Spiritual Mapping Research Articles

TURKISHNESS AND TURANISM IN THE CREATIVITY OF MUHAMMAD HADI

The article examines the problem of Turkism and Turanism in the poetry of one of the Azerbaijani romantics, Muhammad Hadi. It is shown that his work in the magazine "Füyuzat" and being a representative of the "Füyuzat" literary school increased the opinion of Turks from the beginning of his work. The idea of homeland, nation, and people described in his articles, his attitude to the issue of literary language, and his poems were also related to Turkism. Like A. Huseynzadeh, I. Gaspıralı, H.S. Ayvazov, M. Hadi not only defended the all-Turkish literary language, but even considered it necessary to adopt the Ottoman dialect of this language. The processes that took place around Turkey during the First World War, his presence in the war, strengthened the position of Turkism and Turanism in his work, and the ideology of Turkism, which appeared in the language of his poems and articles at the beginning of his work, deepened and gained new content. In his poems written during the republic, he calls for Turkish unity. In many of his poems written during this period, the poet calls to protect the independence won by the Turkish nation and to protect the motherland from the enemy. Although the idea of Turan and Turanism are not clearly emphasized in M. Hadi's poems, the spiritual map and ideology of the image of Turan are drawn in the poetic understanding of the ideology of Turkism.

Being Natural and Supernatural: Animals between Spiritual Sense-Making and Environmentalism from 19th to 21st Century CentralAsia

The history of pastoralist and agricultural societies in Central Asia is intimately interlinked with the non-human world: non-human animals shared their habitat with humans, domesticated animals were used as meat, fur, milk and fuel suppliers, drought animals, beasts of burden, mounts and wealth. Wild animals were cherished as heralds of upcoming seasonal weather change, hunted for meat, fur, prestige and the alleged medical-magical faculties of their body parts or feared for their destructive potential. The close cohabitation of humans and non-humans is reflected in a complex cosmological order. Without denying the fundamental religious importance of canonical texts in an Islamicate context, vernacular texts that belong to the so-called “small genres” were more important sources of information for large parts of Central Asian populations, and shaped the spiritual map for the majority of Central Asians and guided them in making sense of their natural and supernatural environment. This article examines Central Asian conceptualisation of animals as shaped by these texts as a departure to the mundane and spiritual relationship between human and non-human animals in Muslim Central Asia and explores how these different conceptual registers reverberate in contemporary, global debates on animal rights, sustainability and environmental protection.

Protestant evangelical pilgrimages: hagiography, supernatural influence, and spiritual mapping

ABSTRACT Christian pilgrimage sites can be separated into three broad categories: Biblical sites (e.g. Jerusalem, Ephesus, Patmos, and other locations where significant events happen in the Biblical narratives); older Catholic and Anglican sites whose importance has been established over a long history of many centuries (e.g. the Vatican, Lourdes, Canterbury); and lastly, newer sites associated with more recently established Protestant denominations and groups such as Methodism, Lutheranism, Pentecostalism, and others. With a shorter history and lacking either the Biblical significance or the political or national dimension of Catholicism and Anglicanism, other Protestant sites can be considered “popular” or “excentric” sites. These construct their significance through strategies relying on evangelical and Pentecostal discourses and meanings, particularly the construction of great spiritual figures who wield supernatural and invisible influence over history and society. These constructions propose a Spiritual Mapping that is superimposed onto historical and political events, creating an alternative significance for touristic purposes. This paper examines two sites for Protestant evangelical pilgrimages, centered on the figures of John Wesley and Rees Howells, that demonstrate this touristic construction of protestant hagiography, supernatural influence, and Spiritual Mapping.

Paul’s Attitude at Athens (Acts 17:16–34)

Abstract Commentators have interpreted Acts 17:16–34 in various ways. George Otis’s choice to associate Paul’s attitude and activity at Athens with spiritual mapping is an invitation to have another look at that text. Paul, being a human like anyone else, had background influences informing his perception of the images he saw at Athens. Whether this background influence is sufficient to interpret Paul’s response as an expression of cultural naiveté on the one hand or as spiritual mapping on the other depends on the textual data and background information available to us from his Jewish background and from evidence about the culture and thought of the first-century Greco-Roman world in which Paul lived. This article concludes that Paul was not expressing cultural naiveté at Athens, though it would be a stretch also to conclude that his action was spiritual mapping in the manner in which the concept is understood today even when lessons can be drawn from it for today’s practice.

«Teatro de lástimas»: retórica y espacio en el «Llanto sagrado de la América Meridional» de Francisco Romero

This article aims to analyze the text entitled Llanto sagrado de la America Meridional written by the Augustinian friar Francisco Romero. The work presents a kind of spiritual mapping of american land. Therefore, the text divides the territory of the continent according to their proximity or remoteness from the true faith . Our main objective will be to examine the rhetorical mechanisms that lie behind this description of the Indian space.

A Sinful Landscape: Moral and Sexual Geographies in Cape Town, South Africa

'Spiritual mapping' is a transnational Pentecostal 'spiritual warfare' practice that aims to identify and fight 'territorial spirits', or demons that possess specific places. It was unique in Cape Town, South Africa, at the beginning of democracy, because it was both racialized and sexualized. This article examines how Pentecostals in Cape Town employed spiritual mapping techniques to identify and police groups they understood as morally and spiritually 'dangerous': black and 'coloured' communities and gays and lesbians. I argue that South African spiritual mapping was a response to the material and physical insecurities of democracy, particularly the declining economy, failed promises of the African National Congress, and some of the highest rates of crime in the world.

Rappaport, Revisited

In Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, Roy Rappaport misses an opportunity to more tightly theorize the synergistic relationship between concepts of the divine, the psyches of ritual participants, and the adaptive dynamics of religious sociality. This paper proposes such a theory by drawing on implicit features of Rappaport’s account, fulfilling his goal of a “cybernetics of the holy.” I argue that concepts of the divine, when made authoritative for participants through ritual, have three important effects: they invite intense and meaningful reconstructions of personal identity according to paradigmatic examples; they act as a form of encoded social memory by organizing human relationship according to a “spiritual map”; and they provide the cognitive framework that make religious community organization robust, adaptive, and reproductive. We can characterize divine concepts as “specified absences” that ground each of these effects and link them together in a mutually-reinforcing set.

“The light of simple veritie”: Mapping out Spenser’s Cosmography in “The Ruines of Time”

This essay argues that Edmund Spenser’s “The Ruines of Time” is, alongside its role as elegy and complaint, a cosmographic work that engages in what I call “spiritual mapping”—a cartographic process that combines anti-worldly discourse with a trans-historical representation of space. By considering Spenser’s poem alongside William Camden’s Britannia , this essay highlights the textual act of mapping present in both works in an attempt to reveal the influence of an international community of mapmakers, including the Familists, who provided a model for cosmographic work that highlighted spiritual and irenic interests alongside the technical practice of representing space.

Humanitarian Adhocracy, Transnational New Apostolic Missions, and Evangelical Anti-Dependency in a Haitian Refugee Camp

This article addresses religious responses to disaster by examining how one network of conservative evangelical Christians reacted to the Haiti earthquake and the humanitarian relief that followed. The charismatic Christian New Apostolic Reformation (or Spiritual Mapping movement) is a transnational network that created the conditions for post-earthquake, internally displaced Haitians to arrive at two positions that might seem contradictory. On one hand, Pentecostal Haitian refugees used the movement’s conservative, right-wing theology to develop a punitive theodicy of the quake as God’s punishment of a sinful nation. On the other hand, rather than resign themselves to victimhood and passivity, their strict moralism allowed these evangelical refugees to formulate an uncompromising critique of the Haitian government, the United Nations peacekeeping mission, and foreign humanitarian relief. They rejected material humanitarian aid when possible and developed a stance of Christian self-sufficiency, anti-foreign-aid, and anti-dependency. They accepted visits only from American missionaries with “spiritual,” and not material, missions, and they launched their own missions to parts of Haiti unaffected by the quake.

From Slave Revolt to a Blood Pact with Satan: The Evangelical Rewriting of Haitian History

Enslaved Africans and Creoles in the French colony of Saint-Domingue are said to have gathered at a nighttime meeting at a place called Bois Caïman in what was both political rally and religious ceremony, weeks before the Haitian Revolution in 1791. The slave ceremony is known in Haitian history as a religio-political event and used frequently as a source of inspiration by nationalists, but in the 1990s, neo-evangelicals rewrote the story of the famous ceremony as a “blood pact with Satan.” This essay traces the social links and biblical logics that gave rise first to the historical record, and then to the neo-evangelical rewriting of this iconic moment. It argues that the confluence of the bicentennial of the Haitian Revolution with the political contest around President Aristide’s policies, the growth of the neo-evangelical Spiritual Mapping movement, and of the Internet, produced a new form of mythmaking, in which neo-evangelicals re-signified key symbols of the event—an oath to a divine force, blood sacrifice, a tree, and group unity—from the mythical grammar of Haitian nationalism to that of neo-evangelical Christianity. In the many ironies of this clash between the political afterlife of a slave uprising with the political afterlife of biblical scripture, Haiti becomes a nation held in captivity, and Satan becomes the colonial power who must be overthrown. Un groupe d’esclaves africains et créoles se seraient réunis une nuit à Bois Caïman, dans la colonie française de Saint-Domingue. L’évènement qui eut lieu quelques semaines avant la révolution haïtienne de 1791 fut décrit à la fois comme un rassemblement politique et une cérémonie religieuse. Cette cérémonie organisée par des esclaves constitue un évènement politico-religieux important dans l’histoire haïtienne, une source d’inspiration fréquente pour les nationalistes. Dans les années 1990, cependant, un groupe néo évangélique réécrivit l’histoire de cette fameuse cérémonie qualifiée de “pacte sanguinaire avec Satan.” L’essai retrace donc les liens sociaux et les logiques bibliques qui ont conduit les néo évangéliques à réécrire ce moment iconique. L’essai soutient que la confluence des révoltes en réaction à la politique du Président Aristide lors du bicentenaire de la révolution haïtienne ainsi que la montée du mouvement néo évangélique, Cartographie Spirituelle, et celle de l’Internet participèrent à créer de nouveaux mythes: les néo évangéliques donnèrent un sens nouveau aux symboles clés de l’évènement —un serment à une force divine, un sacrifice sanglant, un arbre et l’union du groupe— de la grammaire mythique du nationalisme haïtien à celle de la chrétienté néo évangélique. A travers les nombreuses ironies de la confrontation entre l’héritage politique d’un soulèvement d’esclaves et l’héritage politique des Saintes Ecritures, Haïti devient une nation tenue en captivité, et Satan, le pouvoir colonial qu’il faut renverser.

Exorcising the Mandala: Kālacakra and the Neo-Pentecostal Response

Since the late 1990s, the Dalai Lama's Kalachakra for World Peace initiation has emerged as central site where Tibetan Buddhism and its relationship to the West have been imagined and acted upon by movement within evangelical Christianity called Spiritual Mapping. In Mapping understanding, the Kālacakra is vehicle by which the current Dalai Lama prepares for the end times by seeking to transform America into a universal Buddhocracy called the Kingdom of Shambhala. Tibetan Buddhism is, in short, missionary competitor for global religious domination. Here, the Tibetan-evangelical encounter is presented as the by-product of the simultaneous globalizations of Tibetan Buddhism and Evangelicalism with the human rights discourse in late twentieth century America. The exorcism of the mandala is read as both by-product and critique of globalization, and to engender thoughtful re-evaluation of long-standing Buddhist Studies analytics.

Spiritual Mapping in the United States and Argentina, 1989‐2005: A Geography of Fear – By René Holvast

Spiritual Mapping in the United States and Argentina, 1989‐2005: A Geography of Fear – By René Holvast

René Holvast, Spiritual Mapping in the United States and Argentina, 1989–2005: A Geography of Fear (Leiden: Brill, 2009). xiv + 367 pp. $133.00.

René Holvast, Spiritual Mapping in the United States and Argentina, 1989–2005: A Geography of Fear (Leiden: Brill, 2009). xiv + 367 pp. $133.00.

A Reflection: Religion and Spirituality From Variable to Application

A brief reflection is provided on three very different articles by Thibault, Bushfield, and Monod et al. which focus on moving from variable to application. The basic paradox that emerges in attempting to intervene with elders in terms of dedicated suffering and spiritual mapping is revealed. In an evidence-based practice environment that privileges measurement and pushes toward universalism, it is critically important to recognize the uniqueness of the individual. Balancing the objective with the subjective requires the interventionist/researcher to continually recognize paradox.

Spiritual Assessment in Counseling: Methods and Practice

Given the widely expanding professional and empirical support for integrating spirituality into counseling, the authors present a practical discussion for raising counselors' general awareness and skill in the critical area of spiritual assessment. A discussion of rationale, measurement, and clinical practice is provided along with case examples. D. R. Hodge's (2001) spiritual life map is highlighted as an assessment tool. The authors also discuss the influence of counselor–client values and beliefs in therapy and the need to incorporate developmental and cultural influences in spiritual assessment.

The Sacred Edge

In the Australian context, the desert or bush landscape has provided the primary sense of place for spiritual and ecotheological reflection. But what is it about Australians and the sea? This exploration makes the case that a spiritual sense of place as seascape can inform the constructive work of Australian eco-eschatology. By shifting perspectives from desert fathers to ocean mothers, an alternative spiritual map can be imagined that re-names the geographical margins as a sacred edge. Through the ocean-wisdom of life's risk, fluidity and dynamic openness, the article explores the critical construction of an eco-eschatology of dis/closive possibility. No one has marked the sea. The shore is an ancient world, for as long as there has been an earth and sea there has been this place of the meeting of land and water. Yet it is a world that keeps alive the sense of continuing creation and of the relentless drive of life. Beach for all!

History of the Division of Animal Clinical Chemistry: 1974–1983

Someone once said that there is dignity in nostalgia. In the prose that follows, I have attempted to gather up and pin down in a net of words the landscape of my time in the AACC. Of course, this story reflects my own interests and prejudices. It has all of the limitations imposed on imagination by culture and experience, but after all, I hope that it conveys to the reader the arc of the early days in the Division of Animal Clinical Chemistry (DACC). It finally is a spiritual map of this writer’s own journey in the AACC and the Committee, and as a kind of autobiography, it contains the entire climate and topography of my activities with the Committee, with all of the vaunting ambitions, oversized ego, technical curiosity, organizational energy, little-boy insecurities, the harder edge of success, and the desire for immortality that have sustained me in so many of my pursuits in life. This reminiscence, too, represents a view of the AACC in the days when it was much smaller than it is today. It is an instrument of perception of the possibilities that young men and women can achieve when they work together for a common cause, and it derives its color, intimate contour, and weight of authenticity from the experiences that I have personally gathered in my early sojourn in the incubus of the AACC. Occasionally, a tone of self-aggrandizement may creep in, but I feel that this is the result of what once was a sinewy lust for advancing the cause of the DACC, with the exultant resourcefulness I found in its members, that now has become nearer to a longing for their friendship and a remembrance of their high spirits. Alas, it seems that as time goes on my thoughts are becoming more …

Couples and Spirituality

SUMMARY his article examines, from the developmental perspective of midlife, the potential interconnection between the psychological construct of a healthy interpersonal relationship and spiritual teachings. To examine this interconnection, several universal themes of midlife are examined; Exile: the slumber of devotion; Yearning: the renewal of the search; and Return: transformation and reconciliation. Using Judaism as a metaphor, the article presents a spiritual map by which to guide the journey of relationship, and a framework within which to practice yearning, tolerance, forgiveness, healing, and return. The beneficial effects of a spiritual perspective on relationship is discussed, both in terms of individual and global healing. Finally, a cautionary note, warning against the limitations and pitfalls of integrating a spiritual perspective in therapy, is included.