REINHABITING RELIGION: GREEN SISTERS, ECOLOGICAL RENEWAL, AND THE BIOGEOGRAPHY OF RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPE

2002 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah McFarland Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Women Religious ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Catholic Women ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
Religious Landscape ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Religious Understanding

AbstractThis article explores the growing movement of environmentally activist Roman Catholic women religious in North America and the implications of this movement for theorizing new directions in religion and culture. Sisters' creative efforts to conserve traditional religious and cultural forms while opening up these forms to "greener" (ecologically-minded) interpretations reveals the very protean process of religious meaning-making. It also subsequently challenges more static and conventional theoretical models of religion. In particular, the author documents and analyzes the intertwining of bioregional philosophies of "reinhabitation," expressions of American Catholic religious life, and manifestations of "green culture." Integrating geographic, ethnographic, and historical methodologies, the author argues that when researchers approach the study of religion as "biogeographers," they discover complex levels of religious understanding and expression that are otherwise overlooked. Significantly, it is these frequently-missed dimensions of the religious landscape that more accurately reflect the "living and lived" quality of religion.

Women in American Catholic History

Horizons ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 334-340
Author(s):  
Arlene Swidler
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Women Religious ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Women's History ◽  
Religious Orders ◽  
Catholic Women ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
The One ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
Women’S History

Considering that History and Religious Studies are two of the areas in which feminist scholars have been most active, it is surprising how very little information is compiled in the area of American Catholic Women's History. Catholic Church historians, of course, have never found the laity of great interest, and the contemporary feminist movement has been strongly secular. Protestant and Jewish materials are more easily available, and even those books which purport to address women in American religion in general give only brief attention to Catholicisim, often by dealing solely with women in religious orders. So work on American Catholic women remains to be done.The one exception is books dealing with individual religious orders, partly because of the accessibility of the materials, though I have been gently admonished not to overestimate the order in convent archives. Studies moving wider to focus on sisters in general are still very few, and attempts to integrate these materials with lay women's history have barely begun. People interested in this field will find help in Elizabeth Kolmer, A.S.C., “Catholic Women Religious and Women's History: A Survey of the Literature,” American Quarterly 30 (1978), 639-51, and in the forthcoming book by Evangeline Thomas, C.S.J., Women Religious History Sources: A Guide to Archives (New York: Bowker).

scholarly journals "Cult of True Womanhood" and American Catholic Sisters: An Example of Creative Subversion

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Susan Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Education ◽  
Women Religious ◽  
Original Work ◽  
Catholic Sisters ◽  
True Womanhood ◽  
Catholic Women ◽  
Cult Of True Womanhood ◽  
The Many ◽  
American Catholic

Barbara Welter concludes her pathbreaking article, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860,” by declaring that “[Various forces in their lives] … called forth responses from woman, which differed from those she was trained to believe were hers by nature and divine decree. The very perfection of True Womanhood, moreover, carried within itself the seeds of its own destruction. For if woman was so very little less than the angels, she should surely take a more active part in running the world, especially since men were making such a hash of things” [174]. Traditionally, in both Welter’s original work and the many efforts that have subsequently followed, the living out of “True Womanhood” and the creative subversion it unintentionally inspired have been understood almost exclusively in either secular or Protestant contexts. This article explores the role of Catholic education by sisters in both reinforcing and undermining Victorian gender roles, and specifically analyzes the contributions of Catholic women religious to the complex and subversive process that Welter suggested. It analyzes the cultural and religious tensions that characterized nineteenth-century Catholic women’s education, as well as the women’s agency that, however inadvertently, it came to empower.

Elizabeth Seton, American Saint

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine O'Donnell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Women Religious ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Female Friendship ◽  
Intellectual Inquiry ◽  
Catholic Women ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Local Leaders

Elizabeth Bayley Seton is the first native-born US citizen to be made a Roman Catholic saint. Canonized in 1975, Seton founded the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph, the first vowed community of Catholic women religious created in the United States. Seton’s sainthood marked the culmination of a role she first served during her life: a respectable, benevolent face for a church whose local leaders were eager to demonstrate its compatibility with American culture. Seton’s founding of the American Sisters of Charity was a more practical achievement and one that shaped the Catholic Church in the United States in tangible ways. Starting in 1809, when Seton began a school and vowed community in Emmitsburg, Maryland, the Sisters of Charity expanded throughout the United States, eventually running hundreds of schools and orphanages and offering both a spiritual home and a career path for women who chose it. Seton’s life is expressive for what it reveals about her era as well as for her distinctive achievements. Her prominence led to the preservation of decades of correspondence and spiritual writings. Through them it is possible to see with unusual clarity the ways in which the Age of Revolutions and the rise of Napoleon variously disrupted, reinvigorated, and transformed Catholic traditions; to observe the possibilities and constraints Catholicism offered a spiritually ambitious woman; and to witness changes in the relationship between Protestants and Catholics in the United States. Finally, Seton’s rich archive also renders visible one woman’s experience of intellectual inquiry, marriage, widowhood, motherhood, spiritual ambition, and female friendship.

Predicting Post-Trauma Quality of Life: Meaning-Making Trumps Medical Reality

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ed De St. Aubin ◽  
Abbey Valvano ◽  
Terri Deroon-Cassini ◽  
Jim Hastings ◽  
Patricia Horn
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Life Meaning

Cancer and Cancer Treatment-Related Cognitive Impairment

2019 ◽  
pp. 60-83
Author(s):  
James C.  Root ◽  
Elizabeth Ryan ◽  
Tim A. Ahles
Keyword(s):  
Cancer Survivors ◽  
Cancer Treatment ◽  
Clinical Presentation ◽  
Functional Neuroimaging ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Cognitive Changes ◽  
Central Nervous System Cancer ◽  
Pharmacologic Treatments

As the population of cancer survivors has grown into the millions, there is increasing emphasis on understanding how late effects of treatment impact survivors’ ability return to work/school, ability to function and live independently, and overall quality of life. Cognitive changes are one of the most feared problems among cancer survivors. This chapter describes the growing literature examining cognitive changes associated with non-central nervous system cancer and cancer treatment. Typical elements of cancer treatment are discussed, followed by a description of clinical presentation, self-reported and objectively assessed cognitive findings, and results of structural and functional neuroimaging research. Genetic and other risk factors for cognitive decline following treatment are identified and discussed, together with biomarkers and animal models of treatment-related effects. This is followed by a discussion of behavioral and pharmacologic treatments. Finally, challenges and recommendations for future research are provided to help guide subsequent research and theoretical models.

Linguistic fire and human cognitive powers

2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Cowley
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Cognitive Theory ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Action Perception ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Word Forms ◽  
Species Specific ◽  
Opening Up

To view language as a cultural tool challenges much of what claims to be linguistic science while opening up a new people-centred linguistics. On this view, how we speak, think and act depends on, not just brains (or minds), but also cultural traditions. Yet, Everett is conservative: like others trained in distributional analysis, he reifies ‘words’. Though rejecting inner languages and grammatical universals, he ascribes mental reality to a lexicon. Reliant as he is on transcriptions, he takes the cognitivist view that brains represent word-forms. By contrast, in radical embodied cognitive theory, bodily dynamics themselves act as cues to meaning. Linguistic exostructures resemble tools that constrain how people concert acting-perceiving bodies. The result is unending renewal of verbal structures: like artefacts and institutions, they function to sustain a species-specific cultural ecology. As Ross (2007) argues, ecological extensions make human cognition hypersocial. When we link verbal patterns with lived experience, we communicate and cognise by fitting action/perception to cultural practices that anchor human meaning making.

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