Spiritual Commitment Research Articles

Fetishized nature or life-giving breath? Religion as Skill in Climate Change

"Anthropogenic climate change and unsustainable modes of production, consumption and lifestyles represent one of the most demanding challenges facing Earth, our home and humanity. Therefore religious belief, faith communities and spiritual commitment are highly needed to prepare the ground for what has been described as the necessary “great transformation”. To achieve this transformation, we need a new climate narrative and iconography, supported by a broad alliance of local and trans-local social forces. Religion has a significant role to play in this mobilization. This article begins by depicting several reasons that religion is a crucial driving force in the needed great transformation. Secondly, it will offer a sketch of what Christian ecotheology of the Life-Giving Spirit, and resisting the powers of fetishization of money, technology and power, might have to offer in this context. Following the older paths of animism, fetishism and faith in the Spirit perform along contradictory logics. The challenge for an ecological pneumatology, which wants to drink from its own classical wells, is to resist the authority of life-threatening concepts of animation and overcome the power of fetishization."

Pierre Trudeau and the Separation of Religion and Politics

Pierre Trudeau’s deep personal commitment to Catholicism was largely unknown to Canadians during his tenure as Prime Minister. Indeed, his religious commitment did not play an obvious role in his political life. Trudeau’s version of Catholicism, ‘personalism’, emphasized the personal – interior – spiritual commitment of the individual and the necessity of the separation of religion and politics. He stressed the importance of individual liberty in matters of faith but also the personal responsibility of the individual to serve others and work towards a more just society. Trudeau was opposed to the recognition of an official religion, and indeed to any form of state promotion of a particular religious belief system. He rejected the assumption that political community or social solidarity required a shared (and public) commitment to a particular faith or culture. His promotion of multiculturalism stemmed from his belief that national identity or political membership should not be based on a shared ethnicity that would necessarily include some and exclude others. His championing of the Charter of Rights rested on the view that citizenship should be grounded instead on a shared commitment to the protection of individual and democratic rights. Trudeau was a committed believer and a secular politician, who sought to separate his public action and private conscience. In a sense then he embodied the separation of religion and politics – of church and state – that is central to the contemporary conception of religious freedom. In this chapter, I want to explore the challenge of separating personal or communal spiritual life from civic life which Trudeau had to navigate, throughout his political career.

Facebook and Yoga: Gurus, New Age, and Spirituality through Social Media

This article reports a three-year repeated measures study on the effect of guru-led new religious movements’ (gnrm) customized Facebook yoga lessons on followers’ spiritual experiences and religious commitment. Participants comprised 3,488 followers across four gnrms. During the study period, each gnrm Facebook page had an average of 1,095 daily posts and 156 weekly yoga lessons. Results showed that at phase 2, scores of participants on spiritual experiences and religious commitment measures were significantly higher vis-à-vis the comparison group. Within the participant cohort, women, those with stable marital status, and those who performed a combination of devotional and social service activities at the gnrms scored higher. Disciplined Facebook usage influenced regular viewing of the customized yoga lessons, higher quiz scores, and regular self-practice. The strongest predictor of the phase 2 outcome measure scores was regular self-practice. With focused administering and usage, Facebook is an effective medium for intensifying spiritual experiences and religious commitment among gnrms’ fellowship.

PENGARUH KECERDASAN SPIRITUAL DAN KOMITMEN ORGANISASIONALTERHADAPORGANIZATIONAL CITIZENSHIP BEHAVIORMELALUI KEPUASAN KERJA SEBAGAI VARIABEL INTERVENING

This study examined the effect of spiritual intelligence and organizational commitment on job satisfaction and OCB on Non-PNS Leading Sector Assistant III East Lombok Regency employees. Specifically the purpose of this study was to determine the significance of the influence of spiritual intelligence, organizational commitment and job satisfaction on OCB, determine the significance of the influence of spiritual intelligence and organizational commitment on job satisfaction, and find out the mediating role of the variable job satisfaction. The population of this study were all Non-PNS employees who served in the Leading Sector Assistant III of East Lombok Regency as many as 98 respondents. This study uses structural equation model analysis (SEM analysis) with smartPLS applications. The results showed that spiritual intelligence and organizational commitment had a significant positive effect on job satisfaction, job satisfaction had a significant effect on OCB, while spiritual intelligence and organizational commitment did not significantly influence OCB. For the mediating effect of job satisfaction, there is a full mediation role in the significant influence of organizational commitment on OCB, whereas the influence of spiritual intelligence on OCB has not found a significant mediating effect of the variable job satisfaction.Keywords:Spiritual Intelligence, Organizational Commitment, Job Satisfaction, OCB.

Quantitative Psychology Curriculum Design A Case Study At The Faculty Of Psychology Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University Jakarta

The need for quantitative psychology in the 21st century is an urgent need for Muslim psychologists to compliment what has been done in term of normative qualitative study. The weakness of Muslims psychologists in mastering the quantitative psychology results in the difficulty of measuring psychological dimensions, such as the dimensions of gratitude, tolerance and so forth. This paper aims to describe the curriculum design of quantitative psychology and the application of the curriculum in teaching and learning process at the Faculty of Psychology Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University Jakarta. This study used qualitative method in gathering and analyzing the data. The findings of the study indicates that the concrete activities of quantitative psychology can be initiated by developing psychological instruments measuring psychological variables such as patience, gratitude, tolerance, religiosity, spiritual awareness, spiritual commitment, and spiritual intelligence.

Whores in the Religious Marketplace: Sex-Positivity's Roots in Commercial Sex Cultures

Whores in the Religious MarketplaceSex-Positivity's Roots in Commercial Sex Cultures Jayne Swift (bio) In late 1976 the Church of Venus opened its doors at 1414 First Avenue—"sandwiched" between adult bookstores and theaters on what, during the 1970s, was colloquially known as Seattle's "Flesh Avenue."1 Before it even opened its doors, a columnist for the Seattle Times, curious about the descriptor "Church" on a street known for sin, would begin chronicling the organization's purported mission.2 Founded by local adult business entrepreneur Ron Peterson (who was principal owner of the adjacent peep show, the Amusement Center), the Church of Venus distinguished itself from its neighbors through its professed spiritual commitment to sexuality as an arena of self-enrichment and a force for social good.3 Specifically, the Church sought to spread the word of "sex-positivity" to publics lacking a robust ethics from which to affirm the value of sexuality untethered from the family form, reproduction, or romantic love. The Church quickly achieved local notoriety for its ethics of sex-positivity and its mission to create both public and commercial spaces for the practice of sex-positivity. How did a small iconoclastic community come to disseminate a view of sexual commerce as a tool for facilitating spiritual growth and healing? And how was their sex-positive vision situated within a changing historical paradigm by which sexuality was increasingly seen as an aspect of selfhood that individuals should deliberately, conscientiously cultivate? In this article I argue that people in the sex trade were primary developers of sex-positivity and that sex-positivity was a political resource for challenging their criminalization and marginalization. For the purposes of this article, sex-positivity refers to an ethico-spiritual framework that critiqued the rigid regulation of sexual practice by dominant institutions and the state; affirmed sexual exploration as a site of personal and collective meaning making; argued that this exploration was often constrained by socially entrenched, dogmatic moralities; and promoted sexual freedom through the development of physical infrastructure [End Page 93] and alternative communities. Emboldened by the greater visibility of commercial sex economies in city centers during the 1970s, people in the sex trade deployed sex-positivity to redefine commercial sex, perhaps paradoxically, as a space for the production of caring sexual exchanges among strangers in a market-based society understood as simultaneously sexually and spiritually impoverished. Reconstructing the Church's history through legal records, press coverage, its presence in popular culture, and oral history interviews with those who offered legal testimony on the Church's behalf illustrates how people in the sex trade came to disseminate new ideas about the value of sexual labor and its place in US society, via sex-positive ethico-spiritualities. Unsurprisingly, the perspectives of male entrepreneurs, reporters, and court officials are most accessible, but women were also involved in the Church as crafters of its mission, performers interpreting and enacting its mission, patrons, and (real and fictionalized) advocates. These sources, reflecting the shifting but still potent terms of racial politics in post-Fordist cities, are also quiet on the subject of race. However, religion, and specifically Christianity as a national norm, is omnipresent in these sources. In the post-Civil Rights era, religious morality may have functioned as a seemingly race-neutral term for exerting racialized social control over the public sphere and workers in informal and illicit economies. Across these disparate sources and over a period of years, Church participants espoused an ethics of sex-positivity to audiences (such as the press, police, and judges) who were often baffled by and hostile to it. A historian can never truly know what was in the mind of their subjects, but what emerges from these sources and stakeholders is a clear and consistent defense of sexual labor on the basis that those performing it were non-traditional experts providing a sexual service that held spiritual and ethical value, and they thus had legal rights. The history of this specific counterinstitution evinces how people in the sex trades, in the face of public suspicion, sought to redefine the social value of sexual labor via a distinctive sex-positive worldview, which they assembled from new religious...

Bengali Women’s Writings in the Colonial Period: Critique of Nation, Narration, and Patriarchy

Abstract Critical engagements like the first autobiography written by a Bengali woman, Rasasundari Devi, and the non-fictions by Kailashbasini Devi, Krishnabhabini Das, and other women writers in the second half of the nineteenth century contested the imagined idealization of the Hindu domesticity and conjugality as spaces of loveableness and spiritual commitment. They criticized coercion in child-marriages and the forceful injunctions of the Hindu scriptures on both married and widowed women. Such rhetoric of quasi empowerment needs to be disaggregated to perpetuate issues of ‘double colonization,’ ‘dual-hold’ in feminism in India. The question is whether there can be any grounds of women’s agency in the Indian tradition. Eurocentric critiques are ill-equipped to politicize all modalities of a culture of social exclusion in Hindu imaginaries. Henceforth, as questions of equality, emancipation, and empowerment are fiercely debated in the public domain in contemporary India, we need to argue how immanent dissenting woman subjectivity can originate to counteract multiple patriarchies formed in Indian immediacies.

Secular Beats Spiritual: The Westernization of the Easternization of the West by Steve Bruce

Reviewed by: Secular Beats Spiritual: The Westernization of the Easternization of the West by Steve Bruce Nathan Garcia (bio) Secular Beats Spiritual: The Westernization of the Easternization of the West. By Steve Bruce. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 203pp. $34.95 Steve Bruce is a leading figure in secularization theory. His most recent work Secular Beats Spiritual: The Westernization of the Easternization of the West straight-forwardly responds to a common critique of secularization theory which promulgates a "not-decline-just-change" (14) attitude. Simply, this attitude declares that Western spirituality is not waning so much as it is experimentally separating from traditional Christianity and flirting with various New Age and Eastern spiritual practices and beliefs. Bruce comes armed with his extensive research to emphatically declare, "False!" Bruce employs ample evidence, ranging from the anecdotal to years-long quantitative studies, to gauge the trajectory and nuances of new spiritual movements. His critics must surely commend his research if not his conclusions. However, as with any important social analysis, definitions and scope are key. In this respect Bruce's own secular inclinations are most evident. He distinguishes between reli gion and spirituality with a nifty separation of exteriority and interiority, respec tively. Secularism, furthermore, is merely the absence of the religious and spiri tual (16). His definitions undoubtedly facilitate his case. Moreover, while Bruce commonly uses the term West he almost-exclusively focuses his analyses on the United Kingdom, while only occasionally mentioning the United States and entirely ignoring continental Europe. His rationale is that the UK is largely a secular state and therefore a better site for his analyses of religion's fate. Second, the UK is small enough to more accurately measure trends and "degrees of penetration" (vii). His presumption that the UK is a forerunner to the rest of the West allows him to avoid the demographic and religious nuances of other complex Western societies. After establishing his analytical framework, Bruce begins by exploring popular New Age movements in the UK in chapter two, primarily from the 1960's and 70's. He concludes that the popular movements belied a loyal community of adherents. [End Page 274] Movements either exaggerated their membership, participation was half-hearted, or their large membership quickly dropped off. The few that have survived have done so by incorporating secular ideas and have been made amenable for individual alteration. Chapters 4–6 examine Eastern religious traditions in the UK. Chapter 4 explores Hinduism's presence, influence, and communities in the UK. Bruce focuses particularly on meditation and yoga as Hindu practices having achieved mainstream popularity. Nevertheless, these practices have been largely stripped of their religious origins, while analogously the Hindu-inspired communities achieved enduring success because "the movements require the least sacrifice and that can most readily be fitted into a secular life" (79). Chapter 5 explores Buddhist communities and practices. Bruce sketches a history of Buddhism in the UK, concluding that while more successful in converting native Britons, it has not come close to filling the Christian gap. He focuses on mindfulness as the primary Buddhist contribution, recognizing that it too has become a largely "secular psychotherapy" (103). Curiously, he spends the least amount of time on Islamic influence in the UK. In ten pages, Bruce observes that Islam is the largest of these Eastern religions in the UK, but its participants are not converts or natural-born British. He concludes that Islam nevertheless remains a miniscule portion of the overall population, and further, its dogmatic and monotheistic similarities to Christianity prevent it from entering mainstream secular culture. Islam's exponential rise in continental Europe and the Christian response go unmentioned. Bruce flexes his analytical muscles in chapter 7. He reviews numerous studies and statistics gauging spiritual commitment within spiritual communities and across the whole British population. The most comprehensive spiritual studies confirm two truths: 1) they exaggerate the importance of spiritual communities, and 2) the numbers reveal a small number of spiritual consumers. In short, all evidence indicates a decline in those identified as religious and spiritual, with no reason to expect change in the future. The final chapter summarizes his thesis and main arguments, while providing a commentary on what Bruce...

“A Religious Recognition of Equality”: Liberal Spirituality and the Marriage Question in America, 1835–1850

Studying texts by Lydia Maria Child, Sarah Grimke, and Margaret Fuller, this article seeks to recover the early phases of a dialogue that moved marriage away from an institution grounded in ideas of unification and toward a concept of marriage grounded in liberal ideas about equality. It seeks to situate the “marriage question” within both the rhetoric of American antebellum reform and of liberal religious thought. Rather than concluding that these early texts facilitated a movement toward a contractarian ideal of marriage this article concludes that Child, Grimke, and Fuller, sought to discredit unification as an organizing idea for marriage and replace it with a definition that placed a spiritual commitment to equality between the partners as the animating core of the idea of marriage.

Urban ministry workers’ positive experiences of interpersonal and religious support during crisis

ABSTRACTResearch on faith-based urban workers is limited despite the chronic and traumatic exposure inherent in their work. This study details the perception of positive interpersonal relationships during a time of trauma or crisis as described in semistructured 2- to 3-hour interviews with 13 faith-based urban workers in Los Angeles, California. Using strategies consistent with Consensual Qualitative Research, categories and subcategories defining positive interpersonal relationships were identified. Resulting categories suggested that there are specific characteristics, products, and types of relationships that urban workers experience as important during the time of trauma or crisis. Positive experiences were often religious in nature and included feeling supported, feeling connected, relationship growth, sharing and listening, authenticity, and feeling as through relationships facilitated personal growth or coping. The findings highlight participants’ need for both practical support and relational support which reflects and enhances their spiritual commitment.

Duchowość jako niedoceniany aspekt psyche. Propozycja nowego ujęcia duchowości w psychologii – kategoria wrażliwości duchowej

In the article, I present a proposal for a new approach to spirituality in the field of psychology – the spiritual sensitivity (a disposition to experience spirituality, manifested in the embracement of the nature of things in the transcendent and final perspective, in moral sensitivity, and the ability to find meaning in paradoxical and limiting situations), which consists of individual, interconnected competences (Holism and Harmony Wisdom, Awareness, Meaning; Religiosity and Faith; Ethics and Moral Sensitivity/Conscience; Openness to Other People; Spiritual Commitment; Aesthetic Sensitivity). The proposed theoretical framework relates spirituality – abstract, ideational realm – to the specific, individualized, everyday life of a person, i.e. to the selection of objectives and measures for their implementation, as well as it allows to operationalization the spirituality in easier way in research studies. In the article, I briefly present the method for measuring spiritual sensitivity – Spiritual Sensitivity Inventory (SSI) (Straś-Romanowska, Kowal, Kapala) – and indicate some regularities detected in a series of studies on the nature of the phenomenon and its role in human life, e.g. its importance for the sense of subjectivity and subjective quality of life of people.

Education, Visual Art and Cultural Revival: Tagore, Geddes, Nivedita, and Coomaraswamy

<p>Rabindranath Tagore and Patrick Geddes were part of the same milieu long before they met. They were both internationally minded cultural thinkers. The links between them are illuminated by consideration of their links with two other internationally minded cultural activists: the Irishwoman Margaret Noble, better known as Sister Nivedita, and the historian of art and ideas Ananda Coomaraswamy. The lives of all four exemplify educational and political expression driven by spiritual commitment and underpinned by literature and the visual arts. </p>

Missionary Discipleship as the Innovation of the Church in Pope Francis’Evangelii Gaudium

Abstract Pope Francis' Evangelii Gaudium talks about discipleship in a framework of mission and evangelization. Rather than concentrating on the discipleship as such, it uses as a lens the spiritual commitment of conversion to discipleship, challenging all Christians and the whole Church, including institutional structures, to this conversion. In common with the World Coundl of Churches' document Together towards Life, Evangelii Gaudium emphasizes a need for Christians to focus on the heart of the Gospel, the love of the trinitarian God, in order to find trusful, dynamic, and transformative mission for the changing landscapes of today's global and local phenomena. This article deals with the concept of disdpleship in Evangelii Gaudium. To this end it discusses discipleship and its underlying structure of continual conversion as it is represented in both Evangelii Gaudium and the WCC's mission document Together towards Life. Evangelii Gaudium and Missionary Discipleship Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel), Pope Francis' 2013 apostolic exhortation, emphasizes the missionary that enlivens the community of (2) Rather than talking about discipleship alone, however, Evangelii Gaudium concentrates on the concept of discipleship (3) which is seen as the fundamental essence and task of all Christians in the light of contemporary global and local phenomena: particularly the rapid changes of this epochal period which, while producing great advances, are also escalating inequality by decreasing human dignity. (4) It is as a result of this insight that Pope Francis emphasizes the need for conversion to discipleship, a model that could challenge conditions in the contemporary world. In order to understand what is meant by the concept in Evangelii Gaudium, the following sections present a brief summary of some of its underlying elements. Missionary discipleship as a communal state of being Evangelii Gaudium advocates discipleship as a personal state of being for all Christians, one that is not reliant on one's position in the Church, nor personal ambitions or gifts, nor even the measure of one's faith. Rather, it derives from the sacrament of baptism: In virtue of their baptism, all the members of the People of God have become (cf. Mt 28:19). All the baptized, whatever their position in the Church or their level of instruction in the faith, are agents of evangelization, and it would be insufficient to envisage a plan of evangelization to be carried out by professionals while the rest of the faithful would simply be passive recipients. The new evangelization calls for personal involvement on the part of each of the baptized. Every Christian is challenged, here and now, to be actively engaged in evangelization; indeed, anyone who has truly experienced God's saving love does not need much time or lengthy training to go out and proclaim that love. Every Christian is a to the extent that he or she has encountered the love of God in Christ Jesus: we no longer say that we are disciples and missionaries, but rather that we are always missionary disciples. (5) As this extract makes very clear, discipleship calls for personal involvement through which the joy of the Gospel may spread from person to person in the form of goodness moving respectfully and gently from heart to heart. (6) The document emphasizes that every single Christian is an agent, a concept which embraces active and subjective commitment. (7) However, discipleship, which clearly includes personal commitment, is not an individual state of being. Rather, it assumes engagement with others: Genuine spiritual accompaniment always begins and flourishes in the context of service to the mission of evangelization. [...] This is clearly distinct from every kind of intrusive accompaniment or isolated self-realization. …

Personality, spirituality, suicide, and self-injury proneness among lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults

The present study sought to clarify gaps in current knowledge integrating personality, spirituality, and risk for suicide/self-harm among sample of 336 lesbian, gay, and bisexual community members. It was hypothesised that Neuroticism would positively predict, and Extraversion and Agreeableness would negatively predict, measures of suicide and self-injury proneness. Additionally, it was predicted that spirituality, defined as Spiritual Life Integration (SLI) and Social Justice Commitment, would interact with personality traits to attenuate risk for suicide and self-injury. Results supported the role of Neuroticism, and identified an unexpected predictor of Conscientiousness, at the main effect level. Moderation patterns were observed such that Agreeableness and Extraversion interacted with SLI to attenuate risk, such that high levels of each trait and high levels of spirituality were protective against suicide and self-injury proneness. Theoretical and practical implications with emphasis on counselling intervention implementation and future research are discussed.

KEADILAN SOSIAL DALAM KEUANGAN SYARIAH

Social justice in the Islamic economy is based on spiritual commitment and the concept of universal brotherhood among human beings which requires that all resources be sacred trust God, used to realize Maqashid Shari’ah, it is the fulfillment of human life. This paper describes the theory of social justice that focus on Islamic financial. The foundation of Islamic justice can be seen from al-Qur’an Surah al-Hadid: 25 affirming that justice has been emphasized by the Qur’an as the primary mission of the Prophets sent by God Almighty, including economic justice and the elimination of the income gap. Social justice in Islam is the implication of the fundamental principle underlying all the teachings of Islam, namely monotheism. At the level of practice, Islam prohibits usury, Islam seeks to build a society based on honesty and fairness. Justice in this context has two dimensions, namely the financiers are entitled to a reward, but should be commensurate with the risk and effort required, and the reward is determined by the profit. Implementation of Islamic justice theory in Islamic finance can be seen from mudharabah and Musharaka or commonly known as a profit and loss sharing.

Alternatives to War from the Bottom Up

Alternatives to War from the Bottom Up

Nonviolence Writ Large

Say “nonviolence” today and your hearers are likely to think of protest marches and sit-ins, but nonviolence, as Mahatma Gandhi said, “is not the inanity it has been taken for down the ages.” It is a law of nature and can be applied in any relationship or situation, including statecraft. Indeed, Gandhi argued that “it is blasphemy to say that nonviolence can only be practiced by individuals and never by nations which are composed of individuals.”In North America, an early experiment in nonviolent statecraft began in March 1681, when King Charles II granted William Penn governorship of the vast territory in North America that today bears his name. Penn was a close friend of George Fox, founder of the Religious Society of Friends (the Quakers), and the Quaker regime he created remained an island of peace even as traumatic battles between Native Americans and European settlers swept over surrounding territories. Penn’s “Holy Experiment” only came to an end about seventy years later — not, please note, because the nonviolent colony could not defend itself but because later generations lost faith in its nonviolent principles. Those principles, along with some ideas borrowed from the Iroquois Confederacy, created a foundation of governance that we would envy today: freedom from racism and intolerance (Penn had himself been imprisoned in London for his Quaker beliefs), restorative justice (Penn reduced the 212 capital crimes under British law to two and made all prisons “work houses” for rehabilitation), democracy (even though the king had granted him absolute power over the colony), and peace. The “Great Law” that Penn established in 1682 did away with war and standing armies. What a contrast to the “statecraft” (or corporate craft?) working its violence today in Ladakh, as Helena Norberg-Hodge poignantly describes on page 34 of this issue of Tikkun.Though Penn was not aware of it, his was not the world’s first experiment in nonviolent statecraft (nor was it the last, as Matt Meyer skillfully shows in his essay on page 31). Around 260 bce, a great king of Northern India, Ashoka Maurya, succeeded in conquering a neighboring kingdom in a huge battle, but was so overwhelmed when he saw the devastation he had caused that he renounced war on the spot. Adopting Buddhism, which seemed at the time a more practical basis for compassionate rule, he actually expanded his reign to almost the whole subcontinent and his peaceful empire lasted until his death in 232 bce. Like Penn’s Holy Experiment, the Ashokan rejection of war did not occur in a vacuum but was built on aspects of nonviolence in the supporting culture, including nonviolence toward animals in Ashoka’s case, and religious tolerance. A famous edict of his states “He who cannot respect another’s religion has no respect for his own.”I happened to be in Japan when the first noises were made about abolishing Article Nine of the Japanese Constitution, which encodes Japan’s famous renunciation of militarism, and Japanese friends asked me how to prevent this loss. I argued that you can’t just renounce war, you need to adopt an alternative such as civilian-based defense (where citizens are trained to disobey coup attempts or foreign interventions) and/or unarmed civilian peacekeeping — the work being done across borders in dangerous areas by Nonviolent Peaceforce, Peace Brigades International, and about fifteen other organizations. Nonviolent statecraft must also include the kind of measures adopted by Penn and Ashoka to shift the paradigm from a national security state to “common security” or “total security.”Stephen Zunes, in his highly informative essay on page 29, explains that the successes of nonviolence he lists have not come, “in most cases, from a moral or spiritual commitment to nonviolence, but simply because it works.” In other words, we have seen by and large what Gandhi called “the nonviolence of the weak,” and if we think that’s impressive, just imagine what it will look like when we see the nonviolence of the strong — of those who could use force but choose not to because they have an inner sense that we’re all connected. Imagine.

Exploring nurses' personal dignity, global self-esteem and work satisfaction.

This study examines nurses' perceptions of dignity in themselves and their work. Nurses commonly assert concern for human dignity as a component of the patients' experience rather than as necessary in the nurses' own lives or in the lives of others in the workplace. This study is exploratory and generates potential relationships for further study and theory generation in nursing. What is the relationship between the construct nurses' sense of dignity and global self-esteem, work satisfaction, and identified personal traits? This cross-sectional correlation study used a stratified random sample of nurses which was obtained from a US University alumni list from 1965 to 2009 (N = 133). University Institutional Review Board approval was achieved prior to mailing research questionnaire packets to participants. Participation was optional and numerical codes preserved confidentiality. Statistical results indicated a moderately strong association between the nurse's sense of personal dignity and self-esteem (rx = .62, p = .000) with areas of difference clarified and discussed. A positive but moderate association between nurses' personal dignity and nurses' work satisfaction (rx = .37, p = .000) and a similar association between self-esteem and nurses' work satisfaction (rs = .29, p = .001) were found. A statistically significant difference was found (F = 3.49 (df = 4), p = .01) for dignity and categories of spiritual commitment and for nurses' personal dignity when ratings of health status were compared (F = 21.24 (df = 4), p = .000). Personal sense of dignity is discussed in relation to conceptual understandings of dignity (such as professional dignity) and suggests continued research in multiple cultural contexts. The relationships measured show that nurses' sense of dignity has commonalities with self-esteem, workplace satisfaction, spiritual commitment, and health status; the meaning of the findings has ramifications for the welfare of nurses internationally.

T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton”: Past, Present, and Future

Critical interpretations of “Burnt Norton” have varied widely over the nearly 80 years since its first publication. While many early scholars saw it as an abstract meditation on philosophy, the revelation in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s of the relationship of Eliot and Emily Hale changed to some extent the way in which it is read, with more of a personal view, at least in its inspiration. Indeed, I suggest that “Burnt Norton” and specifically the rose garden passage presents the two figures in the poem at a moment fraught with the possibility of rekindling their earlier romance. Our knowledge of the subsequent poems and of the failure of the further development of their relationship greatly colors our reading of the poem, preventing us from seeing the tension and suspense of this experience as it balances between the attraction of human love and that of a demanding spiritual commitment.

Spiritual Experiences, Personal Commitment: Relationship With Work Stress Among Support Staff for Children with Disabilities in Oman

Background: The development of a meaningful career for support staff working with children who have disabilities is part of a process of self-exploration and crystallization of identity. Such process is determined by several individual characteristics including spirituality and personal commitment. This study examined whether both constructs can predict levels of stress in disability support staff in Oman. Additionally this study examined how both constructs are perceived by support staff in relation to the stress related to serving and supporting children with disabilities in disability centers in Oman. Methods: A mixed method approach was used to collect quantitative and qualitative data. For quantitative data, a cross-sectional design involved administration of a short survey that examined spiritual experiences (DSE), personal commitment (PC), and stress in 142 female support staff from community disability centers in Oman. For qualitative data, focus group were conducted to interview a cohort of support staff who took a two-year specialized course in special education at a Public University in Oman. Results: Multiple regression analyses indicated that DSE and PG were modest predictors of support staff stress. Qualitative analysis showed participants’ belief in the importance of spirituality in their lives and its impact on the capability to manage work stress related to serving children with disabilities. The study findings are discussed in the light of related literature focusing on work stress of support staff.