Spiritual Body Research Articles

“Light Even More than Love”: The Irony of the Cross in J. F. Powers’s Wheat That Springeth Green

In the flourishing of American Catholic literature during the 1950s and 60s, no author outranks the inimitable Flannery O'Connor or Walker Percy. However, one peer of these two masters--J. F. Powers--earned high praise from O'Connor, who wrote of his short stories, Those that deal with the clergy are as good as any stories being written by anybody. (1) Indeed, if Powers is remembered in this estimable group of masters, it is because of his many short stories detailing the ironic lives of priests and monks populating the Catholic suburbs of Minnesota. His oeuvre does surpass his peers in one particular regard: the publication of his second novel Wheat Springeth Green in 1988 reflects the radical changes to American Catholicism after the Second Vatican Council. While Percy's later work acknowledges those changes within American Catholicism, his increasing cynicism seems to lament the lost idyll of 1950s and 60s America, particularly in the darkly horrific Thanatos Syndrome; by contrast, Powers's literary vision precludes nostalgia for the forgotten days of Catholic unity prior to what Mark Massa calls the American Catholic Revolution of the 1960s until now. His fundamentally comic vision of human nature pervades this second novel and highlights the simultaneously biting and charitable satire that makes it a literary masterpiece. When read against the ecclesial divide resulting from Vatican II, Wheat Springeth Green employs Powers' masterful sense of irony in one scandalizing image that haunts the characters attempting to perform the work of the Church faithfully and efficiently: the Cross pervades this novel's pages, calling its protagonist Father Joe Hackett to receive failure as a gracious witness to the scandal of a complacently divided American Catholic Church. To explore this haunting image of the Cross within Powers's last novel, this article will be divided into three major sections. The first will review the critical conversation that has developed around Powers's small body of work with the intention of reaching critical consensus about his fundamental artistic achievement, namely his adaptation of an ironic humor to a deeply Catholic understanding of the lived experience of the Church. The second will then contextualize Powers's second novel within the unique historical moment immediately following Vatican II. This is necessary for the reader to see how Powers's irony is a way of addressing the world of his own time and one that still pervades contemporary Catholic America. Lastly, will offer a reading of Wheat Springeth Green through the nexus of Powers's irony and the historical contextualization developed in the first two sections. This framework provides a particular way of reading the novel's central and recurring image, the Cross, as an icon of faithful failure and holy limitation as the means to achieve holiness. As early as 1964, in an interview for American Benedictine Review, Powers identified himself as a comic writer, although he often deals with religious figures like priests and monks. Indeed, he states in this interview, I write about priests for reasons of irony, comedy, and philosophy. They officially are committed to both worlds in the way that most people officially are not. (2) tension, which results from the priest's simultaneous commitment to the work of the Church as a spiritual body and to the Church as a job, is Powers's central concern, and the irony of a character trying to honor both commitments with the same life propels the comedy of Powers's works when these figures inevitably and humorously confront their limitations. However, for Powers, writing about such characters is not solely about practicing his great skill as a humorist; instead, Powers's focus on priests as main characters mirrors what he believes to be the situation all Christians face in the modern world. He states, That is, of course, one of the big ironies. Here we are, Christians, and here we have the clergy who are descended spiritually from the apostles. …

Community Is a Body: Sex, Marriage, and Metaphor in 1 Corinthians 6:12–7:7 and Ephesians 5:21–33

First Corinthians 6:12–7:7 and Eph 5:21–33 present opposing views about the values and dangers of sex and marriage. In 1 Corinthians, sex with outsiders precludes one from unity with the spiritual body of Christ, and marriage is a means to avoid illicit sexuality and to keep from “burning.” In Ephesians, marriage is characterized by hierarchy, yet the husband–wife relationship is analogous to that of Christ and the church. These texts reach their different conclusions even though they share cultural and rhetorical resources: scriptural recitation of Gen 2:24 and the metaphor of the community as a body. This article analyzes the body metaphors in each text, using cognition-based theories of conceptual metaphor and paying attention to how the Genesis recitations function in the metaphor. The analysis demonstrates how marriage and sexuality are topics that the authors use to discuss yet another idea—the spiritual or mysterious union of the community with Christ. This topic, along with the visual potential of the body metaphor, infuses arguments about sexuality and gender with importance beyond issues of family life and reproduction.

The modern spirit of Asia: the spiritual and the secular in China and India

Preface ix Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Chapter 2 Spirituality in Modern Society 35 Chapter 3 The Making of Oriental Religion 63 Chapter 4 Conversion to Indian and Chinese Modernities 90 Chapter 5 Secularism's Magic 115 Chapter 6 Smash Temples, Build Schools: Comparing Secularism in India and China 140 Chapter 7 The Spiritual Body 168 Chapter 8 Muslims in India and China 193 Chapter 9 Conclusion 214 Notes 231 Bibliography 253 Index 271

The spiritual body: Concept of the (Slavic) soul (II)

This work analyses the concept of the soul in the Slavic and the Serbian cultures in the context of general views on soul and concludes that the dual conception body-soul did not exist in the pagan Slavic world picture. It was developed in Slavic and Serbian culture along with the acceptance of Christianity, while the earlier, pagan culture held in a higher esteem the notion of the vegetative and emotive soul, closely related to the body and the idea of free soul - man’s double, who, nevertheless, implies a certain, although immaterial and not always apparent embodiment (“spiritual body” - ‘telo duhovno’). The iconicity of the lexeme ‘duša’ rests upon the opposition visible-invisible, which is reserved for the vegetative or organic soul, while the free soul depends on the opposition material immaterial. The difference in the iconicity of the lexemes ‘duša’ (“soul”) and ‘duh’ (“spirit”) - although both stand in an etymological relation to ‘dah’ (“breath”), ‘disati’ (“to breath”), ‘duvati’ (“to blow”) - lies in the fact that ‘duh’ is conceptualized as a divine breath, ‘sila duhovna’ (“a divine force”), which can be individuated in part, but which maintains the characteristics of its divine or demonic origin and is related to the intellect and the will, elements of air and fire, while the ‘duša’ is individuated and linked to “lower” levels of human being - bodily functions and sensitivity related to the element of water.

Apocalyptic Futures: Marked Bodies and the Violence of the Text in Kafka, Conrad, and Coetzee by Russell Samolsky (review)

Reviewed by: Apocalyptic Futures: Marked Bodies and the Violence of the Text in Kafka, Conrad, and Coetzee by Russell Samolsky G. W. Stephen Brodsky Russell Samolsky. Apocalyptic Futures: Marked Bodies and the Violence of the Text in Kafka, Conrad, and Coetzee. New York: Fordham UP, 2011. x + 237 pp. Russell Samolsky’s magisterial new study argues that apocalyptic futures are etched by violence in ink and blood both on the body of the apocalyptic novel’s text and the bodies of its victim subjects. Pre-figuring (but not prophesying) apocalypses for whole peoples, these proleptic codes are realized cyclically in apocalyptic and revelatory decryptions. The novel’s reception relies on the reader’s living experience, immediate or mediate, felt as sensations sweet with decay and death—the “stench of truth,” Kafka calls it in “The Savages”—scented with the blood and burning of apocalypses past and yet to be. Samolsky’s paradigmatic foci, a chapter for each, are Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), and Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), fictions in which narrators and victims alike marked by personal apocalypses, minds and bodies harrowed by their tyrants’ tormentors and torturers. So, the body of the text appropriates, and is appropriated by, every other apocalyptic catastrophe: the Holocaust, Hiroshima’s atomic deluge, the South African apartheid state, Pax Americana’s Vietnam War, the Rwandan genocide. A coda devoted to Art Spiegelman’s postapocalyptic Maus (1986) sets the seal on Samolsky’s achievement. Beyond invoking boar-gored Odysseus and Cain’s beastly mark (89), Samolsky avoids revisiting the “marking” archetype and its tropes, their universality apparent in the mythohistory of intra- and intertextual violence. To cite a few instances: the Iliad’s ekphrastic shield cast by crippled Hephaestus for ill-heeled Achilles after Patroclus’s suicidally noble lie; the Fisher King’s thigh-maiming and the Arthuriad’s Dolorous Wound (passim in Coetzee’s Dusklands); Queequeg’s carving his body’s tattoos on his coffin, encrypting lamed and mad Ahab’s mist-veiled destiny; David Jones’s In Parenthesis (1937), [End Page 886] its final chapter “The Five Unmistakable Marks” (of the Crucifixion revenant), with its cabala of flare-lit shoulder numerals, a severed head, and a spectral platoon whose ranks the victim protagonist longs to pass beyond, stripping off a bloody cloth; Ray Bradbury’s, The Illustrated Man (1983), in which Carl, a vagrant not unlike Vercueil of Coetzee’s Age of Iron (1990) is marked in tales by the tattoo needle; and Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960), its hallowed circuit design antedating the Flame Deluge and Simplification, its mutant “sports” monstrous marks of nuclear violence. Samolsky’s ambitious aim, “to articulate a new thinking and textual practice of the relation between reception and embodiment” (31), is consummately realized; yet a minor lacuna is his omission of Northrup Frye’s The Great Code (1981). Frye pioneered the hermeneutic tradition to which Samolsky is heir, analyzing the Book of Revelation, its allusions to the Septuagint, a vision of truth (aletheia: unveiling), a metalepsis of the synoptic gospels as encryptions of apocalypse and revelation. As described by Frye, John experienced his vision of the inwardness of present events with his spiritual body, thus anticipating Samolsky’s understanding of Kafka’s condemned man (“ItPC”), who, beyond pain, experiences his sentence in his body, an inscape transcending linear time, appropriating past and future, which confer meaning on each other in an eternal present. The main chapters of Apocalyptic Futures—“Metaleptic Machines,” “Apocalyptic Futures,” and “The Body in Ruins”—are a richly sourced and recondite son et lumière, deftly marshaling classic, modernist, postmodernist, structuralist, and deconstructionist sages as various as Nietzsche, Barthes, Pawel, Langer, Bloom, Bloch, Benjamin, and Scholem. Would that Samolsky had eschewed such semiotic icons as Derrida, Lacan, Saussure, Foucault, and Rancière—even the latter’s erstwhile companion Althusser, mad memoirist of The Future Lasts Forever. Their costive effect may be to blame for occasional discursively leaden lapses of otherwise lucid prose—for instance, this opaquely otiose brow-crinkler: “Kafka’s texts do indeed seem to contain their own exegesis, even if that exegesis is a stratagem for the evasion...

Fotografi Pertunjukan: Fenomenena Tubuh dari Panggung menjadi Rupa

Performace Photography: The Body Phenomenon from Stage to Physical. Performance photographyhas tried its best to capture the phenomena on stage. These two art mainstreams are completely different both fromthe subject and the objects. Performing art utilizes eyes and noses as the guidance to the feeling and meaningfulbody movements. Meanwhile, photography only utilizes eyes due to the still images it uses. Body in the performanceis the amalgamation of physical body and spiritual body. The detachment from a daily life to act as others accordingto the performance demand makes a performance meaningful and atmospheric for the audience.

History, theology and the relevance of the translatio imperii

In his Sociology, Rosenstock-Huessy had argued that the translatio imperii was an important, but forgotten, Medieval Christian formulation which grasped that with the Church the aspiration of empire had entered onto a new historical path; the extinction that is the fate of all earthly empires need not be repeated if the powers of human endeavour are incorporated within a spiritual body (Augustine’s ‘heavenly city’) for whom ‘love is stronger than death’. This radical faith in the future has been retained in, and is indeed intrinsic to, the secular Western revolutionary consciousness. This faith also provides the discipline of History with an eschatological mission far beyond merely chronicling of the past. History inevitably shares the same theological and philosophical roots not only of Europe but the entire world. For the ‘world’ we now inhabit is what it is because of the outgrowths of revolutions and world wars that were initiated in Europe.

The spiritual body - concept of the (Slavic) soul: Part I

This work analyses the concept of the soul in the Slavic and the Serbian cultures in the context of general views on soul and concludes that the dual conception body-soul did not exist in the pagan Slavic world picture. It was developed in Slavic and Serbian culture along with the acceptance of Christianity, while the earlier, pagan culture held in a higher esteem the notion of the vegetative and emotive soul, closely related to the body and the idea of free soul - man’s double, who, nevertheless, implies a certain, although immaterial and not always apparent embodiment (“spiritual body” - ‘telo duhovno’). The iconicity of the lexeme ‘duša’ rests upon the opposition visible-invisible, which is reserved for the vegetative or organic soul, while the free soul depends on the opposition material-immaterial. The difference in the iconicity of the lexemes ‘duša’ (“soul”) and ‘duh’ (“spirit”) - although both stand in an etymological relation to ‘dah’ (“breath”), ‘disati’ (“to breath”), ‘duvati’ (“to blow”) - lies in the fact that ‘duh’ is conceptualized as a divine breath, ‘sila duhovna’ (“a divine force”), which can be individuated in part, but which maintains the characteristics of its divine or demonic origin and is related to the intellect and the will, elements of air and fire, while the ‘duša’ is individuated and linked to “lower” levels of human being - bodily functions and sensitivity related to the element of water.

Erotic Pedagogies

This article considers the role of Audre Lorde's notion of the erotic as transformative pedagogical practices that can empower teachers and students to passionate learning and community formation. I argue that the erotic has been contained within the private sphere under neoliberalism through its articulation to heterosexuality, Whiteness, and U.S. exceptionalism. Neoliberalism contains the transformative potential of queer, feminist, and antiracist movements through circumscribing the transformative power of the erotic. When the erotic appears within the realm of the public sphere, it is articulated through the pornographic—as against the seemingly progressive agenda of neoliberalism—in order to contain its transformative effects. I then consider what it may look like, as well as what pitfalls we may face, if we engage in erotic pedagogy. I argue that the healing of the mind/body split goes beyond an intellectual exercise. Therein lies transformative power to heal both the political and the spiritual body.

What I Look Like: College Women, Body Image, and Spirituality

Despite public acknowledgment of the importance of spiritual development, little has been written globally on female young adults' personal views of their spiritual values and body image. This article briefly presents the findings of a pilot study that explored female college students' reflections on body image and spirituality. Responses from participants showed that (1) many students are interested in faith and spiritual development; (2) body dissatisfaction affects those women who viewed themselves as spiritual (92%) as well as those who said they were free thinkers (49%). Nevertheless, religion and spiritual values seemed to confer some behavioral protection. Implications for educational programs that will address the spiritual dimension of learning are discussed.

Beyond Pico della Mirandola: John Dee’s ‘formal numbers’ and ‘real cabala’

It is well known that, in both the Monas hieroglyphica and the Mathematicall praeface, Dee drew a part of his inspiration from Pico della Mirandola’s works. However, the nature and extent of Dee’s borrowings has not yet been studied. In fact, the only work of Pico really read and used by Dee was the 900 conclusions, where he found the conception of ‘formal numbers’: that is, mystical numbers carrying magical and divinatory powers. This is very important, since Dee sees these numbers as the very instruments of ‘the law of Creation.’ Pico also played a major part in the foundation of Christian cabala: in this field, his influence on Dee was mainly indirect, given that Dee—in the wake of Geofroy Tory—extended to Greek and Latin the magical and mystical properties which Pico considered as an exclusive property of the Hebrew language. Thus, Dee transforms what he calls ‘vulgar cabala’—the part of cabala that deals with language—from a christianised Jewish cabala into a truly catholic cabala. But for Dee, this is only the lower sort of cabala: above it lies ‘real cabala’, that is, the art of transmuting any physical or spiritual body into another. ‘Vulgar’ magicians and alchemists fail to achieve their aim because they do not possess the mastery of this discipline. Dee took from Pico the notion that cabala is superior to magic, and that the latter cannot be successful unless supported by ‘the work of cabala.’ Finally, Dee’s conception of the ‘metamorphosis’ of the soul taking place between the ‘horizons’ of time and eternity is derived not only from Pico, but also from Thomas Aquinas’s Summa contra Gentiles.

Dying Again and Again: Remarks on the Legend of Saint George in Jindřichův Hradec (Neuhaus)

In the legend of Saint George, painted on the walls of one of the rooms of the castle at Jindřichův Hradec (Neuhaus/Böhmen) in 1338, the Saint is tortured and killed repeatedly, even if the unbelievable moments of his legends had been criticized by the Church several centuries ago. The narrative about his repeated dying survived the criticism, because it answered the needs of believers. The pictorial legend was an effective illustration of general Christian doctrines about life and death, but it integrated some older traditions, too. The resurrections of George did not result in a spiritual body, but in a material recreation of the natural body, in which the person of the Saint could continue his activities in this world. More specifically, the pictorial legend addressed the participants of the Northern crusades. The images offered the knights powerful inspiration: a hope in supernatural intervention and a shining role model on how to confront the physical suffering.

Easter Preaching

Preachers are faced with two unresolved issues at Easter: 1) Are the resurrection stories fact or legend? and 2) What does Paul mean by a spiritual body? Is he supposing something different from the stories? What is the Easter message we are called to preach?

BINARISM IN THE SYSTEM OF CHARACTERS OF THE LATGALIAN ZOOMORPHIC ANECDOTES

<p>Character profile and the system of images as a whole demonstrates the binary structure based on the mythological tradition. Double character of the nature motif pervades the folklore tradition, which is the most demonstratively revealed by the twin motif, where two brothers at the same time are both opposites and complement each other. The paper has applied the structural semiotic method, using opinions of the Russian philologist and culture historian Eliza Meletinskii (Елеазар Мелетинский) on the connection of binary oppositions with the mythological metaphorism and pairs of binary opposition. Purpose – to describe the binarism as an underlying principle for revealing the genre specifics of the Latgalian zoomorphic anecdote at the level of images.</p><p>Struggle of opposites has a special sense in mythological consciousness. Diversity of social roles in a real life can create one character, as well as features that functions as a contrast, by becoming embodied in evil or consistently positive characters, within an anecdote can impersonate a whole ambivalent image. The mythical twin rivalry theme is very topical in the folklore tradition, since existence of pair of twins depicts a situation when two beings create one spiritual body, but at the same time the mysterious twin pair exists in separate contradictory categories.</p><p>In the context of binary opposition, personal identity problem of the hero of zoomorphic anecdotes does not stem from the world outlook, philosophy or culture, but everyday life, it is a practical problem, so to speak, choice of everyday role, place and behavior. A combination of the cliché features in a particular character serves as one of the stereotype-forming directions. Characters of the Latgalian zoomorphic anecdotes have no clearly defined understanding of their place in society, because they represent stereotypical roles of the modern world. Characters’ inherent ability to change their traditional, ideological and functional load, as justified by the progressive principle of mediation, is considered to be one of the most important features in Latgalian anecdotes about animals.</p><p>Specific research reflects also the fact that tricksterism in Latgalian zoomorphic anecdotes is a universal component of typical characters. Orientation of a trickster towards opposites and the destruction of the opposition reflects ambivalence of characters and describes them as promulgators of revolutionary ideas. Significantly enough, the particularity of a trickster can be depicted in two ways – explicitly: the character displayed in the text, and implicitly: the anecdote teller and the listener, who immanently identifies themselves with the character. This can be explained by hidden or open desire inherent in the tellers of anecdotes and the recipients to express the desires existing in subconsciousness.</p><p>Upon inquiry into the impact of trickster on the characters and its place in the system of images as a whole, binary structure based on a mythological tradition is unfold, where features of the mythical twin pair in characters of the Latgalian anecdotes is depicting their controversial nature. This has to do with the personal identity problem of images, which has to be searched for in choice of familiar role and behavior. Each situation played in anecdotes compactly illustrates the collision of opinions, notions or values, providing for the winner and loser positions, contributing to a possible change in the conventional concepts. In Latgalian anecdotes about animals, the place of a character in the system of images is often based on a binary opposition relationship the strongest – the weakest, where the physically strongest image of the anecdote do not always owns the anecdote teller’s – the listener's sympathy.</p><p>Binary oppositions in Latgalian zoomorphic anecdotes have peculiar specifics, which is due to the fact that mainly animal characters are active in the zoomorphic anecdotes. Consequently, the binary oppositions in anecdotes about animals are of more archaic and expanded nature, which is accompanied by greater generalization and certain mythological deeper layer as in other genres of anecdotes.</p>

Scriptural Authority: A Christian (Protestant) Perspective

In curbing the authority of the ecclesiastical Magisterium the Reformation movement brought the authority of the Holy Scripture to the forefront as the normative foundation of Christian theology. One of its basic axioms is the sola scriptum principle, meaning that all one needs to know in order to live in a salvific relation to God can be acquired scripture alone. This constitutes the formal, epistemological principle of Protestant theology up to today, and complements the material principles solus Christus, sola gratia, and sola fide. Whereas these material principles refer to the manifestation of salvation in Christ (alone), to the eternal ground of salvation through the grace of God (alone), and to the gift of salvation by faith (alone), the formal principle oi sola scriptura calls upon the Christian to realize that these three principles of material truth are made known to us (only) by the formal principle by Holy The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man's salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture. 1 On the one hand, the Reformers taught that Holy Scripture not only offers testimony to the Word of God but also is itself of divine origin since the authors wrote under the immediate influence of God. In view of this, GWis ultimately the principal author, while the writing humans are only instrumental scribes. It follows from that that the Bible possesses divine authority. On the other hand the Reformers distinguished between the Bible as the Word of God and the Word of God in the Bible. Furthermore they made a distinction between the written word of the biblical books and the Logos, the eternal word of God, which speaks through the words of the Bible and addresses the reader here and now, existentially. As a testimony to and a medium o/the Word of God the Holy Scripture for Luther is Christ's spiritual body, 2 and thus the authority of the biblical scriptures is a derived and secondary authority. This authority does not rest simply on the sacred text as such but rather on the proclamation of God's grace-filled Lordship over nature

Religion et société en Chine ancienne et médiévale ed. by John Lagerwey (review)

Book Reviews 105 Several articles—Michael Winn’s “Daoist Internal Alchemy in the West” (pp. 179-202), Stuart Sovatsky’s “Kundalini and the Complete Maturation of the Spiritual Body” (pp. 203218 ), and Althea Northage-Orr’s “Western Parallels: The Esoteric Teachings of Hermeticism” (pp. 219-242)—present practices similar to internal alchemy in countries other than China in a comparative perspective. They show how much the approach to Asian traditions—and here the Taoist tradition—is tainted by a vocabulary and an interpretation that remain Western and draw from either the hermetic tradition or pseudo-scientific language. To point out some of this volume’s transcription errors and misspellings: gangong instead of qiangong 乾宮 (p. 38); Russelle 1933 instead of Rousselle (p. 42); Yinfu jing 音符經 in place of Yin 陰符經 (p.73); sanfeng 三豐 in place of sanfeng 三峰; Daoguan for the Daoguang era (p. 123); Daoyuan yiqi 道原一氣 in place of yuan 元 (p. 143). This collective work appears to be a good book of popularization on internal alchemy, a field particularly difficult to tackle because of its hermetic vocabulary. It is nevertheless hard to pinpoint the market for such a heterogenous collection, since some contributions are basically summaries of already existing works (sometimes forgetting to cite the major research on the subject), while others provide new elements, notably on modern and contemporary Taoism, worthy of the specialist’s interest and attention. CATHERINE DESPEUX, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales Religion et société en Chine ancienne et médiévale Sous la direction de JOHN LAGERWEY. Patrimoines Chine. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf/Institut Ricci, 2009. 724 pages. ISBN 978-2-20400-0. €54.00 paper. The study of Chinese religion is a dynamic field. This is the consequence of recent archaeological findings which are often from graves and can therefore be expected to have a religious component. Skeptical attitudes to religion have often limited its presentation to written sources. Here archaeological findings act as a corrective. Moreover, the newfound Chinese interest in this neglected aspect of their identity has promoted research, as has ongoing world-wide curiosity about the spiritual. The fact that several decades of hard work have finally gained for Daoism an identity has also helped to give credibility and weight to the study of religion in China. As long as Daoism was a largely unknown entity, accounts of Chinese religion resembled an anatomy of the human body that ignored the function of the 106 Journal of Chinese Religions heart. The topic of the first half of Religion et société is ancient China.11 The second half that deals with the period of division is of special importance, documenting the spread of Buddhism and the formation of Daoism as a two-pronged process crucial to China’s political and cultural history. John Lagerwey argues that the Buddhist “conquest” was important in facilitating the country’s unification after centuries of political, social, and cultural separatism. This volume is a work in progress in the best sense. It is not a handbook presenting wellestablished results in restrained language but a collection of vigorous articles by leading scholars intent on communicating their latest insights. They draw pictures that stress the historicity of religions, aspects of their creation, acceptance and modification, and the controversies between them. The juxtaposition of approaches and positions works well. For instance, in regard to ritual practices during the period of division, Catherine Despeux’s stress on similarities between Daoist and Buddhist rituals works as a corrective to the isolated treatment of these practices in other contributions. To do justice to the freshness and interest of the chapters I will deal with each individually, in the chronological order in which they are presented. John Lagerwey’s introductory overview stresses continuities in religious beliefs and their political function. He notes in particular the powerful cosmological narrative of the preBuddhist era and ideological aspects of the Buddhist “conquest.” Alain Thote shows that funeral practices document the wide gap between Shang dynasty social strata, when the death of a king was accompanied by hundreds of human victims. This gap narrowed in Zhou times, together with an emancipation of the living, who gradually secluded themselves from the dead. Qin and Chu tombs from...

Religion as a means of preventing injury and promoting safety: Christian discourses on embodiment as safety discourses

On the one hand, South Africa is the most religious country in the world. On the other, it is also the country where HIV is spreading the fastest, and which has the highest rape rate, and the highest occurrence of domestic violence. this article explores the faces of corporal religious discourses that render believers vulnerable to abuse. It furthermore describes how these discourses can be deconstructed to help the religious discourses that in power believers against abuse and enhance their physical and emotional safety. The insights of Body Theology play an important role in describing this shift in religious discourse. The research population was 270 patients who had been subjected to abuse and were referred for counseling to Kalafong Hospital in Atteridgeville, Tswane, where the author works as a part-time counsellor. The population testifies to the possibility of exploring the dialogical spaces between harmful religious discourse that leads to injury on one hand, and religious discourses that offer safety only in self-sacrifice, and in the life thereafter on the other hand. Because of a specific tomography, the research population was almost exclusively Christian, and therefore the religious discourses described in this article draw, from necessity, on Christian resources only. In its final analysis, the article focuses on reconstructed religious discourses of safety, which were constructed through the insights of the Body Theology in dialogue with the experiences of the research population. Body Theology of knowledge is that a person has at least four bodies, thus religious discourses of safety explore the physical body as a site of resistance; the symbolic body as a site of a relationship; the political body is a site for sharing energy and not for exercising power; and a spiritual body as a site of recreation.

The SpREUK questionnaires as tools to measure spiritual/religious attitudes of patients dealing will chronic diseases

Background Although there is mounting research showing a connection between spirituality/religiosity (SpR) and health, understanding their relationship is only preliminary. Future studies depend on having reliable measures of these constructs which address SpR in the context coping, and can be easily incorporated into the study designs. The SpREUK questionnaire [Ostermann et al., Forsch Komplement Klass Naturheil 2004;11:346–53; Bussing et al., Health Qual life outcomes 2005;3:1–10; Int J Psychiatr Med 2007;37:39–57; Zeitschr Gesundheits 2008;31:35–7] appears to be a good choice for assessing a patient's interest in spiritual concerns which is not biased for or against a particular religious commitment. Methods The SpREUK comprises a 16-item main manual (Cronbach's alpha=0.92), a 6-item BENEFIT manual (alpha=0.93), and a 25-item PRACTICES manual (alpha=0.92). The main manual differentiates Search for Meaningful Support because of illness (spiritual quest orientation); Trust in Higher Guidance (intrinsic religiosity); and Positive Interpretation of Disease (hint to change life because of illness; healing is regarded as a process of ‘becoming’ in terms of reflection of life). The BENEFIT scale assesses beneficial aspects of intrinsic SpR. To avoid intermixes of attitudes, convictions, and forms of SpR practices, PRACTICES manual can be used as a separate tool and differentiates Conventional Religious Practice; Existentialistic Practice; Spiritual Body–Mind Practices; and Humanistic Practice. Results On the basis of data from 821 patients with various chronic diseases (mean age 54±14 years), we can confirm the underlying concept of the SpREUK. Particularly Positive Interpretation of Disease had an obvious spiritual connotation and correlated with Search ( r =0.56), Trust ( r =0.45), Spiritual Body–Mind Practices ( r =0.45), and Existentialistic Practices ( r =0.47). Patients with higher age and cancer had significantly higher interest in SpR issues than patients with chronic pain diseases or patients with multiple scleroses. With respect to Life Satisfaction (modified BMSLS), in patients with chronic pain disease, just the BENEFIT scale correlated with life satisfaction aspects Future Perspectives ( r =0.29), Myself ( r =0.28), and Overall Life ( r =0.22). Physical Health (SF-12) did correlate with SpR issues, while Mental Health (SF-12) correlated negatively with the spiritual quest dimension ( r =−0.34). Conclusion The SpREUK questionnaire reveals to be a valid and reliable instrument tested in patients with chronic diseases and a Christian, Muslim, or agnostic/atheistic background, which heeds the spiritual quest orientation, intrinsic religiosity, and uniquely integrates the topic of ‘meaning of disease’ (reappraisal, i.e. hint to change life and). Although the relationship between SpR and various dimensions of health and quality of life has been extensively examined during the past decade, SpR has to be regarded as a distinctive concept which nevertheless may be related to quality of life aspects.

A Theology for the Older, Female Hiv-Infected Body

AbstractAids management programmes in South Africa focus primarily on people under the age of 48. Local theologies, too, address mainly the needs of HIV-infected people between the ages of 15 and 50. This article, then, argues for theological attention to women over the age of 50 who remain voiceless and isolated in their bodies. Although Body Theology as developed by Lisa Isherwood does not deal with the HIV-infected body as such, the insights of this theology, in dialogue with the experiences of HIV-infected women over 50, are used here to construct a basic theology for empowering the four 'bodies' of the older woman living with HIV: the physical body is to be embodied as a site of resistance and enjoyment, the symbolic body as a site of relationship and beauty; the political body as the site of energy, and the spiritual body as the site of recreation and resurrection. Women over 50 are in special need of theological care because of the loneliness ensuing from the fact that, in this age group, the women/men ratio in South Africa is 100 to 70. This renders older women vulnerable to illicit sexual encounters.

Apología agustiniana de la resurrección, por medio de ‘Timeo’ 41 A-B de Platón

This article deals with the comment that Augustine makes to Timaeus 41 A-B, making a review of the reception of the interpretation that Augustine makes and finally it presents briefly the teaching of Augustine about the spiritual body.