Reflections of Spiritual Narratives

This narrative illustrates the connections between spirituality, writing, and health. It does not promote a specific religion but demonstrates strength people gain from believing in a higher power. Prayers with hospital patients and the search for connections more than coincidences illustrate how people find and maintain hope and faith when presented with tragic events such as the recent pandemic. Each reader may find encouragement while reflecting on and following an individual spiritual path.

Spiritual Legitimacy in Contemporary Japan: A Case Study of the Power Spot Phenomenon and the Haruna Shrine, Gunma

Since the 2000s, Japanese internet media as well as mass media, including magazines, television and newspapers, have promoted the concept of a “power spot” as part of the spirituality movement in the country. This emerging social environment for the power spot phenomenon has developed a new form of religiosity, which can be called “spiritual legitimacy,” according to the transformation of religious legitimacy embedded in Japanese society. This paper, therefore, examined the emergence of a new form of spiritual legitimacy utilizing a case study of the power spot phenomenon in the Haruna Shrine, Gunma Prefecture, in Japan. The development of the power spot phenomenon in the Haruna Shrine indicates that consumption of spiritual narratives has strongly promoted the construction of a social context of spiritual legitimacy, such as through shared images and symbols related to the narratives in the sacred site. As a result, this paper clarifies that this new form of spiritual legitimacy embodies stakeholders’ social consensus on spiritual narratives, which people have struggled to construct a social context for spiritual legitimacy to ensure hot authentication of their individual narratives and experiences.

Apocalyptic Geographies

In nineteenth-century America, “apocalypse” referred not to the end of the world but to sacred revelation, and “geography” meant both the physical landscape and its representation in printed maps, atlases, and pictures. This book explores how white Protestant evangelicals used print and visual media to present the antebellum landscape as a “sacred space” of spiritual pilgrimage, and how devotional literature influenced secular society in important and surprising ways. Reading across genres and media — including religious tracts and landscape paintings, domestic fiction and missionary memoirs, slave narratives and moving panoramas — the book illuminates intersections of popular culture, the physical spaces of an expanding and urbanizing nation, and the spiritual narratives that ordinary Americans used to orient their lives. Placing works of literature and visual art — from Thomas Cole's The Oxbow to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Henry David Thoreau's Walden — into new contexts, the book traces the rise of evangelical media, the controversy and backlash it engendered, and the role it played in shaping American modernity.

Reseña Uncovering Spiritual Narratives

Uncovering Spiritual Narratives es el título del libro escrito por Suzanne M. Coyle, publicado en el 2014 por la editorial Fortress Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Estados Unidos de América. El libro tiene un propósito de divulgación teórico-práctica del estudio de la terapia narrativa haciendo énfasis en las narrativas espirituales. La autora tiene un propósito didáctico al presentar algunos parámetros importantes para el desarrollo de la metodología de develamiento de las narrativas espirituales, dando pautas muy concretas en varios momentos a lo largo de todo el libro y particularmente al final de cada capítulo. Suzzanne Coyle, en un lenguaje accesible, demuestra cómo las historias espirituales crean significados y posibilidades que llevan a una acción liberadora.