, impressions of the Bible study group in which took part, would like to share the evaluation of an indigenous colleague who participating for the first time in an international and ecumenical conference. The Reverend Antonio Otzoy is a theologian and the general secretary of a Maya-Presbyterian fellowship in Guatemala. share his testimony, with permission, with the hope that it will stimulate other such missiological reflections by participants in the Salvador conference. Reflections on a Bible study the group that attended, writes pastor Otzoy, I learned that traditional ways of reading the Bible -- often a torrent of theological concepts, or an exhibition of profound knowledge of scripture -- may not be a true group Bible study. In our church Bible studies, one person usually gives and the rest sit and listen. This implies that ordinary people are incapable of becoming subjects of their own history; that others who are `better trained,' become the authors of the various histories of their hearers or listeners. Behind the seeming chaos there must be a divine plan, wrote Kant. But are trained theologians the only ones who can bring order out of disorder or contribute to an understanding of God's actions? In our Bible study group we learned to revise our own thinking, to be more careful of what we say and do. A Bible study should not be an intellectual exercise, but must help shape life. It is not an opportunity to teach others how to reflect, but to help us reflect upon our own lives in regard to others. We learned that the Bible should address us where we are; it should help us to feel that we are important as individuals, even as we discover that we are part of one another, in community. As took part in the group, realized that concern for `praxis' is not just a way of making sure that we `fit,' i.e., are comfortable, within the context of a particular Bible passage; this can be used to rationalize, rather than question, our surroundings. Instead, praxis is the proof and present manifestation of our very existence -- to the extent that we are able to incorporate our own praxis into the totality of `Being.' The application of the text, by itself, does not point us to our sense of `Being.' Rather, our being (personhood) takes on specific meaning as we integrate it into the text, and as the participants in the group get to know one another in their give and take. We can then live that which we feel, think and learn, even as we help others to become participants within an evangelical community spirit. This, Otzoy continues, was the real lesson that I, an Indigenous person, absorbed in the study group to which had been invited. learned that Bible study can become a space for creating community. According to the traditional interpretation of the Christian canon that we have been taught, reality is first divine and then human. We reflected in the group that this should not necessarily be so, otherwise we become guilty of either blaming God for all of our wrong doings or of justifying the suffering of so many victims in history. …