Religious Personalities Research Articles

Prophetic Charisma: The Psychology of Revolutionary Religious Personalities

New religious movements--or so-called cults--continue to attract and mystify us. While mainstream America views cults as an insidious mix of apocalyptic beliefs, science fiction, and paranoia, with new vehicles such as the World Wide Web, they are becoming even more influential as the millennium approaches. Len Oakes--a former member of such a movement--explores the phenomenon of cult leaders. He examines the psychology of charisma and proposes his own theory of the five-stage life cycle of the two types of prophets: the messianic and the charismatic.

Prophetic charisma: the psychology of revolutionary religious personalities

Prophetic charisma: the psychology of revolutionary religious personalities

Prophetic Charisma: The Psychology of Revolutionary Religious Personalities

Prophetic Charisma: The Psychology of Revolutionary Religious Personalities

Religion in United States History Textbooks

PUBLIC EDUCATION HAS BEEN BESET in recent years by one controversy after another involving religion. As American society has become increasingly secular, public schools have often become the center of the debate over the degree to which religion should be confined to the private realm. School prayer, the teaching of evolution, aid to parochial schools, and religious content in commencement ceremonies are just few of the issues that continue to be debated. While some of these issues have been concerns for many years, another controversy involving religion and education has arisen in just the last decade. This is the question of whether history books have unfairly excluded religious events and personalities from America's past. Many significant events in American history involve religion. Yet because religious issues can create strong emotional response, and textbook publishers want to avoid any possible controversy that could hurt sales,' the concern has been raised by many in recent years that textbooks are deliberately avoiding religious topics.2 A great deal of publicity has been given to studies that found such things as an elementary social studies textbook that defined Christmas only as a warm time for special foods or European history texts that skipped the Reformation, rather than having to explain

Persons who most impress gifted youth: a replication.

A replication of a study of the persons who most impressed gifted youth was conducted with 95 students enrolled in a summer residential program for the gifted. Students were asked to indicate the person who most impressed them and to include the reason(s) for choosing that person. The most frequently chosen category of individuals was family members (61.1%), then a tie between persons in the world of arts and culture and persons doing a specific job (8.4%), another tie between comrades and sports stars (6.3%), followed by political or historical figures (4.2%), themselves (3.2%), and moral and religious personalities (2.1%). Consistent with the 1982 study by Karnes and Lee, most impressive to these students were family members and least impressive moral and religious personalities.

Des énarques aux managers [Notes sur les mécanismes de promotion au Sénégal

From Enarques to Managers in Senegal. The third generation of the Senegalese political and administrative elite, largely made up of engineers and managers, is in the process of dominating the field of power, at the expense of the enarques who themselves ousted the primary teachers, the elite which held sway from 1945-47 until 1962-63, in spite of the policy pursued by the French colonial administration, aimed at preventing the advancement of native personnel. With the restructuring of the education and training System after 1955, teachers progressively lost this privileged position, having failed to understand sufficiently early the changes then under way. Until 1970, enarques dominated the highest levels of the State, before moving into politics within the Socialist par- ty, in power since independence. Since the 1980s, their dominant position has been challenged by the managers, who are essentially techno-economists who have not yet secured genuine politico-administrative power. To acquire this power, the managers are likely to make use, like their predecessors, of certain values and practices of traditional native society, while adapting them to the business world. These include family or ethnie solidarity, the demands of the commerce of honour and dignity, the search for the support of traditional or religious personalities, etc.

MUSAR AND MODERNITY: THE CASE OF NOVAREDOK

The pietistic current in Lithuanian Jewry known as the Musar movement has recently begun to attract the serious attention of Jewish historians. The work of Immanuel Etkes on Rabbi Israel Salanter, the founding father of Musarism, and of Shaul Stampfer on the Lithuanian yeshivas of the nineteenth century are two important scholarly contributions which have appeared of late in this area.1 The revival of scholarly interest in Musarism, after many years of neglect, is richly deserved. Musarism shares with Hasidism the distinction of being an original pietistic movement which was unique to the East European Jewish milieu. Like the latter, it produced in the course of one or two generations an impressive array of original religious personalities, each with his own distinct school of thought. And like Hasidism, Musarism grew and flourished in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; that is, at the very time when secularizing cultural and political movements exerted increasing influence in Jewish society. But whereas modern scholarship has lavished a good deal of attention on Hasidism-its doctrines, history, and confrontations with modernity-the analogous work on Musarism has only just begun. One focal point of the recent scholarship has been the relationship between Musarism and modernity; specifically, its relationship to the complex of social and cultural changes which overtook European Jewry in the nineteenth century. Etkes has suggested that, to no small extent, Salanter's religious ideology was born out of a sense of crisis and alarm at the decline in religious sensitivity and punctilious halakhic observance among Lithuanian Jews. For Salanter, the growth of Haskalah circles in Vilna and Kovna which he witnessed during the 1840's was an ominous symptom of a greater spiritual crisis facing Jewry. As an antidote to the growing process of spiritual decay he proposed the institutionalized study of musar (moralistic) literature; not as an intellectual discipline, but as an emotional experience of spiritual regeneration. The study of musar in a dark shadowy room, with a melancholy melody, and passionate repetition of key phrases and verses, would cultivate one's religious self-awareness,

Individuals Whom the Youth in Central Africa Would like to Resemble

Personality is assumed to represent successive and multiple identifications and from this perspective adolescence is seen as a sensitive period in the process of developing the self and the search for personal ideal. In this quest for identity, an adolescent will be inspired by various individuals' and heroes' activities which are culturally bound. To perceive identification models of the Brazzaville youth we asked in French 453 secondary school pupils (231 girls and 222 boys) whom do you want to resemble? Why? Two age-groups were distinguished among the subjects: 11-16 yr.: 110 girls, 112 boys and 17-21 yr.: 121 girls, 110 boys. They were enrolled in 10 different forms of four lyckes (modern high schools) in Brazzaville. The pupils' choices were mainly limited to persons in their entourage (parents: 42%, friends: 10%) and to individuals of the professional level, with the presupposition of future prospects (37%). There was a miscellaneous group (12%) of sportsmen and musicians (cited almost only by girls) and moviestars and TV stars, cultural, scientific, religious and political personalities (cited almost only by boys). Only in the miscellaneous group were there significant differences (p < 0.01) between boys and girls, differences which may point to the greater autonomy of boys than girls. One also noted that determinations of future occupation were more pronounced among the older subjects (50%) than among the younger ones (23%). The impact of the immediate surround~ngs was more important to the younger subjects. We further note that in the category of persons in the immediate environment, girls chose more male models (43%) than boys chose female models (14%). perhaps because the social starus of the males was higher. Moscly (40%) the justification of the subjecrs' choice of a family member was a feeling of gratitude, which was evident in similar investigation in a West African context (Vandewiele, 1980). The subjects remembered the worries and concerns they caused their parents and the help and advice the parents gave to them. Finally concerning the chosen individuals of professional level we observed that most aspirations were restricted to the category of physicians, teachers, and engineers and that boys seemed more ambitious than girls.

Repression and sublimation in religious personalities

Like all intense experiencing, religious life is particular: one's feelings are tied to specific people, through specific actions, and in specific contexts. Descriptive typologies, like that of Capps and Capps inThe Religious Personality, reflect the contours of specific selfunderstanding, but by themselves they do not permit one to compare hierarchically the types that sare uncovered. Abstract theoreies, like psychoanalysis, are not particularistic, but they do permit one to conceive of a hierarchy of mental functioning. Capps and Capps's typology of Aesthetic, Chastised, Resigned, and Dfraternal religious selves can be improved by placing each self along the continuum that stretches from repressed (maladaptive) to sublimated (adaptive) functioning.

Persons Who Most Impress Gifted Youth

A study of the persons who most impressed gifted youth was conducted with 125 gifted students enrolled in a summer residential program. Students were asked to indicate the person who most impressed them and to include the reason(s) why that person was chosen. The most frequently chosen category of individuals was family members (44.8%), then persons doing a specific job (15.2%), comrades or friends (12.8%), persons in the world of arts and culture (12%), political/historical figures (8.0%), sports figures (4.8%), and moral and religious personalities (2.4%).

Ziyārāt of Syria in a riḥla of ‘Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (1050/1641–1143/1731)

As a leading Ṣūfī shaykh of his age al-Nābulusī's prime purpose in all his travels was to seek mystical experience and gain baraka by contact with the righteous, both living and dead. Consequently, his riḥlas emphasize encounters with spiritual dignitaries and ecstatics and his many ziyārāt to holy tombs and other shrines. These works thus provide a valuable source of information on religious personalities of his day and on Muslim sanctuaries.

Self recognition and social awareness in the deconnected minor hemisphere

Two patients with cerebral commissurotomy were tested with visual input lateralized to left or right half of the visual field by an opaque hemifield screen set in the focal plane of an optical system mounted on a scleral contact lens which allowed prolonged exposure and ocular scanning of complex visual arrays. Key personal and affect-laden stimuli along with items for assessing general social knowledgability were presented among neutral unknowns in visual arrays with 4–9 choices. Selective manual and associated emotional responses obtained from the minor hemisphere to pictures of subject's self, relatives, pets and belongings, and of public, historical and religious figures and personalities from the entertainment world revealed a characteristic social, political, personal and self-awareness comparable roughly to that of the major hemisphere of the same subject.

THE EGO-FUNCTIONING OF RELIGIOUS PERSONALITIES

The present study purports to identify, as preliminary step toward evaluation, the actual, and not ideal, ego-functionings of religious personalities as those of Jyodo-Shinsyu, Zen Buddhism, Protestant and Catholic belief and Tenrikyo, since the ego-functioning is, undoubtedly, related to some of the objectives of religion revealed as authority-acquisitioning activity and maturing of personality.The Adorno's F Scale was administered to 200 university students, consisting of 5 denominations, each of 40 subjects, majoring respectively their own religion in their denominational universities. The data were analysed by means of factor analyses, and factor-scores obtained were compared. The 4 factors extracted were identified as “Escapism, ” “Id Manifestivity, ” “Power Orientation, ” and “Tradition Orientation, ” the first and the third factor being negatively related to the Ego-function, and the second positively related to the Id-potency, and the fourth positively related to the Super-Ego-dominace. The following characteristics are our main findings:1. The distinctive way of ego-functioning was empirically identified for each religion along with the multi-dimentional expression of SuperEgo, Id, and Ego functionings.2. This multi-dimensionality was already indicative of partially functional and partially dysfunctional contribution of religion to the maturing of personality, anticipatedly refuting the stereo-typed perception of religion as “religion as an escape-mechanism. ”3. This sort of functional approach is a promising strategy for the study of religion, so that, when matched with a consideration of its social implications, it could be a real existential approach in examining Authority-acquisiition.

Some Impressions of Iranian Islam

Iran is a large and important country which is too little known in Britain, and which is even the subject of grave misunderstandings—such as the idea that it is an ‘Arab’ country and that therefore its religion is the same as that of its Arab neighbours. I went there simply as a visitor, bent on listening and learning through personal contacts. My reading of Iranian history had informed me that Iran has produced many important religious movements, though none of them has survived as a major world religion, unless you count the Baha’i. The birthplace of several powerful religious personalities — Zoroaster and Mani for example—it has tended to influence rather than dominate. In some strange way it has always subtly altered, sometimes even confused the great religions of mankind. Lacking the intellectual rigour of the Greek tradition, and without the intensity of the Semitic outlook, the Iranians have evaded the clutches of these two powerful alien influences. They are a humane and moderate people, much attracted to the good things of life, with a liking for speculation, often expressed in vast and woolly ideas. In this they betray their affinity to the people of the Indian subcontinent.

シュメール都市国家ラガシュにおける土地制度研究への一序論 -P. A. Deimel の業績の再検討を中心に-

P. A. Deimel's contributions relating to the land system of the Sumerian city-state of Lagash in “Orientalia” about half a century before are sometimes referred to and quoted from by Western scholars as the most fundamental on this subject to this day. But on the other hand, particularly as to his conclusive conception of the socio-economic structure of the Sumerian city-state, so called ‘Tempelwirtschaft’, he has been often criticiyed for the reason that he made mistakes in the interpretation of individual materials as well as in the process of building up the conception. In consideration of such state of diversified evaluations of his achievements, the present writer discusses in this paper the following items so as to discriminate the points in question from his acceptable results relating to the land system.(1) Deimel's elucidation of ‘nig-en-na’; the propriety of the point of view that ‘gan-nig-en-na’ was cultivated and harvested by the labour organization of ‘gan-kur6’-holders. (2) The interpretation of ‘kur6’; the reason why ‘ubernehmen’ than ‘festgesetzt’ should be adopted as the interpretation of ‘dab5’ between Deimel's duplicate presentation. (3) Questions about Deimel's proposition that ‘gan-kur6’-holders were as a whole 'militarkolonen or military husbandmen, and that all of them were under the obligation of corvee and military services. (4) The writer's points to demonstrate are as follows. Among the ‘gan-kur6’-holders, there were, to a not inconsiderable extent, administrators, officials, and higher religious personalities who did not appeared in se-ba lu-kur6-dab5-ba' lists or the records concerning mass labour and appreciably more who did not appeared in the recruitment lists. The ‘sub-lugal’ people in the narrower sence, most of whom appeared in both of the se-ba lists and of recruitment lists, were only one specific sort of ‘gan-kur6’-holders, Of course, the writer, too, does not deny the existence of the ‘gan-kur6’-holders as a social order, considering them in view of the people of the other social orders who did not hold ‘gan-kur6’. The writer's central aim in this paper is to make clear the complexity of this order.

The Murder of the Caliph 'Uthmân

The murder of ‘Uthmân was an important turning-point in Islamic history, and the story of how opposition in the provinces, particularly Egypt, combined with opposition at Medina itself and brought about the Caliph's death has been repeated many times. Accounts in sources such as al-Tabarî's History and al-Balâdhurîs Ansâb al-ashrâf bring together much transmitted detail concerning thisdénouement. Caetani's monumentalAnnali dell'Islamserves as an extensive compilation of such detail, and Wellhausen, Levi Delia Vida, Gibb, Veccia Vaglieri and Petersen are only some of the other modern scholars who have commented on the event. Perhaps Professor Gibb best expresses the current view of the background to it in his thought-provoking article entitled ‘An interpretation of Islamic history’, where he sees in the caliphate of 'Uthmân a conflict between two main parties, the Meccans and the ‘tribesmen’. He points out that the Meccan merchants had been swift to seize the opportunities of wealth which arose in the immediate post-conquest phase, and goes on to say that in the course of 'Uthman's caliphate there arose at Medina ‘growing resentment at the rapid affirmation of Meccan political control… and the economic exploitation of the empire. Open discontent was first expressed by several religious personalities, whose conscience was shocked by the worldliness and grasping materialism displayed in the name of Islam. But these only provided a rallying-cry and a cloak for the material grievances of the tribesmen and Medinians, who swung into line behind them.’ Gibb therefore sees a total of four alignments, of which the Meccans and the tribesmen were the main parties, while the Medinans and the so-called religious party were secondary in importance.

Autobiographies of Ten Religious Leaders: Alternatives in Religious Experience by Radoslav A. Tsanoff

184 BOOK REVIEWS logically on the second, which in turn serves the first as support and language." (p. 56) The author shows considerable respect for the traditions of different churches on the question of inter-communion, but he definitely thinks the time has arrived for moving beyond the present practice to an actual sharing of the one bread. Thurian attempts to give some theological support for this plea by his view that faith is a " process " and not simply adhesion to a series of statements of belief. Traditional Catholic theology is familar with the distinction between implicit and explicit faith. Thus Thomas Aquinas and a peasant in medieval Sicily may have both belonged to the sames church, but the level of the explicitness of their faith varied widely. Thurian wants to apply this distinction to the question of intercommunion between churches today. The fulness of truth regarding the Eucharist is an eschatological goal toward which the doctrines of different churches tend. Therefore, it seems in order that the Catholic or Orthodox Churches, heretofore opposed to inter-communion, should feel free to allow inter-communion at least occasionally to members of other churches whose Eucharistic teaching they view as less complete or explicit. Thurian adduces no substantiation for this position from Vatican II. Certainly no student of the conciliar documents would expect any direct support from that source. However, Vatican II did place new emphasis on the historical or " process " aspect of the Church. The Church as the People of God has a past and moves forward to its future. Then too, the concilar decree on ecumenism acknowledges in an unprecedented way the theological importance of other Christian churches. These churches, Protestant as well as Orthodox, have some ecclesiological meaning as churches and not just as collections of good but invincibly ignorant Protestants or Orthodox. These considerations, in this reviewer's opinion, should lead the Catholic Church to a renewed evaluation of its traditional opposition to inter-communion. If Thurian's little book helps lead to this reconsideration of positions, it will have more than made its publication worthwhile. Berkeley Priory Berkeley, California PETER DEMAN, 0. P. Autobiographies of Ten Religious Leaders: Alternatives in Religious Experience . By RAnosLAV A. TBANOFF. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1968. Pp. 804. $7.00. Radoslav Tsanoff was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, and emigrated to the United States as a young man in 1908. He graduated with honors from Oberlin College and in 1910 received his doctorate in philosophy from BOOK REVIEWS 185 Cornell University. Practically his entire professional life has been spent at Rice University as a professor of philosophy. Since 1961 he has been a Distinguished Trustee Professor of Humanities at Rice University. Among his previously published works the following titles deserve special mention: The Problem of Immortality: Studies in Personality and Value (19~4); Religious Crossroads (1942); The Moral Ideals of Our Civilization (1942; second impression 1947); Ethics (1947; revised edition 1955); The Great Philosophers (1953; second edition 1964). Professor Tsanoff's most recent work, prior to the present volume, was Worlds to Know: A Philosophy of Cosmic Perspectives (1962) . In the present volume Professor Tsanoff offers an ecumenical panorama of outstanding religious personalities, starting with St. Augustine and terminating with Pope John XXIII. He does not restrict himself to Catholic figures nor even to European Christians, although he does exclude from his study the Oriental mysticism of Asia and India. Thus, the reader will find in this volume a stirring account of the religious experiences of ten Christians who have emerged influential leaders in the course of the centuries: St. Augustine, St. Teresa of Avila, George Fox, John Bunyan, John Wesley, Cardinal Newman, Ernest Renan, Leo Tolstoy, Albert Schweitzer and Pope John XXIII. As in any selective anthology, readers may argue about the inclusion or emission of certain individuals. Some may be unwilling to admit that Bunyan, Renan and Tolstoy deserve to be classified as religious leaders in Christianity. Others may be disappointed to find that Professor Tsanoff omitted from his list such persons as St. Paul, St. Jerome, Luther, St. John of the Cross, Calvin, Fr. Liebermann, St. Therese of Lisieux, de Foucauld, and others. Perhaps the historian of Christian spirituality...

Films for the Church

gious productions. The possibilities of increased attendance and influence for the church were tremendous; the films turned out were heterogeneous, unequal in concept and treatment, ranging from missionary training films (how to build a lean-to in the jungle, how to approach a tribal chief) and pictures urging more active participation in church affairs (And Now I See, Lutheran) to pictures that attempted to deal with the moral and metaphysical questions raised by the atom bomb (Way of Peace, Wartburg Press; God of the Atom, Moody). The majority were dramatizations on a higher or lower technical level of Bible stories, missionary conscience-tweakers, and biographies of religious personalities. With one or two exceptions these frankly evangelistic films (and all of them are that) have had neither the propaganda power nor the emotional appeal of religious pictures produced for the commercial market, such as The Song of Bernadette or even Going My Way. The potentialities for the church in terms of indoctrination, education, and moral and spiritual guidance have yet to be realized.

Baron von Hugel

Sir,—Baron von Hugel was not a professional theologian. He was devoted to the philosophy of religion and to theology because he was a Christian and a Catholic, but he was profoundly more than a theologian because he was an integral Catholic.To ask whether he was centrally Catholic and to examine his theological credentials alone is not enough. A religious personality can be psychologically heterodox under a number of aspects, of which the two more important are the theological and spiritual. A man can be theologically immaculate and spiritually lop-sided, in which case he is not centrally, i.e., integrally, Christian. I do not intend to add the slick correlative that a man may be spiritually impregnable and theologically nebulous, because both speculation and history prove that this is not true. But a mind which is mistaken on single propositions in a time of crisis may most emphatically possess spiritual grandeur of an outstanding kind. Moreover, even the greatest Saints are not normally without sin and moral wavering until after the biographers have plastered up the chinks, and some of the noblest religious personalities in history have value for us precisely because of their bearing in face of their own moral contractions and mistakes. Baron von Hugel is for some the greatest example of this that our age has known, and his spiritual message would carry infinitely less meaning for us were there none of these contractions and subsequent gigantic renunciations of his life. Von Hugel’s soul is first and foremost a synthesis of opposed moral forces: a neurotic, violent, easily jarred character constantly transformed and driven into massive unity by divine love.