Happiness Is Not Only Your Right; It’s Your Duty!

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-84
Author(s):  
E. Stone
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Identity ◽  
New Age ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Spiritual Community ◽  
Late Modern

Salto Quântico is a rapidly growing religious movement based in Aracaju, Brazil. Syncretizing New Age, Spiritist and Christian precepts, the group exposes followers to spiritual discourse and ideology imparted by enlightened spirit guides through leader and medium Benjamin Teixeira de Aguiar Machado. Followers are encouraged to embrace the adage, “Happiness is not only your right; it’s your duty!” This article will draw on ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews conducted in Aracaju in 2012 to depict a profile of the group. It will also critically consider and explore ways in which the group encourages adherents to seek happiness in the midst of the challenges of late-modern life in Brazil, through participation in the group’s spiritual community, progressive interpretations of sexual identity and sexuality, and spiritual discourse around happiness and the combating of depression.

“Killing the Elephant”: Murderous Beasts and the Thrill of Retribution, 1885–1930

2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 405-444 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Louise Wood
Keyword(s):  
New Age ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Crime And Punishment ◽  
Industrial Age ◽  
Public Executions

At the turn of the last century, circus elephants who had, in fits of distemper, killed circus trainers, workers, or spectators were regularly put to death. That alone is not extraordinary. What is fascinating is that the killings of these animals were not infrequently staged as public executions, with the elephant playing the role of the menacing criminal facing his just rewards before a crowd of eager witnesses. News accounts in turn reported these events as they would criminal executions, framing them as stories of murder, remorse, and retribution. This article treats these remarkable events as complex rituals through which larger tensions and conflicts surrounding crime and punishment in this period became manifest. These executions, performed as extensions of the modern circus, were commercial spectacles in and of the industrial age. Still, like circuses, they were also events full of ambivalence about this new age, as they acted out popular controversies over the nature of criminality, the meaning of justice, and the role of vengeance in modern life.

Metaphysical Exile

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Pippin
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Detailed Interpretation ◽  
The Many ◽  
Psychological Dimensions ◽  
Late Modern

This is the first detailed interpretation of J. M. Coetzee’s “Jesus” trilogy as a whole. Robert Pippin treats the three “fictions” as a philosophical fable, in the tradition of Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, Rousseau’s Emile, or Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Everyone in the mythical land explored by Coetzee is an exile, removed from their homeland and transported to a strange new place, and they have all had most of the memories of their homeland “erased.” While also discussing the social and psychological dimensions of the fable, Pippin treats the literary aspects of the fictions as philosophical explorations of the implications of a deeper kind of spiritual homelessness, a version that characterizes late modern life itself, and he treats the theme of forgetting as a figure for modern historical amnesia and indifference to reflection and self-knowledge. So, the state of exile is interpreted as “metaphysical” as well as geographical. In the course of an interpretation of the central narrative about a young boy’s education, Pippin shows how a number of issues arise, are discussed and lived out by the characters, all in ways that also suggest the limitations of traditional philosophical treatments of themes like eros, beauty, social order, art, family, non-discursive forms of intelligibility, self-deception, and death. Pippin also offers an interpretation of the references to Jesus in the titles, and he traces and interprets the extensive inter-textuality of the fictions, the many references to the Christian Bible, Plato, Cervantes, Goethe, Kleist, Wittgenstein, and others. Throughout, the attempt is to show how the literary form of Coetzee’s fictions ought to be considered, just as literary—a form of philosophical reflection.

scholarly journals The articulation between evolutionism and creationism in New Religious Movements: Two South American case studies

2020 ◽  
pp. 179-194
Author(s):  
Vitor Campanha
Keyword(s):  
Biological Evolution ◽  
New Age ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
The Internet ◽  
South American ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Religious Perspectives ◽  
American Case

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how certain religious perspectives present nuances between the concepts of creation and evolution. Although public debate characterizes them as polarized concepts, it is important to understand how contemporary religious expressions resignify them and create arrangements in which biological evolution and creation by the intervention of higher beings are presented in a continuum. It begins with a brief introduction on the relations and reframing of Science concepts in the New Religious Movements along with New Age thinking. Then we have two examples which allows us to analyze this evolution-creation synthesis. First, I will present a South American New Religious Movement that promotes bricolage between the New Age, Roman Catholicism and contacts with extraterrestrials. Then, I will analyze the thoughts of a Brazilian medium who disseminates lectures along with the channeling of ETs in videos on the internet, mixing the elements of ufology with cosmologies of Brazilian religions such as Kardecist spiritism and Umbanda. These two examples share the idea of ​​the intervention of extraterrestrial or superior beings in human evolution, thus, articulating the concepts of evolution and creation. Therefore, in these arrangements it is possible to observe an inseparability between spiritual and material, evolution and creation or biological and spiritual evolution.

scholarly journals “Here in the Bible Belt, It’s Predominantly Negative”: Sexual Identity Stigma in the American South, 50 Years After Stonewall

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph J. Frey ◽  
William J. Hall ◽  
Jeremy T. Goldbach ◽  
Paul Lanier
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
United States ◽  
Health Disparities ◽  
Sexual Identity ◽  
Minority Stress ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mental Health Disparities ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
United States South ◽  
The Impact

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and pansexual (LGB+) individuals have disproportionate rates of mental illness. Minority stress and sexual identity stigma are posited as the primary social determinants of LGB+ mental health disparities. Discussions in the literature have questioned the impact of sexual identity stigma in a world increasingly accepting of sexual minorities. Additionally, the LGB+ population in the United States South is often overlooked in American research. This article details a qualitative study exploring experiences related to sexual identity stigma among adults who identify as LGB+ in the United States South. Semi-structured interviews with 16 individuals were analyzed using content analysis. Six thematic categories of stigma emerged from participants’ experiences: (a) navigating an LGB+ identity, (b) social acceptability of an LGB+ identity, (c) expectation of LGB+ stigma, (d) interpersonal discrimination and harassment, (e) structural stigma, and (f) relationship with the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community. Findings suggest that sexual identity stigma remains a common experience among these Southern United States participants. Further, thematic categories and subcategories primarily aligned with extant theory with one exception: Intracommunity stigma, a form of stigma emanating from the LGBTQ community, emerged as a stigma type not currently accounted for in theoretical foundations underpinning mental health disparities in this population.

Sexual and Religious Regimes of the Self in Dutch Discourses about Homosexuality: A Queer Theological Analysis and Alternative

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 353-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Derks
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Identity ◽  
The Self ◽  
Christian Identity ◽  
Sexual Diversity ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Conservative Protestant ◽  
In Christ ◽  
Late Modern

Abstract This article discusses two major ways in which sexual and religious identities are conceptualized in Dutch public discourses about homosexuality. In a secular discourse that stresses that LGBTs should be able to ‘be themselves’, certain religious identities are often ignored, subordinated or attacked, while the self that needs to be realized is rendered primarily a sexual self. A conservative Protestant (counter-)discourse on ‘being in Christ’ subordinates (homo)sexual identity to Christian identity—or even rejects it. To move beyond such (Late) Modern oppositional constructions of religion and homosexuality in terms of (religious/sexual) “identity”, this article explores the (queer) Catholic concept of sacramental characters—as an anti-identity—and suggests that it has the potential to unsettle some of the deadlocks in public discourses about homosexuality and sexual diversity.

scholarly journals Loneliness, social dislocation and invisibility experienced by older men who are single or living alone: accounting for differences across sexual identity and social context

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Paul Willis ◽  
Alex Vickery ◽  
Tricia Jessiman
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Identity ◽  
Social Participation ◽  
Older Men ◽  
Living Alone ◽  
Social Connections ◽  
Social Environments ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Social Settings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Separation

Abstract Across literature on loneliness and ageing, little attention is given to the intersection of ageing, sexuality and masculinities, and how this shapes the social connections of older men. We report findings from a qualitative study of older men's experiences of loneliness and social participation, focusing on perspectives from two groups who are single and/or living alone: men identifying as (a) heterosexual and (b) gay (not bisexual). We present findings generated from semi-structured interviews with 72 men residing in England (65–95 years). We discuss three prominent themes: (a) loneliness, loss and social dislocation; (b) diverging life-events that trigger loneliness; and (c) variations in visibility and exclusion across social settings. Embedded within men's descriptions of loneliness is a running theme of social dislocation that speaks to a wider sense of social separation and estrangement. Unique to gay men's accounts are the ways in which experiences of loneliness and social isolation are compounded by living in heteronormative social environments and their encounters with ageism in gay social settings. Older men's accounts convey anxieties about visibility and anticipated exclusion across social settings shared with other men that vary according to sexual identity and context. We discuss how sexuality and being single and/or living alone impact on older men's social participation as we seek to move beyond a heterocentric understanding of loneliness.

scholarly journals Gay the right way? Roles and routines of Irish media production among gay and lesbian workers

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 355-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne O’Brien ◽  
Páraic Kerrigan
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Identity ◽  
Career Progression ◽  
Gay And Lesbian ◽  
Production Data ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Television Production ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Film And Television ◽  
Irish Film ◽  
The Right

This article explores how gay and lesbian identities are incorporated, or not, into the roles and routines of Irish film and television production. Data were gathered in 2018–2019 through semi-structured interviews with a purposive, snowball sample of 10 people who work in the Irish industries. The key findings are that for gay and lesbian workers their minority sexual identity impacts on the roles that they are likely to be included and excluded from. Sexuality also affects their promotion prospects and their career progression. Similarly, in terms of routines of production, gay and lesbian workers are associated with certain genres, based on stereotypical assumptions about their sexual identities by their hetero-managers and colleagues. In short, Irish gay and lesbian media workers articulated an overarching tension between the heteronormativity of the industry and the queerness of the gay and lesbian media worker. Some workers respond to that tension by adopting a homonormative approach to work while others attempt to forge a queer way of producing.

A “Greek God” in a Japanese New Religion: On Hermes in Kōfuku-no-Kagaku

Numen ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 420-446
Author(s):  
Franz Winter
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
New Age ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Theoretical Question ◽  
New Religion

Abstract The article deals with the presence of the “Greek god” Hermes in the Japanese new religious movement Kōfuku-no-Kagaku, which was founded in 1986. The various references are interpreted in light of the history and development of the movement and with regard to its setting in present-day Japanese religious culture. In addition to the importance of several aspects of the reception of the Euro-American New Age tradition and the prophecies of Nostradamus, the fact that the figure of Hermes is presented as the hero of several manga and anime productions of Kōfuku-no-Kagaku is also taken into consideration. This leads to the theoretical question of the importance of the new media of representation of religious content and the effect this approach has on the development of the various groups.

Trendsetting Learning Biographies: Concepts of Navigating through Late-modern Life and Learning

2006 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabelle Diepstraten ◽  
Manuela du Bois-Reymond ◽  
Henk Vinken
Keyword(s):  
Modern Life ◽  
Late Modern
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