scholarly journals “The Mass on the World” on a Winter Afternoon: Contemporary Wilderness Religious Experience and Ultimacy

Open Theology ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 281-291
Author(s):  
Susan Power Bratton

Abstract Contemporary studies of wilderness spirituality are based primarily in quantitative social science, and disagree over the relative influence of shared stories and religious traditions. In a study of visitors to California’s national parks and trails, Kerry Mitchell found that backpackers reported heightened perceptions, fueled by such dichotomies as the encounter with the spectacular rather than the mundane, and with divine organization rather than human organization in wilderness. I argue wilderness experience informed only by natural scenery falls short in encountering ultimacy. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s “The Mass on the World” offers a unified rather than a fragmented vision of divine relationship to the natural and the human. Multiple readings can inform the wilderness sojourner, including a basic, open reading as a prayer shared with all nature; an environmental reading considering suffering and the act of Eucharistic offering; and a constructive reading to address dichotomies and fuse humanity and nature into an integrated cosmic future

Author(s):  
Greg Garrett

Hollywood films are perhaps the most powerful storytellers in American history, and their depiction of race and culture has helped to shape the way people around the world respond to race and prejudice. Over the past one hundred years, films have moved from the radically prejudiced views of people of color to the depiction of people of color by writers and filmmakers from within those cultures. In the process, we begin to see how films have depicted negative versions of people outside the white mainstream, and how film might become a vehicle for racial reconciliation. Religious traditions offer powerful correctives to our cultural narratives, and this work incorporates both narrative truth-telling and religious truth-telling as we consider race and film and work toward reconciliation. By exploring the hundred-year period from The Birth of a Nation to Get Out, this work acknowledges the racist history of America and offers the possibility of hope for the future.


Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 478
Author(s):  
Verónica Roldán

The present study on the religious experience of the Peruvian community in Rome belongs to the area of studies on immigration, multiculturalism, and religion in Italy. In this article, I analyze the devotion of the Peruvian community in Rome to “the Lord of Miracles”. This pious tradition, which venerates the image of Christ crucified—painted by an Angolan slave—began in 1651 in Lima, during the Viceroyalty of Peru. Today, the sacred image is venerated in countries all over the world that host Peruvian immigrant communities that have set up branches of the Confraternity of the Lord of Miracles. I examine, in particular, the cult of el Señor de los Milagros in Rome in terms of Peruvian popular religiosity and national identity experienced within a transnational context. This essay serves two purposes: The first is to analyze the significance that this religious experience acquires in a foreign environment while maintaining links with its country of origin and its cultural traditions in a multilocal environment. The second aim is to examine the integration of the Peruvian community into Italian society, beginning with religious practice, in this case Roman Catholicism. This kind of religiosity seems not only to favor the encounter between the two cultures but also to render Italian Roman Catholicism multicultural.


Author(s):  
Stephen E. Maiden ◽  
Gerry Yemen ◽  
Elliott N. Weiss ◽  
Oliver Wight

This case examines the queueing issues caused by the growth in popularity of one of the most visited Hindu temples in the world. On January 2, 2015, Ramesh and Vasantha Gupta visit Tirumala Venkateswara Temple, just a day after some 210,000 people crowded the 2,000-year-old site. The case describes the many enhancements that the temple administrator, Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD), has implemented since its management of the temple complex began in 1932. The soaring popularity of the temple, however, has led to safety and comfort concerns for pilgrims. While challenging students to consider additional improvements that might benefit pilgrim throughput rate and time in the temple system, the case highlights the tension TTD must manage between maximizing efficiency and maintaining religious traditions. Additionally, the case demonstrates the importance of perceived waiting times in the management of queues.


2017 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joerg Rieger ◽  
Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger

Across the globe, conditions of labour are worsening, providing both challenges and opportunities. As labour is one of the places where the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class is always at work, new models of resistance are created here as well. Deep solidarity describes what happens when the 99% who have to work for a living (including people who are excluded from the job market) realise what they have in common, in order to employ their differences productively in the struggle. In this article, a theologian and a labour and community organiser work together showing how the Abrahamic religious traditions and developments in the world of labour help us to shape deeper forms of solidarity.


2011 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 103-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Jansen

Literacy is a personally acquired skill, and the way it is taught to a person changes how that person thinks. Thanks to David Henige historians of Africa are much more aware of how literacy influences memory and historical imagination, and particularly how literacy systems introduce linear concepts of time and space. This essay will deal with these two aspects in relation to Africa's most famous epic: Sunjata. This epic has gained a major literary status worldwide—text editions are taught as part of undergraduate courses at universities all over the world—but there has been little extensive field research into the epic. The present essay focuses on an even less studied aspect of Sunjata, namely how Sunjata is experienced by local people.Central to my argument is an idea put forward by Peter Geschiere, who links the upheaval of autochthony claims in Africa (and beyond) to issues of citizenship and processes of exclusion. He analyzes these as the product of feelings of “belonging.” Geschiere argues that issues of belonging should be studied at a local level if we are to understand how individuals experience autochthony. Analytically, Geschiere proposes shifting away from ”identity” by drawing from Birgit Meyer's work ideas on the aesthetics of religious experience and emotion; Meyer's ideas are useful to explain “how some (religious) images can convince, while other do not.”


Oryx ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 199-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Henshaw

Between 1988 and 1993 six periods of field study were undertaken to investigate the environmental impact of the construction of a main irrigation canal and other works in the proposed extension of Suklaphanta Wildlife Reserve and to recommend protective measures. Suklaphanta is administered by His Majesty's Government of Nepal through the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation. Special emphasis was placed upon the barasingha Cervus duvauceli population because it is the largest remaining group of this endangered deer species in the world. This paper presents recommendations for the management of the barasingha and its habitat.


Twin Research ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fernand Leroy ◽  
Taiwo Olaleye-Oruene ◽  
Gesina Koeppen-Schomerus ◽  
Elizabeth Bryan

AbstractThe Yoruba are an important ethnic group mainly occupying Southwestern Nigeria. Mainly for genetic reasons, this very large tribe happens to present the highest dizygotic twinning rate in the world (4.4 % of all maternities). The high perinatal mortality rate associated with such pregnancies has contributed to the integration of a special twin belief system within the African traditional religion of this tribe. The latter is based on the concept of a supreme deity called Olodumare or Olorun, assisted by a series of secondary gods (Orisha) while Yoruba religion also involves immortality and reincarnation of the soul based on the animistic cult of ancestors. Twins are therefore given special names and believed to detain special preternatural powers. In keeping with their refined artistic tradition, the Yoruba have produced numerous wooden statuettes called Ibejis that represent the souls of deceased newborn twins and are involved in elaborate rituals. Among Yoruba traditional beliefs and lore some twin-related themes are represented which are also found in other parts of the world. Basic features of the original Yoruba beliefs have found their way into the religious traditions of descendants of African slaves imported in the West Indies and in South America.


Spiritualita ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sukron Romadhon

Spirituality and a new religious awakening, are seen by religious elites as a stage of religious directness in carrying out religious traditions and rituals. New civilizations can instead be a threat to conventional religious traditions and rituals. Without the willingness of religious elites to criticize and re-interpret conventional ritual traditions and patterns, the functions of the world's major religions could fade. The world's major religions are increasingly alienated from the objective world and awareness of the lives of the people and their people. It seems that there will be a new form of religion or a new religion that is completely different from the tradition of religious rituals that have been carried out by the major religions of the world. While the religious elite is still attached to classical religious interpretations. But on the other hand, the emergence of modern society, encouraging the argument of secularization is part of modernization. The values underlying socio-political and economic relations also appear to be beginning to enter an irregular stage, when viewed conventionally, the spiritulitas of global civilization, rather than lies in the format of values, traditional systems and structures or modern rationality. New civilizations in social systems and Science and Technology (SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY) began to be directed at a more intuitive spirituality stage. Then came the act of social piety that proved impartiality over the duafa wal mustad'afin, workers and the poor who were oppressed by the economic system. The emergence of the term left theology only wants to explain about righteousness and belief based on the ability to perform acts of liberation of the proletariat. This action is not only done after the reality of the proletariat appears, but creates a social and economic system that has impartiality towards the proletariat.Keywords: Spirituality, Secularization, Social Piety


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