Seeing the tundra for the plants, on the eco-spiritual wholeness of arctic vegetation

Drawing on ethnographic field research in Chukotka, Russia, this article explores ideas and practices connected with the Arctic tundra vegetation that speak to its place in Chukchi spirituality and cultural milieu. The ethnographic focus is on a Chukchi remembrance ceremony with other social contexts of human–plant interaction offered as comparative examples. Contributing novel insight for the considerations of sentient landscapes and ceremonial engagements with plants, the article turns to the Chukchi eco-spiritual relationships in the beyond-the-human world. It suggests that the vegetation cover is not merely an assemblage of fungi and plants, but an organismal membrane through which the tundra communicates and acts, while also facilitating integrations between the human and beyond-the-human worlds.

Human Flourishing and a Theology of Poverty Alleviation

The Christian Scriptures present an idealized vision for human flourishing that includes material and economic justice, as well as relational, spiritual wholeness. This binds Christians to a non-negotiable responsibility to work to prevent and alleviate poverty as an act of participation in God’s redemption of creation. Key to this work is an appropriate and accurate understanding of human flourishing (and its corollary, human poverty) as multi-dimensional. Consequently, any Christian theology that seeks to address the prevention and alleviation of poverty must also explore the necessary issues from a multi-dimensional perspective. While there are diverse ways in which Christians can participate in this divine work, a Christian vision for the alleviation and elimination of poverty must have a focus on long-term structural solutions to injustice, and the importance of community and relationship. This article gives particular attention to a Canadian context. (150 words only)

The Influence of Emotional Well-Being and Spiritual Wholeness on Midlife Positive Functioning of Middle-Aged Professionals

This descriptive-correlational study focused on the emotional well-being, spiritual wholeness, and positive functioning of middle-aged professionals. It aimed to measure the levels of emotional well-being, spiritual wholeness, and positive functioning; likewise, their difference when age, sex, civil and employment status, and job rank were considered. This research also intended to determine the relationship among the mentioned constructs. The study utilized tests on Emotional Well-being, Spiritual Wholeness, and Psychological Well-being Scale. Eighty-three participants from the university in Bacolod City were purposively chosen to answer these tests. Findings revealed that the levels of emotional well-being and spiritual wholeness of midlife adults were very high. Also, no significant differences in both constructs were found. The positive functioning of the respondents is high. However, an average positive functioning of single respondents was revealed when the civil status was considered. It was concluded that both emotional well-being and spiritual wholeness are significantly related to the positive functioning of midlife adults. The results of the study will be utilized for the creation of a wellness program, which aims to improve the employee’s psychological well-being.

Clergy Wholeness Study: How Occupational Distress, Depression, and Social Support Inform the Health of Clergy

It has been shown that the rate of clergy occupational distress and depression is increasing. This study examines occupational distress, social support, mental health, and spiritual wholeness in Florida clergy. Clergy in our study sample exhibited higher rates of occupational distress than the national average. Significant connections were made between validated instruments used to assess mental health, clergy occupational distress, and social support. More research is needed to understand the potential causal effects.

Slavophilism and the Origins of Russian Religious Philosophy

This chapter presents Slavophilism as having laid the foundations for the further development of Russian religious philosophy. The leading Slavophile thinkers in this respect were Aleksei Khomiakov and Ivan Kireevsky. Two main principles guided their religious thought: the compatibility of faith and reason, and the defence of human freedom, dignity, and personhood. Their signature religious-philosophical concepts are sobornost, faithful or believing reason, and integral personhood. The chapter explores the different sources of their religious thought, prioritizing their own faith and religious experience. Khomiakov and Kireevsky were convinced that human beings, through integrating faith and reason and achieving spiritual wholeness, could apprehend reality in its ontological or noumenal depths, in a way that abstract rationalism could not. This intuition of being came to be hailed as the distinctive ontologism of Russian religious philosophy. It provided a foundation for the development of Russian philosophical personalism. The Slavophiles, especially through the concept of sobornost, also emphasized the communal nature of personhood: persons realize themselves through free and loving interaction with each other. For Khomiakov and Kireevsky, the ideal community was the Church.

The Prosthetic Fantasies and Fallacies of Claude Wheeler

The chapter frames Willa Cather’s 1922 novel One of Ours within the context of the US government’s concern about wartime production’s depletion of American forests. Government rehabilitationists and foresters alike sought to place disabled soldiers in forestry-related vocations, which would provide employment and spiritual renewal in nature. These concerns mirror those of Cather’s protagonist Claude Wheeler, who suffers a spiritual amputation at age five when his father cuts down a tree with which Claude had developed an Emersonian kinship. In war he finds spiritual wholeness by offering himself as the prosthetic limbs for those intellectually and artistically superior individuals whom the war has physically and spiritually amputated. Claude’s wholeness comes, ironically, in seeing himself as the trees being cut down for the matériel needed to win the war and civilization to the western world. This self-conceptualization puts him in close company with Italian Futurism, which praises both human mechanization and violence.

Audre Lorde’s Hopelessness and Hopefulness: Cultivating a Womanist Nondualism for Psycho-Spiritual Wholeness

The late black American feminist lesbian poet Audre Lorde (1934–1992) was known in feminist communities in the United States, Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere for her poetry and prose about how to survive various forms of oppression. Though Lorde authored many political and spiritual poems and essays (including psychological topics) in her adulthood, little has been written about Lorde’s early psycho-spiritual spiritual journey from Catholicism to I Ching, which informed her adult integrated African spirituality, which in turn informed her political and social consciousness. Lorde’s poems to God, written during puberty and post-puberty, and her embrace of I Ching nondualism, provides insight into how Lorde understood the psycho-spiritual challenges of surviving through hopelessness and despair, and into confidence and hopefulness.

The Time of Troubles in Alexander Dugin’s Narrative

Alexander Dugin (b. 1962) is one of the best-known philosophers and public intellectuals of post-Soviet Russia. While his geopolitical views are well-researched, his views on Russian history are less so. Still, they are important to understand his Weltanschauung and that of like-minded Russian intellectuals. For Dugin, the ‘Time of Troubles’ – the period of Russian history at the beginning of the seventeenth century marked by dynastic crisis and general chaos – constitutes an explanatory framework for the present. Dugin implicitly regarded the ‘Time of Troubles’ in broader philosophical terms. For him, the ‘Time of Troubles’ meant not purely political and social upheaval/dislocation, but a deep spiritual crisis that endangered the very existence of the Russian people. Russia, in his view, has undergone several crises during its long history. Each time, however, Russia has risen again and achieved even greater levels of spiritual wholeness. Dugin believed that Russia was going through a new ‘Time of Troubles’. In the early days of the post-Soviet era, he believed that it was the collapse of the USSR that had led to a new ‘Time of Troubles’. Later, he changed his mind and proclaimed that the Soviet regime was not legitimate at all and, consequently, that the ‘Time of Troubles’ started a century ago in 1917. Dugin holds a positive view of Putin in general. Still, his narrative implies that Putin has been unable to arrest the destructive process of a new Time of Trouble.

Pastoral caregiving as life science: Towards an existential hermeneutics of life within the interplay between pastoral healing (cura vitae) and spiritual wholeness

Currently, the media is creating an illusion of youthful wellbeing: ‘healthism’. But is life merely about physical health? What is meant by spiritual healing in pastoral caregiving? By means of the ontology of life and an existential analysis of the structure of being, a grid is developed in order to make a pastoral diagnosis regarding the interplay between different aspects and dimensions of the category life. It is argued that, seeing the bigger picture in a pastoral hermeneutics of life, contributes to spiritual healing (cura vitae). The basic assumption is that cura animarum should be designed in theory formation in pastoral caregiving as follows: faith care as life care. It is, in this respect, that the Christian spiritual categories of anastrephō, peripateō and hodos can be used in practical theological reflection to describe praxis in practical theology as fides quaerens vivendi [faith seeking lifestyles]. A spirituality of lifestyles points to habitus [human soulfulness] as new modes of ‘walking with God’ and ‘living with God’ (pneumatological praxis of God). Fides quaerens viviendi should be exemplified by a taxonomy of virtues.