Textures of Spirituality in Rural Malawi

What does religion in rural Malawi have to teach us about spirituality more broadly? If spirituality is the experience of the self as connected directly to the sacred, rural Malawi fosters intense religiosity, but often muffles spirituality. Nonetheless, where spirituality pushes up through the undergrowth of practical religious concerns, we see some of what the spiritual does for Malawians, and for us as well: it replenishes and revitalizes the inner resources of the self by linking the self to transcendent sources of power and meaning. Based on interviews and participant observation conducted in Malawi, this chapter focuses on the meaning-making process of spirituality and shows how the experience of the self is connected directly to the sacred. The analysis of this process has implications for our understanding of spirituality in other parts of the world as well.

Vicky Boldo/kisêwâtisiwinyôtin:iskwew (Gentle Wind Woman): From Individual to Intergenerational Healing

In this article, the authors highlight Indigenous helper Vicky Boldo/kisêwâtisiwinyôtin:iskwew’s (Gentle Wind Woman) approach to healing knowledges. kisêwâtisiwinyôtin:iskwew’s background of Cree, Coast Salish and Métis ancestry, in addition to living a scarring experience as a trans-racial adoptee, created a ground of insight and self-care that sparked her awareness and reliance on Mother Earth as part of her survival. This chapter documents kisêwâtisiwinyôtin:iskwew’s insights into the sacred and inseparable relationship to Earth and all beings as crucial to overall wellbeing. The authors discuss kisêwâtisiwinyôtin:iskwew’s teachings about connection, embodiment and utilizing inner resources to move through the pain and trauma of separation from the self and sacred. Ultimately, kisêwâtisiwinyôtin:iskwew exemplifies the need to centre the ways in which people respond to hurt assisted by positive social environments that challenge and stop structures of abuse. This understanding gained as a “wounded healer” in turn creates spaces for individual learnings extending into intergenerational teachings on healing and dignity.

“The Cross and the Impossibility of Faith”

This chapter analyzes the exchange between Luther, Karlstadt, and Müntzer during the Peasants’ War. Each counseled a different response to persecution, rooted in their respective paradigms of annihilation and union. Personal invective around cross-shirking intended to expose opponents’ inability to receive and teach truth. Luther defended the doctrine of salvation extra nos and the stance of waiting for God to reform hearts as true suffering of God’s condemnation of human ideas and inner resources for salvation. Karlstadt and Müntzer continued to trace Luther’s teaching to self-will, while breaking with one another over the legitimacy of violent rebellion. Müntzer saw the Anfechtungen at the birth of faith as a passing trial, after which illumined Christians could execute God’s will against the ungodly. Karlstadt rejected rebellion as contrary to God’s will. Unlike Müntzer, Karlstadt and Luther constrained the revolutionary implications of democratized mysticism—Karlstadt by delaying union, Luther by redefining it.

Modern Strategies For Realizing The Educational Potential Of Art In Conditions Of Modernization Of Education

This article is devoted to the issues of teaching and educating young people through the disclosure of the inner resources of art. The educational potential of art is determined and the ways of its realization in the conditions of modernization of education are described. The functional possibilities and prospects for the development of the artistic culture of young people, including in the process of interaction of cultures of different peoples, are considered. The components of the national culture are described, state strategies, attitudes and guidelines in the implementation of the educational potential of art are indicated. Much attention is paid to the continuity of traditions, national, artistic values of the Uzbek people, the formation of students' motivation to master the values of national and world artistic culture.

”Whatever Does Not Kill Me Makes Me Stronger”: A Sociological Analysis of Uses of the Concept of Resilience. The Case of Boris Cyrulnik’s Self-Help Books Readers

This article offers a social science analysis of the resilience concept’s success and common sense uses. Based on a sample of letters from the readers of the French author Boris Cyrulnik’s self-help best-sellers, the article first depicts the characteristics of the attitude of the letters’ authors towards Cyrulnik and what they expect from him. Second, it proposes to understand resilience as a language game used to communicate about suffering and then analyses why certain readers feel resilient while others don’t. It concludes that this way of reacting to adversity (i. e., tapping one’s inner resources, never giving up) is particularly desirable in a context where autonomy has become more prestigious.

Must We Conform?

This chapter compares Melville’s Bartleby and the Venetian atheist savant, Sarpi. Bartleby lived a miserable life in nineteenth-century New York City. His inner resources were meager, and quiet desperation eventually led him to refuse to conform any longer. He died of self-inflicted inanition. The other lived in sixteenth-century Venice. His inner resources were considerable, and they enabled him to wear a lifelong mask hiding what he really believed. Both had reasons for the different answers they gave to the hard question. Comparison between their responses makes it possible for us from a distance to evaluate whether conformity was or was not reasonable for them and whether it would be reasonable for us as we face the question of whether we should conform to our conditions. I follow Montaigne in concluding that although circumstances may force us to make prudent compromises, there is a limit beyond which we should not go. But what that limit is varies with social and personal circumstances.

Patočka on Europe in the aftermath of Europe

Jan Patočka’s elaborations in ‘Europe after Europe’ concern a kind of irrationalism and nativism proper to European thought that has prohibited the embryonic core of the idea of Europe, namely, the renewed Socratic-Platonic motif of the ‘care of the soul’ in Christian Europe, to unfold its full potential. The article investigates a further ‘irrationalism’ that narrows the universalist thrust of the idea of Europe, precisely, by conceiving of it in terms of the Greek concept of an idea. This article draws on the inner resources of the notion of the idea in order to recast Europe as a Europe beyond the idea.