Spiritual Narratives Research Articles

Rató, Spirit of Waterfalls

In “Rató, Spirit of Waterfalls,” Antonio Briceño celebrates the culture of the Pemon indigenous people in Venezuela. Indigenous peoples have rich connections to the land. The value of their traditional knowledge is beginning to be appreciated. But many indigenous peoples must battle outside interests that have different ambitions for their ancestral homes. Securing their land rights can help protect their livelihoods, their rich cultural heritage, and some of the most biodiverse locations in the world. In “Rató, Spirit of Waterfalls,” Antonio Briceño celebrates the culture of the Pemon indigenous people in Venezuela. Indigenous peoples have rich connections to the land. The value of their traditional knowledge is beginning to be appreciated. But many indigenous peoples must battle outside interests that have different ambitions for their ancestral homes. Securing their land rights can help protect their livelihoods, their rich cultural heritage, and some of the most biodiverse locations in the world. Antonio Briceño is a Venezuelan photographer and biologist whose work promotes the conservation of nature and indigenous cultures. In his dramatic body of work entitled “Gods of America,” Briceño creates dynamic portraits of indigenous people set against natural and cultural landscapes. Briceño melds images of primordial environments and spiritual leaders into visions that evoke the archetypes commonly found in human cultures throughout time. In each photograph, Briceño portrays a scene from the spiritual narrative of an indigenous culture. He presents his deified subject as the “owner” of a natural element or force, drawing attention to the stark difference between Western concepts of ownership and those of indigenous cultures. The indigenous “owners” do not exercise dominion over nature with the right to exploit it but rather are the humble guardians of the natural world, responsible for its stewardship. In these images, the owners are extensions of nature itself, spiritual symbols of the gifts of life. From a cascading waterfall to a headdress of fish, each of Briceño’s visual mythologies provides a glimpse into an aboriginal heritage in which life continues to unfold within the cathedral of nature. Artwork selection and curatorial statement provided by Art Works for Change. To learn more about this artist and his work, visit https://www.artworksforchange.org/portfolio/antonio-briceno/.

“Licencious gaddyng abroade”: A Conflicted Imaginary of Mobility in Early Modern English Protestant Writings

A history of the little word “gadding”, I suggest in this article, is revealing. Tracking its appearance in early-modern English printed texts shows how it was almost always used pejoratively: gadding is repeatedly connected with an unquiet spirit, with all that is disordered, unruly, hectic, frazzled, busy, malign – or Roman Catholic. There were peaks of use of this word in the 1580s and 1660s. These correlate with particularly intense periods of cultural, religious and political anxiety over itinerancy and other forms of geographic mobility. Consideration of this context, looking particularly at the 1583 English translation of Calvin’s [S]ermons [...] vpon [...] Deuteronomie and its relation to Calvin's original texts and their contexts, suggests that anxiety about mobility is a particularly English feature of Protestant thought. But, alongside an inherited uneasiness about gadding, a desire for travel was equally compelling for many mid-seventeenth-century sectaries. So, it is the imaginative and spiritual conflict produced by this tension that primarily concerns me in this article. Beginning with the familiar accounts of Anna Trapnel’s and John Bunyan’s trials, and moving through examples of several nonconformist spiritual narratives, I trace ways in which this conflicted position underpins a range of uses of oral and print forms. From these readings, I suggest the particular dynamics of English Protestantism lend themselves to its becoming a crucial site for the negotiation of the period’s overall political, economic, spiritual, epistemic and social concern with mobility and, conversely, how mobility in itself becomes a core preoccupation of early-modern English Protestant thought.

Spiritual exemplars

ABSTRACTThis paper proposes that spiritual persons are an excellent focus for the study of ‘living religion’ and offers a methodology for doing so. By ‘spiritual persons’, I have in mind both exemplary figures – like Jesus or the Buddha – and the multitude of ‘ordinary’ spiritual persons whose lives are led in aspiration to the spiritual goods the exemplars manifest (enlightenment, say, or holiness). I start with Linda Zagzebski’s recent argument that moral persuasion primarily occurs through encounters with exemplars of moral qualities, of a sort that invite admiration and emulation. A plurality of modes of spiritual exemplarity is distinguished, each reflecting a distinct form of spiritual aspiration, which will show in the lives of the members of different traditions. I develop this claim by focusing on the ways that spiritual aspirants can encounter exemplars through their depictions in spiritual narrative. It emerges that narrative encounters can activate certain forms of admiration and enable certain forms of emulation if they depict the suffering of exemplars.

“I'm Not a Spiritual Person.” How Hope Might Facilitate Conversations About Spirituality Among Teens and Young Adults With Cancer

ContextSupporting patients' spiritual needs is central to palliative care. Adolescents and young adults (AYAs) may be developing their spiritual identities; it is unclear how to navigate conversations concerning their spiritual needs. ObjectivesTo 1) describe spiritual narratives among AYAs based on their self-identification as religious, spiritual, both, or neither and 2) identify language to support AYAs' spiritual needs in keeping with their self-identities. MethodsIn this mixed-methods, prospective, longitudinal cohort study, AYAs (14–25 years old) with newly diagnosed cancer self-reported their “religiousness” and “spirituality.” One-on-one, semistructured interviews were conducted at three time points (within 60 days of diagnosis, six to 12 months, and 12–18 months later) and included queries about spirituality, God/prayer, meaning from illness, and evolving self-identity. Post hoc directed content analysis informed a framework for approaching religious/spiritual discussions. ResultsSeventeen AYAs (mean age 17.1 years, SD = 2.7, 47% male) participated in 44 interviews. Of n = 16 with concurrent survey responses, five (31%) self-identified as both “religious and spiritual,” five (31%) as “spiritual, not religious,” one (6%) as “religious, not spiritual,” and five (31%) as neither. Those who endorsed religiousness tended to cite faith as a source of strength, whereas many who declined this self-identity explicitly questioned their preexisting beliefs. Regardless of self-identified “religiousness” or “spirituality,” most participants endorsed quests for meaning, purpose, and/or legacy, and all included constructs of hope in their narratives. ConclusionAYA self-identities evolve during the illness experience. When words such as “religion” and “spirituality” do not fit, explicitly exploring hopes, worries, meaning, and changing life perspectives may be a promising alternative.

Incoherent Subjects, Incomplete Lives: The Limits of Spiritual Autobiography in Spain

For many years Teresa de Ávila’s Libro de la vida was considered an exceptional work of literature, in both senses of the word “exceptional”. The work of Isabelle Poutrin, Francisco Durán López and others has made us question one of these meanings: no one doubts Teresa’s great literary value, but we now know that hers is one of hundreds (if not more) spiritual autobiographies/diaries kept by early modern Spanish women (and a few men as well). None of these lesser known vidas are as comprehensive or polished as Teresa’s Vida, and many are fragmentary and even incoherent. Insofar as these partial accounts of spiritual graces have been studied or translated, they are often excerpted, paraphrased, or translated in such a way as to make them more legible than, I argue, they really are. I propose then to consider how we might integrate these failed (in the sense that their authors’ spiritual narratives were never deemed models for others), fragmentary, incomplete, and incoherent narratives into the study of the “spiritual autobiography”. This chapter will examine a selection of such autobiographies to make the argument that, by examining a more complete corpus of spiritual autobiographies, and not just the most polished and successful ones, we get a different and fuller picture of the possibilities and limits of women’s self-fashioning through language in the early modern period.

Releasing the Sparks: Extending a Kabbalistic Metaphor to Contemporary Business Practice

An increasingly uncertain global business environment demands a new approach to strategizing. This paper argues for a contemporary re- imagining of the spiritual narrative of “releasing the sparks”. In the Jewish mystical tradition, when the world was created sparks of Divine light were scattered, something like taking a book and throwing all its words and letters into the air. The job of humanity is to rescue and liberate these sparks to create a meaningful world. Extending the metaphor to contemporary business practice, firms seeking to attain a long-term sustainable competitive advantage will need to develop the capability to continuously reach out and release the sparks by attracting and converting potential stakeholders into actual stakeholders. What we propose directly connects firm value creation to an explicit sense of spiritual purpose accompanied by social welfare enhancements via a two-pronged strategic focus on developing trustworthiness and increasing proximity. A purposeful focus on “releasing the sparks” will support a firm’s ability to innovate in this new competitive context by strengthening its relationship to the broader eco-system in which it is embedded.

Children’s Spiritual Lives: The Development of a Children’s Spirituality Measure

Previous researchers who have studied children’s spirituality have often used narrow measures that do not account for the rich spiritual experiences of children within a multi-faith context. In the current study, we describe the initial stages of development of a children’s spirituality measure, in which items were derived from children’s spiritual narratives. An exploratory factor analysis of the items revealed three main factors, including Comfort (Factor 1), Omnipresence (Factor 2), and Duality (Factor 3). As rated by their parents, children from families that were more spiritual and religious had higher scores on the newly-developed measure. Limitations and future directions are discussed.

Guidebooks, postcards, and panoramas: The building of Montserrat through modern mass media

This article demonstrates how guidebooks, postcards, and panoramas have mediated spiritual, cultural, and nationalistic narratives of Montserrat, a mountain and monastery-shrine near Barcelona, Spain. Montserrat—as a place and as an idea—was shaped as a national symbol in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through a struggle among shifting religious, cultural, and political forces. These struggles have influenced individual and collective memories while they have informed the architectural grammar used in the reconstruction of the modern monastery-shrine, influencing the work of the Catalan architects Antoni Gaudí and Josep Puig i Cadafalch and informing the alterations of the sites that these mass media represent and idealize.

Jeremiah’s Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New England. Meredith Marie Neuman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Pp. vi+265.

<i>Jeremiah’s Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New England</i>. Meredith Marie Neuman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Pp. vi+265.

Grand Narratives of Spirituality: Some Critical Reflections

Grand narratives posit spirituality as the master term undergirding human history and all its cultural and religious formations; individual human becoming in all its moral, psychological, social and transpersonal dimensions; and the therapeutic practices of caring professionals. This sets the scene for a series of isomorphic relations to crystallize between spirituality and culture, spirituality and humanity, spiritual care and holistic care. The result is that pre-existing frameworks drawn from academic disciplines and professional vocabularies can be dislodged to the bewilderment of those located outside the spirituality camp. The risk is that scholars and practitioners who take up residence inside the fortress of a grand narrative of spirituality may allow spiritual premises to prejudice their research and practice. It is argued that scholars need to preserve the epistemological priority of social-scientific categories in studies of contemporary communities; that caring professionals need to reaffirm the ontological priority of humanity in their practice; and that demarcating boundaries between the secular and the spiritual could enhance spirituality scholarship and the work of caring professionals in modern post-secular societies.

A Practical Theology Tool to Identify Subjective Individual and Group Spiritual Perspectives

This article explains the adaptation of a social science method called “Q” into a practical theology tool which elicits the spiritual experiences and perspectives of individuals or groups; offering potential for deepening personal understanding of one's inner life. Q-methodology uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative techniques based on statements which are drawn from the literature about the subject and in consultation with key stakeholders—in this case, spirituality. The statements are then prioritized by participants using a grid and commenting on their choices. Sets of spiritual narratives emerge from the analysis and reflect participants' key experiences of faith and life. This tool has a number of valuable uses including a transformational opportunity. The tool was developed for a specific cohort (Anglicans in the Western Cape, South Africa); however, it is readily transferable to many other cultural contexts.

Conceptualising mental health in the United Arab Emirates: the perspective of traditional healers

Substantial investments in health-care have ensured the widespread availability of allopathic medical services across the United Arab Emirates (UAE). However, in spite of this accessibility traditional healers (Mutawa) continue to play a significant, albeit, unofficial role in the UAE's health sector. Citizens routinely consult traditional healers for problems that might, from a western biomedical perspective, be considered psychiatric conditions. This qualitative study explores traditional healers' conceptualisations of mental health problems, discussing their perspectives on phenomenology, aetiology, intervention and outcome. Notably, traditional healers distinguished between biomedical illness and states they attributed to demonological or metaphysical causes. The Islamic spiritual narrative was central to discussions of aetiology, intervention and outcome. Greater integration of traditional healers within the UAE's mental health-care services would, in many cases, improve patient experience and outcomes.

Sister Thorn and Catholic Mysticism in Modern America by Paula M. Kane (review)

Sister Thorn and Catholic Mysticism in Modern America. By Paula M. Kane. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2013. Pp. xiv, 313. $39.95. ISBN 978-1-4696-0760-3.)Sister Mary Crown of Thorns (nee Margaret Reilly, 1884-1937), a sister of the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd at Peekskill, New York, reportedly endured the stigmata from September to November 1921. The manifestations of a cross on her breast and on the walls of her cell were witnessed by some of her sisters and were brought to the attention of Archbishop Patrick Hayes of New York. However, their publicity beyond the convent walls was the result of communications from overzealous clergy. The appeal of the story could not be quashed, despite the best efforts of Hayes, and newspapers promptly splashed headlines of the Peekskill stigmatic for public consumption.Kane's monograph is a work of American studies, not church history, and still less a biography. It examines an unusual spiritual narrative arising in New York's Gilded Age. It occurs to an Irish American woman with serious health problems. Kane calls herself a bricoleur-one who casually observes the detritus of life, mining it for shards of meaning. As a method, it is wanting. Through some valuable archival work, however, Kane alights on a very intriguing subject whose crosshatches traverse the piety of Irish Catholic New York, convent culture, and authority structures that do as much to promote as to try to contain a story of stigmata.The book relies on primary source data found in archives in the United States and London and an extensive, if tangential, secondary literature. After an initial survey of material related to Sister Thorn's case in the archives of the Good Shepherds, a sudden change in policy there closed the files for the author's research. Similarly, she had difficulty in obtaining information from the archdiocesan archives in New York. Kane did not consult a large file in the Secret Vatican Archives (Archivio della Delegazione degli Stati Uniti d'America, Subseries XIX: Istituti religiosi, Posiz. 1229) pertaining to Thorn's case and the havoc raised over her among the Good Shepherd sisters. Doubtless the book would have been enhanced with further engagement of the sources.In seven chapters, Kane examines Thom's family, vocation to the religious life, the motivations of her champions, Catholics and the scientific study of supernatural phenomena, devotional culture in the United States, and the Americanization of modern sanctity (p. …

Finding Religion in Everyday Life

This address is a contribution to the study of “lived religion,” that is, the embodied and enacted forms of spirituality that occur in everyday life. Like the children’s books that ask “where’s Waldo,” sociologists are invited to think about the many ways in which we need to refocus our work in order to see the religion that often appears in unexpected places. As the discipline has broadened its geographical and cultural vision, it also must broaden its understanding of what religion is. Religion is neither an all-ornothing category nor a phenomenon that is confined to a single institutional sphere. Understanding the multilayered nature of everyday reality and the permeability of all social boundaries makes a more nuanced study of religion possible. Using data from the “Spiritual Narratives in Everyday Life” project, it is suggested that religion can be found in the conversational spaces—both in religious organizations and beyond—where sacred and mundane dimensions of life are produced and negotiated.

The Caregiver’s Wandering: The Quest for Identity Integration in the Workplace Using Reflection, Talking Circles, and Creative Expression

These workshops are inspired by the observations of the author in the field of mental health services delivery. The way the caregiver’s role is interpreted is different between the caregiver and the management team - the clinician cannot imagine her professional commitment without considering personal values and motivations, whereas the employer considers personal motivations an impairment to professional effectiveness. This may explain the high rate of burnout for the practitioners working in already stressful conditions in healthcare. Could the reconciliation of personal and professional dimensions prevent this disavowal of human capital? Holistic art therapy proposes to integrate the divide, to repair the rupture often experienced by the caregiver in clinical practice. Furthermore the ethnopsychiatry approach helps to reintegrate bio-psychosocial and spiritual narratives to rebalance the power struggles of workplace which may undermine the professional’s performance and fundamental raison d’être. The caregiver can become whole, balancing interpersonal, interdisciplinary and intercultural dimensions in healthcare practices.

Whole Person Team Care

In the rapidly changing environment of 21st century healthcare, effective interdisciplinary team-based care is a key ingredient in providing whole person care across the continuum. Interdisciplinary teams face significant issues and challenges in providing whole person care given the boundaries that exist between various healthcare disciplines. Systemic institutional barriers and hierarchies commonly work against team communication, cooperation, and collaboration. These work environments contribute to work-related stress, staff turnover, inefficient, lower quality care, burnout, and compassion fatigue. Ultimately team environments that do not foster team member well-being are unlikely to find success in creating environments that foster whole person care. Given these realities, teams who hope to provide whole-person care need strategies for creating and sustaining a team environment of self-awareness, self-compassion, mindfulness and non-judgmental presence.This session will present the outcomes of three innovative approaches to interdisciplinary care team flourishing through case study analysis of hospital-based palliative care teams, and adult/pediatric hospice teams. The first intervention illustrates a process for developing and implementing a team retreat experience. Combining elements of team building, experiential learning and discussion of assigned readings, palliative care and hospice teams exhibit increased team trust, respect and communication across discipline boundaries. The second intervention demonstrates positive meaning-making through the use of a “spiritual narrative.” Through sustained reflection on a guiding metaphor, “spiritual narratives” enhance team identity formation, function, and sustainability. The third intervention outlines a model for group mindfulness meditation. Through regular practice of mindfulness meditation as an integrated component of the work day, team members sought to increase their self-awareness, presence, attunement and compassion in clinical interactions. Attendees of this workshop will be inspired and equipped to with new ways to enrich interdisciplinary team flourishing while providing excellent whole person care.

Flesh Made Word: The Obese Body as Cultural Matter

Emergent narratives regarding the obese body challenge the received discourse, which posits that body as the materialization of individual moral failings. In this essay, I assess the emergent spiritual dysfunction narrative, which I contend sites the obese body as a field for and agent of the negotiation of contemporary tensions around consumption. To that end, I assess mainstream representations of three women—Oprah Winfrey, Carnie Wilson, and Kirstie Alley—whose ongoing and highly publicized “battles” with obesity have been prominently featured in mainstream media in recent years. I argue that popular discourse around these figures locates the tensions around consumption within the dialectics of individual/community and materialism/spiritualism, navigating those tensions in such as to repair and restore broader, currently precarious neoliberal logics.

Wounding and Healing: dealing with difference in Christian narratives of migrant women in East London since the 1980s

Setting oral histories conducted with a group of female Christian migrants to East London from various backgrounds and different stages in the life cycle alongside interviews with male migrants and non-migrant women, this article seeks to explore the relationship between gender, mainstream religious affiliation and the negotiation of the migratory experience. Informed by mimetic and feminist theory on religious subjectivities, the article focuses on the preoccupation with sacrifice and healing which emerges from these life stories and highlights the ways in which the emotional realities of pain, separation and suffering also give rise to powerfully reconceptualised, individual faith resources and creative strategies for claiming agency within familial, vocational and religious settings. Through a focus on domestic life, work and church leadership within ‘mainstream’ Christian churches, this article complicates assumptions about the nature and historical trajectory of ‘traditional’ religious organisations, and interweaves migrant women's experience closely with that of other members of their church communities. Through these ‘moving stories’, gender forms an integral part of these women's spiritual narratives and is constitutive of their articulation and negotiation of their faith, migration and inculturation.

Spiritual Narratives in Beethoven’s Quartet, Op. 132

This paper, taking its cue from the movement’s heading, reads the “Heiliger Dankgesang” from Beethoven’s String Quartet, op. 132, in terms of spirituality, divinity, and death, following a formal narrative understood in terms of Eastern-influenced conceptions of death and afterlife found in Beethoven’s Tagebuch. It has often been noted that the movements of op. 132 present extremely strong contrasts with one another, and this paper draws connections between the narrative shapes of the various movements and several of the quite varied spiritual perspectives explored by Beethoven. Viewed in this way, op. 132 synthesizes two of the areas in which Maynard Solomon has argued that Beethoven was open to multiple contrasting and even contradictory possibilities—the musical and the spiritual. The contrasts and conflicts among the movements and among the spiritual narratives that they suggest add new dimensions to inter-opus connections as well, giving new depth to the intertextual relationship between the String Quartet, op. 132, and the Ninth Symphony.

Spiritual Narrative in Palliative Care Practice and Team Care (TH338)

Spiritual Narrative in Palliative Care Practice and Team Care (TH338)