From Mind Cure to Mindfulness: What Got Lost

Mind Cure ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 187-218
Author(s):  
Wakoh Shannon Hickey

This chapter considers the early, community-oriented wing of New Thought movement and the Mindfulness movement side by side and identifies several characteristics they have in common, as well as significant differences between them. The Mindfulness movement is similar in various ways to Individualist New Thought. This analysis reveals some of the problems and limitations inherent in the Mindfulness movement’s approach to meditation, from both Buddhist and scientific perspectives. By extracting meditation from its religious contexts and meanings and turning it into an individual technique for reducing stress, several important resources get “lost in translation.” These include the social and spiritual benefits of religious community; fundamental aspects of Buddhist and neo-Vedanta spiritual paths, particularly the ethical foundations of meditation and yoga; and systemic analyses of the causes of suffering and stress-related illness, including racism, sexism, and poverty.

ALQALAM ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 83
Author(s):  
Maftuh Maftuh

For many observers, Banten is well known as an area where the population has a strict religious understanding onislamic law. Colonial officials and experts in Islamic studies such as Snouck Hurgronje and GF Pijper, testified that compared to other Muslims across Java , Muslim in Banten and Cirebon were stricter in practicing Islam . The phenomenon of the social life of the religious community in Banten is necessarily formed within a very long time span. This paper traces the root of the formation of public religious understanding ojMuslim in Banten. Using a socio-historical approach, this paper then leads to the conclusion that the sultan of Banten issued policies that had a greater emphasis to the adherence to the Shari'a rather than Sufism. Religious orientation on the fiqh-oriented can explain the Islamic militancy Banten community, as witnessed by the colonial officials, and even still can be seen up to this present moment.Key words: Jslamization, Sultanate, Banten


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 86-100
Author(s):  
Svetlana V. Riazanova

The point of the author’s research interest is mechanisms for the formation of a private religious community on the example of the Intersession brotherhood. A group of believers was emerged as part of the revival of the Orthodox life of the Kama region, but transformed into specific organization with features of popular religion, new religious movements and so-called “historical sects.” Author reconstructs the history of the community involving elements of the biographical method. The study is based on interviews and correspondence with former members of the community, close people of the residents of the commune, as well as analysis of the materials of the closed group on the social network, some audio of the groups’ seminars, photocopies of the working notebooks of the group and a series of photographs made by the believers. The investigation is based on the theoretical constructions of E. Goffman and the concept of total community. Intersession brotherhood appears as a community with the features of totality – territorial and communication closure of the residents, their employment in internal jobs, perception of the group as a family. Lack of privacy is combined with the presence of “mother-child” connection to the leader. The practice of naming for adults, the creation of new marriages, participation in gender-oriented councils create a special micro-environment with the unification of the world view. The system of privileges for advanced residents is supplemented by a developed system of fines. It makes possible to speak about special tools that lead to a change of values, a narrowing of the set of social roles and a reduction of critical thinking.


2007 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-101
Author(s):  
Ildikó Fejes

The study focuses on the 21st century practices of religion of a traditionally religious community. The study was carried out in a small town in Székely Land, Miercurea Ciuc or Csíkszereda, where the social changes are rather slow compared to the centres, however the religious changes are marked by the territory’s homogenous and outstanding religious character. The study offers a brief theoretical review of the causes of the social changes in the religious practices, after that presents the town’s external-premodern and internal-modern religious practitioners


HUMANIKA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 46
Author(s):  
Nashrul Wahyu Suryawan ◽  
Endang Danial

The background of this research is the social diversity of Indonesian people. This situation causes conflicts among Indonesian people which need solutions to minimilize the effects of the conflict among the society. The study over the value of unification and harmony of the Religious Community Forum is one of the implementation of the unification spirit, the aspect of toleration, which needs to be spread out among the society. The goal of this research is to dig down how the Religious Community Forum works in  increasing the Malang multicultural society understanding over the value of unification. It is also to know how the Religious Community Forum increases the society toleration and the importance of unification among Malang society diversity.  Alt last but not least, the study over the unification value functions as a report of how the Religious Community Forum maintain the Indonesian people unification. This research use subjects of the Religious Community Forum members, religion leaders, government officers, and Malang people. The approach used in this research is qualitative with case study method. The data collection techniques used in this study are observation, interview, documentation, and participation. Meanwhile, the data is analyzed by using data reduction, data display, and verivication.The findings of this research are: 1) The activities done by the Religious Community Forum contain the unification value; the unification and harmony religious communities, conflicts and dialogues counseling, toleration, socialization over the government policy of the unification and harmony of diverse society; 2)The Religious Community Forum contains social aspects; the diversity value, toleration, pluralism, and the society unification,  which can be descended to the next generation; 3) The forum has some roles in maintaining and keeping the unification value of multicultural society through the activities applied in the society. Malang government supports and coordinates any institution works in society unification and harmony. The actions taken shows that the government are concerned on the unification of multicultural society. Thus, it can be concluded that the activities done by the Religious Community Forum of Malang contain the unification value


1992 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 225-237
Author(s):  
Judy Ann Ford

Historians have long been aware that patronage is a crucial factor in interpreting the social meaning of art. The late Middle Ages knew a variety of patrons, each employing art to communicate different sorts of concern: royal and aristocratic courts emphasized political messages, urban communes created governmental myths, cathedrals and monasteries gave expression to spiritual ideas—and all used art to convey notions of social identity. Recent investigations into the process of choosing and procuring works of art in these contexts have not only added perspective to formal art criticism, they have also deepened our understanding of the groups interested in the creation of art. One area in which questions of patronage could perhaps be better illuminated is the community of the parish. The parish served as the primary religious community for the majority of men and women for most of the Middle Ages. It was complex in composition, involving both laity and clergy, encompassing other religious associations, such as gilds, and including the devout and the indifferent, the orthodox and the dissenters.


2006 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard G. Tedeschi ◽  
Lawrence G. Calhoun

Coping with grief can include, in part, trying either to assimilate the loss into the existing worldview and its spiritual and religious components, or changing those components in congruence with the new reality. This spiritual or religious challenge can lead to loss of faith and a loss of spiritual meaning, but it can also provide a struggle that eventually leads to growth in the religious and spiritual domains. In a similar way, the bereaved person's experiences with their proximate culture and social world, particularly if their social systems include a religious community or shared spiritual beliefs with others, can lead to negative changes, but there is the possibility for growth in the social domain as well. Clinicians who work with bereaved persons need to be aware of the possibility that such themes may be important to their clients, and some suggestions are made to assist clinicians in this kind of work.


2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gretel Van Wieren

The food and faith movement in the U.S. is a loose amalgamation of religious communities and organizations, clergy members and lay volunteers, activists and agricultural practitioners who are working, in varied and diverse ways, to address the social, ecological, political, and ethical challenges posed by current food systems. Oftentimes these groups work hand-in-hand with secular food and food justice organizations in organizing community supported agriculture projects, farm to school programs, educational efforts around health, nutrition, cooking, and gardening, and public policy advocacy efforts. What distinguish religious approaches to this work are the ritual practices and narrative tropes that oftentimes orient them. This paper explores some of these motifs by examining the work of three religious, community-based farming projects. It concludes that these religious farms and others like them should be considered sacred spaces for how they ritualize and symbolically interpret agricultural and food practices.


1999 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 941-960 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID HICKMAN

Since the late 1960s, the English Reformation has often been represented as a process of change forced upon an unwilling people by an educated social elite. The religious system of the elite, by this view, is seen as inimical to a broad range of popular practices and beliefs, with puritan ideology giving extreme expression to socially repressive tendencies. Although recent scholarship has sought to modify this view, the relationship of popular and elite culture in London is still often perceived as confrontational. The present article seeks to examine patterns of religious behaviour among the social elite in London during the later sixteenth century, arguing that continuity in certain traditional forms of piety, such as charitable benefaction and funerary practice, expresses a complex of fundamental attitudes and beliefs which operated across the social spectrum. These practices, when enacted, defined and legitimated the parish as a religious community. They also served to reattach a shared belief system to a historically changing religious context, a process of renegotiation in which the whole civic population participated.


1964 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manning Nash

In the study of social integration, there is continual interplay between fact and concept. As new societies come into the ken of social science, theory and method are stretched or hammered to take account of the novel modes of social solidarity. We have not yet come to terms with the diversity, the breaks in social organization, or the social norms that give Southeast Asian societies their particular forms of integration.One of the earliest general apprehensions of the nature of social organization in Southeast Asia was put forth in 1910 by J. H. Boeke. This keenly observant Dutch administrator held that there existed from the Indian subcontinent to Japan a special sort of Asian society and culture, the dual society, based on die following major features: it was governed by tradition, and its people were spatially immobile; it was a rural society based on a corporate land tenure system; it was a consumer economy; and it was integrated by religious norms. In Boeke's widely known one-line summary, Asian society is essentially a “religious community of food-crop cultivators all belonging to the same clan or social unity.” There is a sort of Gemeinschaft, an organic unity of peasant cultivators, held togetlier by a value system of a sacred order and subordinating economic activity to the continuity of the social structure.


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