Spiritual Individuals Research Articles

Creativity & Spirituality: Tools for Organizational Development

Organizations today are aware that nurturing a good work culture leads to value addition and profit maximization. Workplace spirituality is an important tool in creating an energizing work culture. The present paper outlines the concept of spirituality at workplace and how it helps to foster creativity which leads to organizational development. It also highlights a few examples from ancient Indian mythology to emphasize that creativity and spirituality are the tools for personal as well as organizational growth. Creativity is a necessary part of the business cycle. With technological advancements, market shifts, and demographic changes organizations have to rethink products and services. Thus creativity is the key to successfully navigate through these changes by maintaining spirituality. For this employees and employers should have immense faith in one-another and they should co-ordinate for development of each other. A spiritual workplace provides resources to help people uncover their creative potential and to practice creativity within the organization. Spiritual organization respects and values individuals’ experiences and includes individuals who bring appropriate skill sets to a particular job. The “vertical” and “horizontal” component in spirituality in the workplace leads to employee nourishment and satisfaction. It means individuals and organizations attempting to live their values more fully in the work they do. Both these components should be well integrated to make any organization sound, sustainable, and effective. Creative organizations include both components to drive spiritual hunger and make a difference. This paper is an effort to explore different perspectives of spirituality to enhance creativity and thus achieve organization objectives. The paper is based upon secondary source of information and provides a new look towards creativity and spirituality as we conclude that they are the tools of organizational development.

Trees in Vodou

Trees are an important dwelling place for the spirits of the Vodou pantheon. I describe arboreal rituals dedicated to the veneration of tree-residing spirits, taboos against cutting sacred trees, con?icting taboos against planting certain trees, and a ceremony for removing a spirit from one tree and placing it in another. After discussing common folk beliefs about particular tree species, and examining associations between these species and individual spirits, I suggest that a rapid decrease of trees in Haiti mandated the ceremony for removing a spirit from a tree and placing it somewhere else. Consequently, as tree diversity dwindled into the handful of primary species utilized in rural Haiti today, a large pantheon of spirits had to be funneled into an increasingly limited number of trees. Accordingly, Vodou practitioners had to facilitate spirit ?exibility with regard to which trees they inhabit.

Two mechanisms of biased responding account for the association between religiousness and misrepresentation in Big Five self-reports

Religious individuals in a large community sample were found to exaggerate their level of Agreeableness whereas spiritual individuals exaggerated their degree of Openness. The association between religiousness and overclaiming Agreeableness was mediated not only by socially desirable responding (SDR) but also by personal views of the desirability of Agreeableness: religious individuals saw particular value in Agreeableness, and overclaimed it accordingly. The overclaiming of Openness by spiritual individuals could not be accounted for by SDR, but was partially mediated by spiritual individuals’ views of Openness as a particularly desirable trait. Independent ability to explain the association between misrepresentation in self report and both religiousness and spirituality were thus indicated by both SDR and by an approach which expects an individual’s overclaiming behavior to match their personal values.

Breaking down biocentrism: two distinct forms of moral concern for nature.

Breaking down biocentrism: two distinct forms of moral concern for nature.

The Religious Roots of the First Amendment. By Nicholas P. Miller. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. xviii + 250 pp. $35.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)The Religious Roots of the First Amendment . By Nicholas P. Miller . New York : Oxford University Press , 2012. xviii + 250 pp. $35.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesAnyone who remembers Rodney Dangerfield also remembers his on-stage persona's elusive quest for respect. Anyone having even casual familiarity with the modern secular academy knows that for scholars of American religion, especially those who are believers themselves, Dangerfield's frustrations can seem uncomfortably familiar. George Marsden made the case forcefully in the late 1990s (The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship [New York: Oxford University Press, 1998]). But unlike the comedian's character, who never quite grasped the link between wanting respect and earning it, religious historians over the last two decades have generated a block of scholarly capital that cannot be ignored. A variety of interpretive purposes has guided the work of such notables as Marsden, Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and Grant Wacker, but their collective demand that religious ideas be taken seriously is impressively augmented by Nicholas P. Miller's study of Protestantism's role in shaping the First Amendment.While more than a generation ago historians Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood waged a spectacularly successful campaign to place ideas at the center of our understanding of America's Revolutionary and Constitutional past, Miller argues that religious ideas were largely orphaned in the process. Taking as his focus the principles that shaped the founding generation's understanding of First-Amendment freedoms, Miller contends that longstanding scholarly battles to attribute the framers' inspiration to either classical liberalism or republicanism ignores their most important intellectual and cultural resource: the influence if dissenting Protestantism on the colonial and Revolutionary intelligentsia and, most significantly, on the broader American population.Especially important to Miller is upending the well-worn argument that religious leaders became champions of freedom only as secular reasoning subsumed their religious principles or as increasing cultural diversity compelled them toward pragmatic toleration. Such an assumed adversarial relationship between religion and reason, Miller contends, obscures what was in fact a cooperative venture in which historic Protestant principles actually led the charge. In other words, Miller offers a First Amendment derived substantially from religious principles, not in spite of them.His argument rests on historic Protestant commitments to the right of private judgment in matters of faith. He locates the wellspring of this principle in the early work of Martin Luther, citing the theologian's Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520) as being far more influential than his later flares against seditious heresies following the 1524 Peasants' Revolt. Most significantly, Miller sidelines Luther's magisterial Protestant heirs and contends that dissenting Protestant sects made this spiritual individualism politically viable. Quakers and Baptists--not Puritans, Presbyterians or Anglicans--became the primary transatlantic carriers of this tradition to America with Roger Williams, William Penn, and John Locke equipping dissenter principles for much broader cultural and political duty.Dissenters' emphasis on the right of private judgment as the personal, spiritual route to biblical truth gave rise to liberty of conscience as its secular expression, one that ultimately became serviceable in more conservative Protestant enclaves, as well as among the central players in the nation's Constitutional founding, chiefly James Madison. …

The Role of Religion and Spirituality in Coping with Type 2 Diabetes: A Qualitative Study among Black Men

Religion and spirituality are instrumental to coping with health; however, there is limited literature on the use of religion and spirituality among Black men with type 2 diabetes. The purpose of this study is to explore how Black men use religion or spirituality to cope with diabetes management. We conducted in-depth interviews with 30 Black men recruited from a diabetes clinic in Atlanta, Georgia as part of a larger study. This article reports on data from 12 of the 30 Black men who reported the use of religion and spirituality as a coping strategy for diabetes management. The following coping strategies were reported: prayer and belief in God, keeping me alive, turning things over to God, changing my unhealthy behaviors, supplying my needs, reading the Bible, and religious or spiritual individuals helping me. Healthcare professionals and researchers involved in diabetes management among Black men should consider these findings in their efforts.

Is God's call more than audible? A preliminary exploration using a two‐dimensional model of theistic/spiritual beliefs and experiences

Among spiritual individuals, auditory hallucinations (AHs) are often accompanied by positive affectivity (PA) suggesting that such coincidental affective valence might gainfully demark spiritual from comparable non‐spiritual aberrant perceptions. Yet nearly all of the relevant past religiosity/spirituality research has been limited to AHs and/or known groups (Evangelicals, epilepsy patients, etc.). Using a community sample (N = 485), this article explores whether unusual perceptual experiences (UEs) more generally (not simply AHs) together with PA predict participants' self‐reported spirituality. Specifically, a dual marker hypothesis developed from affect attribution theory—in which UE, PA, and their interaction predict spirituality in a non‐additive positive fashion—is proposed and confirmed (even after controlling for socio‐demographics). The estimators reveal that spirituality is disproportionately elevated for high scorers on both predictors. These results are consistent with previous known‐group studies and support recent speculation that the affective–cognitive interpretation of perceptual aberrations might be a key feature of spirituality and one that potentially demarks it from psychosis. Moreover, the correlation between spirituality and PA varies depending upon one's UE level; a result not anticipated by the incumbent positive psychological theory of spirituality.

Fortunio Liceti on Mind, Light, and Immaterial Extension

Almost half a century before Henry More, the Padua-based natural philosopher Fortunio Liceti (1577–1657) formulated a distinction between material extension and immaterial extension. While More's version of the distinction is seen as one of the most characteristic features of his metaphysics—underlying both his theory of individual spirits and of absolute divine space—Liceti's metaphysics of immaterial extension has not received much attention by commentators. Liceti ascribes immaterial extension to light and the human mind and, like More, he uses the analogy between light and mind to explicate the structural differences between material and immaterial extension. In this article, I explore how Liceti—following some aspects of Albert the Great's eclectic Aristotelianism—tries to combine broadly Aristotelian accounts of light and mind with the Platonic concept of emanative causation. I argue that, in Liceti, the notion of existential independence from matter lies at the heart of his conception of extended, ...

The social significance of spirituality: New perspectives on the compassion–altruism relationship.

In the current research we tested a comprehensive model of spirituality, religiosity, compassion, and altruism, investigating the independent effects of spirituality and religiosity on compassion and altruism. We hypothesized that, even though spirituality and religiosity are closely related, spirituality and religiosity would have different and unique associations with compassion and altruism. In Study 1 and 2 we documented that more spiritual individuals experience and show greater compassion. The link between religiosity and compassion was no longer significant after controlling for the impact of spirituality. Compassion has the capacity to motivate people to transcend selfish motives and act altruistically toward strangers. Therefore, we reasoned that spirituality (but not religiosity) would predict altruistic behavior and that compassion would help explain this link. Indeed, in Studies 3, 4, and 5 we found that more spiritual individuals behaved more altruistically in economic choice and decision-making tasks, and that the tendency of spiritual individuals to feel greater compassion mediated the spirituality-to-altruism relationship. In contrast, more religious participants did not consistently feel more compassion nor behave more altruistically. Moreover, in Studies 3 and 4 we found that the broader traits of Agreeableness, Openness, and Extraversion did not help explain why more spiritual individuals behaved more altruistically. Our findings argue that spirituality—above and beyond religiosity—is uniquely associated with greater compassion and enhanced altruism toward strangers.

Gutai Chain: The Collective Spirit of Individualism

This article is a theoretical investigation of the Gutai's collective enterprise, examining the creative process of Gutai Art Exhibitions from 1955 to 1962 and looking in particular at the Outdoor Exhibitions and Gutai Art on Stage. I will argue that the group's leader, Yoshihara Jiro, engendered a collective spirit of individualism that at once embraced utopian ideals of collectivism and was suspicious of any enterprise that encouraged a dissolution of self. Marked by this ambivalence, Yoshihara adapted the collective experience to create a community in which creativity became a dialogical enterprise based upon a foundation of subjective autonomy: subjective autonomy, that is, as an ethical concept propounded by postwar authors such as Sakaguchi Ango, who believed that authenticity and individualism were the only defenses against the mass psychology that enabled the militarism of the Second World War. Despite this emphasis on the individual, I argue that the collective enterprise of the Gutai altered the creative process irrevocably, and that it is impossible to consider the work of any artist separate from the group. In his article “Gutai kusari” (“Gutai Chain”) on the tension between the individual and the collective, the artist Ukita Yôzô wrote, “The works at the Gutai Art Exhibition evolve from a state of mind and concentration exactly like that when aiming at a moving target.” It is precisely this experience of creation in dialogue with a community, aiming at a moving target that cannot be dismissed.

Unusual but sound minds: Mental health indicators in spiritual individuals

Previous research has linked certain types of modern spirituality, including New Age and Pagan, with either benign schizotypy or insecure attachment. While the first view emphasizes a positive aspect of spiritual believers' mental health (benign schizotypy), the second view emphasizes a negative aspect, namely the unhealthy emotional compensation associated with an insecure attachment style. This study addresses these two conflicting views by comparing a sample of modern spiritual individuals (N = 114) with a contrast group of traditional religious believers (N = 86). Measures of schizotypy and attachment style were combined with mental health scales of anxiety and depression. We further assessed death anxiety to determine whether modern spiritual beliefs fulfilled a similar function as traditional religious beliefs in the reduction of existential threat. Our results support a psychological contiguity between traditional and modern spiritual believers and reinforce the need to de-stigmatize spiritual ideas and experiences. Using hierarchical regression, we showed that unusual experiences and ideas are the major predictor of engagement in modern spiritual practices. Anxiety, depression variables, and insecure attachment were not significant predictors of spirituality or correlated with them; on the other hand, the results show that spiritual believers report high social support satisfaction and this variable predicts involvement in modern spirituality. Further, spiritual practices were negatively correlated with and negatively predicted by death anxiety scores. Overall, the results strengthen the association between modern spirituality, good mental health, and general well-being.

The Duchess of Malfi: Class Conflicts and the Spirit of Individualism

The Duchess of Malfi: Class Conflicts and the Spirit of Individualism

Struggles on the frontier of professional control: Leading cases from Canada

Professions and unions have often been positioned as opposing alternatives or logics of action in theories of labour. Professions embrace a spirit of individualism and mystique, privileged by a social status, while unions are collectivist and seek respect and to usurp power from a dominant class. How do professionals successfully shift their position from dominance to subordination when they engage in collective bargaining? This article proposes that collective representation of professions is not a substitution of one form of power for another, but rather is the expression of a new arena of power for labour playing itself out at the forefront of work regulation in Canada. Three cases of labour disputes of professionalized workers highlight the struggle over the exercise of discretion and illustrate that collective bargaining is an occupational closure strategy that alters the boundaries of a profession in an attempt to maintain professional control.

Spiritual Individualism or Engaged Spirituality? Social Implications of Holistic Spirituality among Mind-Body-Spirit Practitioners

Spiritual Individualism or Engaged Spirituality? Social Implications of Holistic Spirituality among Mind-Body-Spirit Practitioners

ROMANTISISME INGGRIS DAN AMERIKA: PERBANDINGAN FRANKENSTEIN DAN SCARLET LETTER

Works of literature during Romantic period are totally unrelated to love, romance or attraction between men and women as widely understood. Rather they exert stress upon sense and feeling where individual freedom is highly esteemed. While Frankenstein (1818) reveals that power of mind and reasoning skill without feeling and conscience can lead to murder and death, Scarlett Letter (1850) shows that self-reliance and a strong spirit of individualism are part and parcel of one's belief. Key Words: romantisisme, simbolisme, kebebasan individu, Puritan,

The politics of historiography: Writing an architectural canon into postwar American national identity

This article questions the official recognition of émigré architect Mies van der Rohe as the canonic figure shaping the International Style as the quintessential American mode of architectural expression. The article examines how historians, critics and curators placed the work of Mies in the American historiography of the modern movement by interpreting his work in light of modernist paradigms that prevailed in the United States from the early 1930s to the years following the Second World War. It is argued that Mies's work provided for scholars of the emerging First World a fertile ground to figure the universal transnational merits of modern architecture as a particular expression of the American nation, spirit and cherished values of freedom, individualism and pragmatic, puritan rigor. Dwelling on concepts such as ‘liberal democracy’, ‘American Exeptionalism’ and ‘the patrimony of a modernist past’, the article examines how the Miesian canon and the image it offered for postwar ‘America’ was entangled in intertwined architectural and national histories.

Spirituality and religiosity in combating pain

The International Association for the Study of Pain defines pain as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience, peculiar,specific and non transferable associated with actual or potential tissue damage. Pain, especially when chronic, affects all areas of life ofindividuals, being thus physical, psychic, and social. Amongst the forms for combating pain, religiosity and spirituality has proved to beimportant for sick people, and are related to the reduction of stress pain involves. The role and the mechanisms by which religiosity andspirituality act in combating chronic pain were the object of a literature survey in Medline database. Religiosity is characterized as thefirst or the second strategy used against pain. Religious and spiritual individuals present a reduction of pain complaints, of the concentrationof ACTH (adrenocorticotropic hormone) and serous cortisol, a reduction of systolic arterial pressure, and cardiac and respiratoryfrequency. Religious activities produce an increase of the activation of prefrontal cortex, causing a higher efficiency and interactivity ofhypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal system. The increase of pain mediators involved also occurs: GABA, serotonin and dopamine. Spiritualindividuals face pain better, especially chronic pain, due to physiological and neural alterations coming from their beliefs.

Lessons from breast cancer survivors: The role of recreation therapy in facilitating spirituality and Weil‐being

Spirituality is not consistently integrated into health care even though it is thought to play a vital role in health and recovery from illness. Recreation therapy (RT) can capitalize on the free and expressive nature of leisure‐based interventions to facilitate spiritual growth and help individuals enhance their overall well‐being. This qualitative study explored the impact that an integrated RT and exercise program had on the spirituality of six women recovering from breast cancer. A content analysis of the RT documentation recorded during the six‐month program was compared to five attributes commonly used to conceptualize the term spirituality: meaning, value, transcendence, connecting, and becoming (Martsolf & Mickley, 1998). The results provided preliminary evidence that the RT interventions provided during this breast cancer program were related to each of these five attributes of spirituality for the majority of participants. These findings along with implications for practitioners and future research are provided.

Sound Studies: Framing Noise

'a shower of meteors of sound'1In a 1937 lecture, John Cage issued his now commonplace statement: 'Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating' (1961: 3). Just four years earlier, Cage was studying with Henry Cowell at The New School, where German composer Hanns Eisler was also teaching. In 1928 Eisler had written: 'When you are composing and you open the window, remember that the noise of the street is not mere noise, but is made by man' (1978: 30). In a later interview Cage returned to the theme:I had the lights turned out and the windows open. I advised everybody to put on their overcoats and listen for half an hour to the sounds that came in through the window, and then to add to them - in the spirit of the sounds that are already there, rather than in their individual spirits. That is actually how I compose. I try to act in accord with the absence of my music.(1982: 176)The purpose of this exercise is not to locate the origin of a now wellcirculated idea; it is simply to hear the words of two composers describing what it means to study music within an 'entire field of sound', outside conventional distinctions between music and non-music, noise and sonority. It is not surprising that sound studies would begin in elemental studies of its rational language: music. Yet what might be surprising is that this circulation of ideas took place not in a conservatory, but at The New School, an institution founded by dissident, radical scholars, refugees from the increasingly authoritarian culture of Columbia University. At around the same time, young radical American composers called for the rejection of European musical idealism and, in the voice of Aaron Copland, instead embraced a modern music that would be 'principally the expression in terms of enriched musical language of a new spirit of objectivity, attuned to our times' (Copland 1941: 18). The New School listened.In 1927, Copland was appointed to the faculty and organised the famous Copland-Sessions series of lectures and concerts. The series brought recognition to a new American music - to Copland and Roger Sessions, and to other composers, including Roy Harris, Virgil Thompson, and Walter Piston. Copland's appointment to the faculty was followed by those of musicologist Charles Seeger and composers Henry Cowell, Hanns Eisler, and Ernst Toch. Copland's jazz influences, Eisler's worker's songs and twelve-tone music and Cowell's non-Western musical influences privileged innovation and multi-disciplinarity that displaced European musical idealism. This experimental approach not only realised in praxis the radical ideals of The New School's founders, but it also modeled the interdisciplinarity that would influence curricular planning. This was not a 'music school'. It was a school where musical performance and listening collaborated with dance, film, visual art and architecture.In 1928, when The New School's townhouse headquarters on West 23rd Street in Manhattan were slated for demolition, its president Alvin Johnson sought to create a new structure that captured the institution's progressive approach to education. He commissioned modernist architect and theatrical set designer Joseph Urban to design The New School's new home at 66 West 12th Street. On the ground floor of that building, the first International Style structure in New York, was the eggshaped Tishman Auditorium - an acoustical achievement in its own right, but also a rehearsal for Urban's Radio City Music Hall. The rounded ceiling presented acoustical challenges, which designers overcame by hanging concentric plaster rings from the ceiling, a strategy later employed at Radio City (Landmarks Preservation Commission: 1997). While Tishman marked a milestone in modern acoustics, The New School's scholars were engaging in groundbreaking research on modern sounds and sound technologies. The New School Film Music Project, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and conducted by Eisler and Theodor Adorno, sharply criticised the synthesis of music and image in Hollywood film. …

Byeon Yeongman: Colonial Korea's Alternative Modernity

The article deals with Byeon Yeongman (1889-1954), a man who had the reputation of being one of the sharpest critics of Western modernity in early modern Korea and one of the brightest literati, well-versed both in traditional Sino-Korean and Western learning, during the colonial period. However, after his death he was mostly ignored by South Korean scholarship, partly because he consciously positioned himself outside of the main political and cultural fractions of the day and was consequently alienated from them. He was an odd bird for more mainstream “cultural nationalists” on the right who condemned him for “writing for simple amusement,” and he was completely ignored by both Communists and anarchists on the left, his visible sympathy towards more egalitarian ways of distributing wealth notwithstanding. However, he managed to develop a consistent logic of criticism against the modern life from a position which may be characterized as a sort of “spiritual individualism” and which drew both on Nietzsche’s ideas and on age-old “moral individualism” of the Confucian tradition.