Káromkodásból katedrálist: lelkigondozás és spiritualitás összefüggései Jób könyvében

A Cathedral Built on Swearing? Interrelations between Counselling and Spirituality in the Book of Job. Given its enormous exegetical potential, pastoral care could clearly lay hold more of the Book of Job’s kerygmatic rather than its psychological certainties. In addition to the Book of Job being often read as a case study about the suffering person’s sense of justice and quest for meaning, Job’s experience has a spiritual overtone as well: he is faced with the question of the true nature of God and the need to find an adequate human response to it. Also, the Book is indicative of how people respond to the suffering and what witness and support they offer. In this paper, I evaluate the counselling strategies in the Book of Job identified by Manfred Oeming. I pay special attention to Job’s wife, and I argue that she should not be considered a proper counsellor, as she herself is stricken by the same tragic events as is Job. Instead, she is a fellow sufferer, although acknowledged as such only by extracanonical literature. What is more, she may be identified as the partner or the first and foremost caregiver of the sufferer whose challenges and difficulties remain unidentified, unspoken of, and unaddressed most of the time. As for the spiritual issues aroused by suffering, I suggest that both counsellor and counsellee must reach spiritual maturity to be able to understand and accept their experience of suffering as a genuine experience of God, and so, given time, this may make space for God’s theophany and healing presence. Keywords: Book of Job, suffering, spirituality, pastoral care, counselling, fellow sufferer, caregiver

Latin Americans’ God

This chapter presents the image of God respondents have. They mostly conceive of divinity as a personal being. They use relational metaphors to name it, father, friend, husband, and experience it in their regular, ordinary lives. They feel, touch, hear, and see that intervention. Dios keeps making miracles for them. Respondents’ experience of God helps them to make sense of their life circumstances (there is a plan) and pushes them outside themselves (to meet others); the call from this personal suprahuman power is a social one, one that invites them to relate with others in a meaningful way. If life is about encounters, the afterlife is about re-encounters.

Experiential Dissonance and Divine Hiddenness

Our expectations for human experience of God can obscure the reality and the presence of such experience for us. They can lead us to look in the wrong places for God’s presence, and they can lead us not to look at all. This article counters the threat of misleading expectations regarding God, while acknowledging a role for diving hiding from humans on occasion. It contends that, given God’s perfect moral character, we should expect typical human experience of God to have moral dissonance, that is, experiential conflict in morally relevant ways. We shall see the evidential or cognitive importance of how humans respond to such dissonance. Our failing to respond cooperatively with God can result either in our obscuring evidence of divine reality or in God’s hiding divine self-manifestation for redemptive purposes aimed at our benefit.

Institutional Religion and Religious Experience

A number of empirical studies have shown the continuous lack of adherence and the growing autonomy of the population regarding religious institutions. This article reflects on the kind of relationship between deinstitutionalisation and religious experience based on the following hypothesis: the evident decline in religious institutions does not necessarily lead to the disappearance or the weakening of religious experience; rather, it runs simultaneously with a process of individualisation. Our aim is to provide empirical evidence of such transformations; therefore, we do not get involved in speculations, but take into account the contributions of scholars concerning three key terms integrated in the conceptual framework of “religious experience’’: “experience of God”, “God image”, and “institutional belonging”. We analysed 39 in-depth interviews with a qualitative approach; interviews were conducted during the years 2016–2018 amongst Evangelical and Catholic populations in three Latin American cities (Córdoba, Montevideo, and Lima) and in the city of Bilbao (Spain). These interviews clearly indicate a growing autonomy from the religious institution, while evidencing a rich range of experiences of God and a great diversity of God representations. In both cases, they point to processes of individualisation of believers who elaborate their own religious experience in a personal and complex way.

God, Evil, Freedom. Reception and Interpretation of Dostoevsky in Luigi Pareyson and his Heirs

The essay aims to focus on reception and interpretation of Dostoevsky in the thought of Luigi Pareyson (1918-1991) and his heirs, who have developed a deep and original theoretical reading of Dostoevsky's work, able to bring out not only its ethical stance, but most of the essential aspects of his thought, and to investigate its current relevance. The reflection of Pareyson – who promoted the introduction of Dostoevsky's thought into the academic circles of Turin, being convinced that philosophy cannot avoid confronting the issues it explores – consists of three main moments: the experience of good and evil, the experience of freedom and the experience of God. Starting from consideration of Dostoevsky's characters as ideas, Pareyson proposes a new and coherent philosophical interpretation of his work, which can undoubtedly be compared to those of Ivanov, Berdjaev, Evdomikov, Šestov. His observations around the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor and the "refutation of Ivan" – which, according to him, constitute the most significant and theoretically prolific moments of Dostoevsky's production – seem unaffected by the flow of time and could still represent a valuable and indispensable contribution to the understanding not only of the great Russian author, but of human nature itself.

DLSU-D Green Innovations on Waste Management: Adoption of Greener Lifestyles in New Normal

De La Salle University-Dasmariῆas (DLSU-D) is one with the call to collective action in responding to global ecological crisis as it adapts to the new normal of creating a safe, sustainable, and healthy university where the experience of God is lived and shared. As the world is currently battling new challenges affecting the environment in the face of COVID-19 crisis, DLSU-D reiterates its stand to lead in sustainable practices that foster caring for our common environmental home. Under the Black Out! Green In! flagship program, which is the University’s green response to combat climate change, its Ecological Solid Waste Management Program (ESWMP) ventures into simple, low-cost, and low technology initiatives. Internal collaboration among faculty, students, and service providers as well as external partnerships with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and local government units (LGUs) having similar environmental advocacies and lifestyle changing significantly contribute to the innovations and sustainability of the campus waste management program

STRUKTUR RASA ADORASI

The true religious feeling is rooted in adoration. The taste of adoration is derived from the experience of God which indeed shake one’s soul. On one side, the experience of God leads to the recognition of God as the Great Creator of the universe. In this case, God is experienced as the everything. On the other side, it causes that human being encounters the self-recognition as a helpless creature. One feels as a nothingness of creature here. The feeling of adoration, therefore, has a religious structure in human soul that has a direction to God. As the structure of soul, the adoration is likely to be subjective which means that the subject experiences God (the world of ideas) and at the same time, it is objective that God is experienced by the subject (the real world). The object of the experience of adoration is, particularly, transcendent. Finally, the sense of adoration is needed to revive the living of faith for the believers.

The art of interpreting God’s action in the theology of three medieval mystic women

This study presents an approach to the theological minds of three Medieval mystical women: Matilde de Magdeburgo, Margarita Porete and Hadewijch de Amberes. Their theology is for the Church and theological matters, a source of wisdom, for they interpreted their experience of faith as imperative to make the gospel known. They lived in a time marked by significant developments in literature, artistic constructions and experiences of new spiritualities. They were part of an organisation of laywomen called the beguines who taught the art of interpreting God’s action in the being. The medieval writing of courtly love, amorous dialogue and the mystics of nothingness resounded in them. The underlying question of our study was which theological categories did these beguine women rely on to interpret God’s action in beings? As a point of departure, we performed the hermeneutic method to describe some of the theological categories that gave character to their thought, which aimed at enriching a theology that involved women’s contributions, the methods with which they constructed the knowledge and the challenges they proposed. Their theology constituted a critical voice of the androcentric and patriarchal schemes that did not allow women to teach or talk about God.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The interdisciplinary nature of the study is that the problem raised assumes a dialogue with other social science disciplines specifically. The way in which women construct a discourse on God’s action in people implies taking into account anthropological, theological, psychological and literary elements. In their openness to God’s action, human beings put into action their cognitive capacities and the knowledge derived from their cultural interaction in order to be able to speak about the experience of God in their lives. This study offers elements for fundamental theology and mystical theology.

Salvation, Baptism in the Holy Spirit, and Experience of God

This chapter begins by charting the failure of Herbert Asbury’s conversion, using this as a point of departure to review two classical ways to provide a taxonomy of divine action for the Christian life, especially the experience of the Holy Spirit. The Christian tradition imparts a variety of concepts like sanctification, theosis, holiness, baptism in the Spirit, and union with Christ to speak of the experience of the Christian believer. Furthermore, the tradition speaks of the action of the church and the action of other believers on Christians. By attending to the concepts of divine and human agency, this chapter provides a way forward through this debate.