Spiritual Milieu Research Articles

הסתגלות של הרוחניות היהודיות הצפון-אמריקנית בישראל

This paper focuses on the cultural translation and adaptation of North American Jewish spirituality (JS) in Israel. JS emerged in North America in the late sixties and early seventies and absorbed the universalistic, open and inclusive approach typical of the counterculture and of the subsequent New Age forms of spirituality. When JS entered the Jewish Israeli scene in the late nineties it was adapted by two different socio-religious groups: secular New Age Israelis and the National-Religious public. As adopted by secular Jews who belong to the New Age spiritual milieu it retains (most) of the universal values that characterize the North American JS. At the same time, it reconstructs Jewish rituals in accordance with Israeli New Age aesthetics. When it is absorbed by Religious-Zionist Jews, its Jewish particularistic affinities are accentuated and the universal-cosmopolitan aspects are blurred, or even, in cases like that of R. Yitzchak Ginsburg, obliterated, creating a nationalistic version of JS.

‘A chain of deep-laid and premeditated villainy’

The flurry of recent interest in what scholars have dubbed ‘conspirituality’ has focused attention on the intersection between conspiracy theories and the overlapping subcultures of New Age, alternative, and esoteric spirituality. These important insights have also highlighted the extensive histories of cultures of conspiracy which exist within larger religious traditions and the related question of why adherents of specific varieties of religion appear to be highly susceptible to strains of conspiracist thinking. To further illustrate the ubiquity of conspiracy theory in contemporary spirituality, this article offers a historical overview of the intricate culture of conspiracy which has developed in the Roman Catholic Church since at least the French Revolution by outlining its five major permutations: anti-Masonry, antisemitism, anti-communism, anti-Satanism and anti-modernism. This article demonstrates the centrality of conspiracy theories in how a sizeable portion of Roman Catholics have responded to what they perceive as the threatening aspects of modernity as well as the renewed popularity of conspiracy theories within a Roman Catholic spiritual milieu during Pope Francis’s papacy.

Waiting for the Ecological Apocalypse

In French-speaking Europe a fast-growing and increasingly visible network of ‘collapsologists’ predicts the end of our thermo-industrial civilization. Though their catastrophic expectations follow diverse scenarios in terms of temporality and harshness, they share the common feature of not anticipating the end of the world, but the end of a world opening up to a new era. Moreover, they attach great significance to inner transformation and practices of reconnection to oneself, living beings, and the whole Earth. Standing at the crossroads of ecology and alternative spiritualities, I argue that collapsologie can be interpreted as an apocalyptic resurgence, a re-apocalyptization, of the spiritual milieu, a transformation that mirrors a previous shift within the New Age from catastrophic to a progressive millennialism.

Viaje mágico y espiritual a una tierra de manzanos

From the current context of contemporary spiritualities, we wanted to approach an emerging form of tourism known as spiritual or mystical. In order to do this we have focused on the most important European destination in spiritual milieu: Glastonbury. Based on a qualitative methodology, field observa‑ tions and in‑depth interviews, we got closer to both those who organize these kinds of trips and those who are interested in participating on them. The work presented here is based on a specific case: Sandra and Pablo; a couple of Spaniards who, for several years, have accompanied groups of spiritual seekers on their pilgrimage to this magical and sacred place, emphasizing that they are people from outside the tourism sector.

Inscription No. 494 from the Temple of Toutuo as Prototype of the Inscription on the “Nestorian Monument” from Xi’an, 781 (Preliminary Notes)

The article seeks to further research the method of adaptation used by ‘imported’ schools of thought to adjust to Chinese ethical, political, philosophical and religious teachings and practices. The author does so by comparing two epigraphic monuments: A lost inscription by the secular Buddhist enthusiast Wang Jin (5th century) from the Chinese Buddhist temple Toutuo (Dhuta) and the well-known inscription on the so-called “Nestorian monument” from Xi’an (Chang’an) of the Tang Dynasty, which is more than three centuries younger than the first inscription. The author shows that the compiler of the latter (and later) inscription, a Syrian Christian named Adam (Jing-jing), was guided by the structure, style and logic of the first (Buddhist) document when composing his history of the spread of Syriac Nestorianism in Tang China, prefacing the historical part of his work with a general theological preamble and flirting with a priori archaic literary formulas that quote an obsolete literary style of the 5th century. The author concludes that when trying to adapt to the Chinese spiritual milieu, alien beliefs introduced to China inevitably followed the same logical paths, appropriating the vocabulary of the previous imported religion. Thus, for the Syrian Nestorians of the Church of the East, Buddhism became such a forerunner, while Western Christian denominations (the Franciscans and further the Jesuits) each time at a new stage rediscovered the principles of “preaching to all”. A kind of apotheosis of such a “rediscovery” was the “method of Matteo Ricci”, a 16th-century Jesuit missionary who elevated the theory and practice of theological and cultural accommodation to an absolute and joined the conceptual apparatus of Christianity on Chinese soil with the notions and even the ritual practices of Confucianism.

A Network of Awakening Souls

The New Age spiritual milieu has been characterised as increasingly diffuse and lacking in cohesion as it evolves away from its counter-cultural and millenarian roots. It has also been criticised for its dependence on capitalist-driven consumption, with noticeably less attention given to what the New Age produces. However, whilst New Age certainly relies on the free market to sustain a multitude of spiritual businesses, its facilitators also play an instrumental role in the dissemination of ideologies and the building of community based on a shared ethos. Markets can therefore function as sites for meaningful enquiry into the ideologies, activities and cohesiveness of New Age culture. An examination of New Age Facebook groups in Australia demonstrates the spiritual milieu is less fragmented than it may appear. Instead, this national network is unified by its shared values and bound together by a core doctrine of holistic self-spirituality.

Rabindranath Tagore’s Syncretistic Philosophy and the Persian Sufi Tradition

Abstract Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) has been praised by a number of Bengali Muslim authors for his sympathetic portrayal of Islamic concepts and ideals, and it is well known that some of his works of prose and verse were influenced by Persian poetry and Sufism. Tagore’s father knew Persian and could recite the poetry of Ḥāfiẓ (d. 1389) by heart. Tagore himself was also deeply influenced by the Persian classical poet. In the last decade of his life, Tagore described his admiration for the great Persian Sufi poets, visiting the tombs of Ḥāfiẓ and Sa‘dī in Shiraz. In this article, I will discuss the spiritual milieu of the Persianate culture of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bengal to shed light on the extent of the influence of Persian Sufi ideas on this milieu in general and Tagore in particular. Attention will also be given to other aspects of Tagore’s religious syncretism: Bāul mysticism and its lyric poetry, Sahaja Buddhism, Vedanta philosophy, the Upanishads, and a few other currents of Eastern thought. Lastly, I will explore Tagore’s relationship with Persian Sufi concepts and poetry and discuss the effect of his visit to Iran and his encounter with the poet Ḥāfiẓ.

The Parable of the Sower: a case study examining the use of the Godly Play® method as a spiritual intervention on a psychiatric unit of a major children’s hospital

This case study examines the use of Godly Play® as a pastoral intervention on a psychiatric unit at Children’s Health – Children’s Medical Center in Dallas, Texas. The chaplain adapts Godly Play®, more typically used as a programme of Christian formation in churches and schools, for this setting, leading a ‘Purpose and Meaning’ group weekly whose goal is to provide inpatients with a developmentally appropriate way of reflecting on and expressing their own sense of identity, purpose and meaning within the personal, social and spiritual milieu in which they identify themselves as members. The case study examines how the method is adapted as a spiritual intervention in a clinical setting, and analyses its effectiveness in meeting the stated goals of the group.

Jordanian survivors' experiences of recovery from critical illness: a qualitative study.

Despite the fact that a lot of patients consider their discharge from hospitals as a positive sign of progress towards regained health, many of them start suffering from physical, psychological and social problems after discharge from intensive care units. This study aims to describe the experiences of Jordanian survivors of critical illnesses 3 months after discharge from a hospital intensive care unit. A descriptive qualitative approach was used to involve 18 Jordanian patients from two hospitals in a major Jordanian city using open-ended interviews. Interview transcripts were analysed using content analysis method. Three main themes have emerged from the data: (1) new meaning of life; (2) different perspectives on the meaning of life, and (3) struggle for role identity. The sample was chosen from one city in Jordan; longitudinal study might help identify the change in patients' experiences over time. Patients described the discharge from the intensive care unit as a means of rescue from death; they began to value their spiritual and religious rituals. Negative traumatic experiences hindered the patients' recovery process. During recovery, patients struggled to resume their power and role in family. This study emphasizes the importance of providing care according to the patient's individual needs, related to their cultural and spiritual milieu; there is a need to develop follow-up services for ICU survivors within a national health policy. Further educational and training programmes in the patient's issues after discharge from hospital are needed. This will definitely help nurses care after this patient group.

Commitment to care: a qualitative study of intensive care nurses' perspectives of end‐of‐life care in an Islamic context

Currently, end-of-life care is a significant issue and a topic of debate in intensive care settings but understanding of nurses' perspectives about this within an Islamic context is surprisingly lacking. The purpose of this study was to explore intensive care nurses' perspectives of the end-of-life care in South-east of Iran. A descriptive qualitative research approach was used to engage 12 intensive care nurses from three intensive care units of teaching hospitals affiliated to Kerman University of Medical Science in a semi-structured interview. Interview transcripts were analysed using an inductive coding approach. Four major categories emerged from analysis of the interviews: commitment to care, awareness of dying patients, caring relationships, and dealing with barriers and ethical issues. The first category was emphasized and appeared dominant in all interviews. Because of specific socio-cultural and environmental factors, the findings of this study may not be applicable in other contexts, but enhance our knowledge about the topic in an Islamic context. This study emphasizes the importance of looking at the end-of-life care for critical terminally ill patients within the context of spiritual milieu associated with commitment to a compassionate care until the last moment of their life. Intensive nurses, faced with various barriers and ethical issues, instead were focused on physical and spiritual care and believed that it should fulfil their role in the challenging process. These findings indicate that there is a need for policies that help increase the quality of life of dying patients. It is imperative that nursing managers and policy makers in Iran consider these findings to improve end-of-life care in intensive setting. More training programmes, further education and research on the topic, should be implemented.

Making sense of personal and global problems: an analysis of the writings and lectures of Rauni-Leena Luukanen-Kilde

Rauni-Leena Luukanen-Kilde (b. 1939) is a well-known figure in the Finnish alternative spiritual milieu. She is an author and lecturer on parapsychology and ufology and has been a guest on several talk shows in the Nordic countries. The topics discussed by Luukanen-Kilde range from the psychic abilities of mankind to visitations from extraterrestrial beings. Since the mid-1980s Luukanen-Kilde has developed conspiracy theories about an elite group governing the world in secret. Luukanen-Kilde is a bestselling author and draws audiences of several hundreds to her talks. Her conspiracy theory view of the world offers explanations for all kinds of personal, national, as well as global problems and disasters. Personal health problems, tragic incidents such as school shootings, economic crises and unemployment, earthquakes and floods can, according to her belief system, all be attributed to a single cause; namely to the actions of a clandestine, malevolent group. The popularity of Luukanen-Kilde’s books and lectures can be seen as an example of how people in late modernity are seeking alternative interpretations of themselves and of world events.

The Limburg Sermons: Preaching in the Medieval Low Countries at the Turn of the Fourteenth Century by Wybren Scheepsma (review)

REVIEWS 307 traders known as Radhaniyya were important conveyors of slaves. The Balkan region, especially the Slavic and Bulgar regions, provided the main sources of slaves for Byzantium. The Greek synonym word for slave is sklavos, and this attests to the Slavic origin of these slaves. Rotman meticulously researched the evolution of the slave trade routes throughout the geo-political changes occurring in the Byzantium world between the eighth and eleventh centuries. Rotman provides a map featuring trade routes and a table explaining the ever-changing geopolitical space of these turbulent times. The definitions of slave in the Byzantine world closely track the development of the idea of slavery and freedom in the medieval world. Rotman undertakes a fascinating linguistic analysis of all the terms denoting some type of slave status. He analyses the frequency of slave-related references and their possible use in shedding light on the role of slaves in the Byzantine world by looking at public documents, private documents, hagiographical literature, historiographical literature, and sources such as the papyri of Egypt (6th–7th c.), the archives of Athos/Patmos (9th–11th c.), documents of Cappadocia (10th– 11th c.), and documents of southern Italy (11th c.). The closing chapters analyze the evolution of the concept of “unfreedom,” the Byzantine church and its relation to slavery, and the beginning of the perception of slave as human being . Rotman states that the definition of the person of free status was linked to his religious identity, to his community, and to his state. The slave started being perceived as human for a religious reason and a political reason: in the first case, the slave owed his allegiance to God and not to his fellow man; in the second, the slave owed his allegiance to the imperial state, not his master. In Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World, Rotman analyzes Byzantine slavery from civil, social, and economic viewpoints, focusing on this social dependency of a private nature in an enlightening, provocative, intelligent, and relevant way. As he points out, slavery as a civic institution no longer exists in the modern world, yet unfreedom is found everywhere. MIHAELA L. FLORESCU, French and Linguistics, Cerritos College Wybren Scheepsma, The Limburg Sermons: Preaching in the Medieval Low Countries at the Turn of the Fourteenth Century, trans. David F. Johnson (Leiden: Brill 2008) xiii + 486 pp. This excellent, thorough monograph provides the Anglophone world with a richly-detailed account of one of the earliest collections of Middle Dutch prose, The Limburg Sermons, a thirteenth-century corpus of spiritual and contemplative texts found in MS The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 70 E5 (given the siglum H; the manuscript also contains the earliest extant Dutch dramatic poetry , the Maastricht (Ripuarian) Passion Play, on the final folios—fols. 233v– 247v—but this text was likely added to the MS somewhat after the Sermons were copied, despite a continuity of pricking through fol. 236). This collection of sermons is remarkable not only for its primacy in Dutch prose and the Netherlandish spiritual tradition, but also for its virtuosic incorporation of sources both local and distant: letters from Hadewijch and a treatise by Beatrice of Nazareth are used, and the bulk of the sermons are translations and adaptations of certain of the Middle High German sermon collection known as the St. Georgen Sermons. REVIEWS 308 This volume contains an exhaustive discussion of the sources of the sermons , the choices the compiler made in assembling his materials (and, when applicable, in translating from MHG), the general spiritual milieu in which they were likely produced, and several images of relevant MSS and block books. The book ends with several appendices that give us a codicological description of MS H, the rubrics by which the 48 sermons are identified, a concordance presenting an overview of the transmission history, a glimpse at the translations which changed the addressees of the sermons from female to male, and finally a Modern English translation of the two most important sermons from the collection (Ls. 31, This is the Book of the Palm Tree, and Ls. 39, This is the Book of the Orchard—21 pages of translated material, altogether). To say the least, this is an exhaustive treatment of...

‘You Don't Know How Lucky you are to be Here!’: Reflections on Covert Practices in an Overt Participant Observation Study

There has been a tendency in sociology to see covert and overt roles of social researchers in participant observation studies as opposites. This is both in terms of the researcher role and the surrounding ethics, with the overt researcher role being seen as fundamentally more ethical than the covert participant observer. However, Calvey (2008) alleged that covert practices often remain unreported in overt accounts. The purpose of this paper is therefore to address this issue through reflections on my own research experience. Drawing on my research with the contemporary spiritual milieu in Scotland, I will argue that the covert and overt roles are far from opposites and should be seen as part of a continuum. The moral high ground attributed to overt research is often questionable and most overt studies will employ covert practices. It will therefore be argued that decisions regarding the role of the participant observer should be grounded in the intellectual contemplation of specific research situations, including ethical considerations, rather than condemning sound social enquiry on the misguided basis that overt research is always superior to covert studies because of its ethical standards. In conclusion it will be argued that all researchers have a responsibility to reflect honestly upon their research experience as part of wider reflexive turn in social research.

Het verborgen leven van de zusters Agnieten

On the basis of earlier studies and recent research it may be argued that a mystical renaissance occurred in the Low Countries and the neighbouring Rhine region in the second and third quarters of the sixteenth century. This mystical revival was lived by women in convents and beguinages, and supported by men, in particular the Cologne carthusians. This article focuses on the Saint Agnes convent in Arnhem. In recent years it has become clear that mystical life and literature suddenly sprung up in this convent and its spiritual milieu. The hitherto hidden life of the Saint Agnes sisters is brought to light by (1) a reconstruction of the history of the convent, (2) a description of the spiritual life of the community based on the extant manuscripts, the original texts produced in the community, and the convent's spiritual network, and (3) a tentative analysis of the sisters' mystical spirituality.

Beyond the Spiritual Supermarket: The Social and Public Significance of New Age Spirituality

This article argues that New Age spirituality is substantially less unambiguously individualistic and more socially and publicly significant than today's sociological consensus acknowledges. Firstly, an uncontested doctrine of self-spirituality, characterised by sacralisation of the self and demonisation of social institutions, provides the spiritual milieu with ideological coherence and paradoxically accounts for its overwhelming diversity. Secondly, participants undergo a process of socialisation, gradually adopting this doctrine of self-spirituality and eventually reinforcing it by means of standardised legitimations. Thirdly, spirituality has entered the public sphere of work, aiming at a reduction of employees’ alienation to increase both their happiness and organisational effectiveness. A radical ‘sociologisation’ of New Age research is called for to document how the doctrinal ideal of self-spirituality is socially constructed, transmitted, and reinforced and critically to deconstruct rather than reproduce sociologically naive New Age rhetoric about the primacy of personal authenticity.

Twelfth‐Century Apocalyptic Imaginations and the Coming of the Antichrist

This paper is concerned with the apocalyptic ideas of some twelfth-century figures, principally Norbert of Xanten, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hildegard of Bingen, and Elisabeth of Schonau. Starting from a difference of opinion between Norbert and Bernard on the imminence of the arrival of the Antichrist, the paper explores the apocalyptic understanding of various twelfth-century thinkers. It then seeks to acount for their divergent opinions by reference to such traditional explanations as gender, organizational affiliation, or participation in or consciousness of social and religious movements. Such explanations having been found wanting, it is then suggested that we should look closer to home. An examination of the spiritual milieu of the four main characters, using information from letters and other accounts such as vitae, is essayed. Such evidence, though not entirely conclusive, indicates a correlation between the more active apocalyptic imaginations and heightened consciousness of the intervention of the devil in everyday life.

An Analysis of the Missionary Methods of the Puritans

For the English, as well as for the Spanish of the sixteenth century, the first vision of America was highly paradisical and full of promise: this new land was without doubt the best of the world. The Indian who inhabited this land was the beautiful and docile “noble savage” of the Renaissance, favored with the highest physical and ethical qualities. The English at first defended the Indian, using all the niceties of expression and representation then in vogue. Even though the Indian was innocent, he was civilized: that is to say, he was outside the scheming, egoistical, harsh world of Europe. This stereotyped image was accepted by such writers as Le Moyne, De Bry, and White, who embellished and poetized the gentleness and goodness of the redskin; but it was not sufficient to assure the Indian a place in the Protestant spiritual milieu since it did not measure up to the biblical and predestinarian model. The first attempts at evangelization, for instance, the identification of the Indians as human, were carried out by simple Anglican colonists. These men, lacking true evangelical spirit, soon forgot about their earlier mission and instead of impressing spiritual ideas on the hearts of the Indians, they dedicated themselves almost exclusively to exploiting them and to demanding temporal riches of them without giving them in exchange the necessary doctrinal truths. However, since the Protestant God was much less patient and casuistic than the God of the Catholics, He soon became angry and the divine punishments were so terrible that the Anglican colonizers were wiped out in the sixteenth century. The English explanation for the failure was a spiritual one and not a material one. In reality the men of that age seemed to be able to find an excuse for their failures only from a religious point of view.