Training Spiritual Caregivers

This chapter explores graduate theological education as a field that produces both discourses of spirituality and the professionals who provide what is increasingly called “spiritual care.” As taught in chaplaincy programs, the case of spiritual care illustrates how “spirituality” is produced by religious institutions in a pragmatic effort to train chaplains for work in the secular institutions that employ them. The chapter shows how, based on the history of chaplaincy graduate education programs and their students’ religious backgrounds, programs adapt the content of their curricula and their approaches to religious diversity to prepare their students for work with a wide range of religious and nonreligious people across secular institutions. It concludes by outlining what this case contributes to broader scholarly conversations about the institutional production of “spirituality” in the current American context and the role of theological education in that production.

Secular Scholarship in France

Between the French and German worlds of knowledge, a complex movement of cultural and intellectual transfers retained capital importance, from Voltaire’s days at the court of Friedrich II in Potsdam to Heine’s Parisian years, and beyond. On the French side, such contacts in the study of religions can often be traced to the activity of Protestant and Jewish scholars. The French-speaking Protestant theologians, including those in Geneva and in the Huguenot “Refuge” in Holland, sought to emulate liberal Lutheran theologians in the leading German universities, developing daring new approaches to Scriptural interpretation, while many Jewish scholars moved from Germany to France in search of academic posts. This forms the background to the unique development in France of a non-theological study of religion, by Protestant and Jewish scholars together with their Catholic colleagues, in new, secular institutions.

Religion and prosociality across the globe

In this paper we analyze newly available, globally representative data on preferences and world religions (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism). We find that individuals who report believing in such religions also exhibit more prosocial preferences, as measured by their levels of positive reciprocity, altruism and trust. We further document heterogeneous patterns of negative reciprocity and punishment across world religions. The association between religion and prosocial preferences is stronger in more populous societies and weaker in countries with better institutions. The interactive results between these variables point towards a substitution effect between religious and secular institutions, when it comes to prosocial preferences.

Contending with Spiritual Reductionism: Demons, Shame, and Dividualising Experiences Among Evangelical Christians with Mental Distress

The belief that mental distress is caused by demons, sin, or generational curses is commonplace among many evangelical Christian communities. These beliefs may have positive or negative effects for individuals and groups. Phenomenological descriptions of these experiences and the subjective meanings associated with them, however, remain somewhat neglected in the literature. The current study employed semi-structured interviews with eight evangelical Christians in order to idiographically explore their experiences of mental distress in relation to their faith and wider communities. Through an interpretative phenomenological analysis, two superordinate themes were constructed: negative spiritualisation and negotiating the dialectic between faith and the lived experience of mental distress. Participants variously experienced a climate of negative spiritualisation, whereby their mental distress was demonised and dismissed, and they were further discouraged from seeking help in secular institutions and environments. Participants often considered such dismissals of their mental distress as unhelpful and stigmatising and experienced heightened feelings of shame and suffering as a result. Such discouragement also contributed to the process of othering and relational disconnection. Alongside a rejection of church teachings, which exclusively spiritualised psychological distress, participants negotiated a nuanced personal synthesis of faith, theology, and distress, which assumed a localised and idiographic significance. This synthesis included advocating for the uptake of aetiological accounts, which contextualised mental distress in terms of the whole person and resisted de-politicised, dichotomised, and individualistic narratives. Results are discussed in relation to a broad range of literature in the field, while further research suggestions are provided.

Dimensões da justificação no discurso legislativo uma abordagem diacrónica

this paper I intend to analyse some aspects of the evolution observable in the way the legislative discourse justifies the legal-legislative provisions in legislative texts of different synchronies of the Portuguese language: this is especially apparent when they present statements which contain acts of discourse with justification value.From a comparative and diachronic perspective, I will confront Afonso X’s medieval legislative texts (such as the Portuguese versions of the Primeyra Partida and the Foro Real) with contemporary Portuguese legislative texts. I will attempt to demonstrate that in medieval legislative texts, in addition to the greater extent of the supporting segments, there is also a discursive structure that uses arguments of authority. In Afonso X’s legislative texts royal legislation is conveyed and the Speaker, designated by the first person “we”, is identified with the king, holding a power inherent to this statute. It reaffirms its status as authority and the desirability of royal legislative action and affirms the pragmatic need for the existence of justice by its favourable effect (which is ethically identified with the Common Good).By contrast, contemporary legislative discourse is presented in the third person and this does not designate any individualized subject. The law is stabilized, established in multi-secular institutions and fundamental rights are already guaranteed, and new legislation is generally conjunctural and especially case-by-case legislation. In contemporary legislative formulations there is no discourse of the legitimization of power and the dimension of the supporting segments is smaller.

Religion and Politics

Religious and secular institutions, forces and impulses have intersected repeatedly in Australian political life, not always along clear-cut lines. This chapter begins by analysing ways in which settler society sometimes deemed Indigenous peoples too irreligious for full participation in the new (Christian) polity, and at other times found their traditions too religious to be recognized under (secular) Australian law. It then considers how ideas of the Australian nation have assumed and disputed religious foundations. Religious institutions and their members have played prominent parts in party politics and in public policy. After considering key examples, the chapter reverses the standard analysis by considering how politics has shaped religion.

Female Religious Leadership during Khrushchev’s Anti-Religious Campaign

This article considers female leadership in Evangelical Baptist communities in the postwar period. The authors examine the extent to which the division of roles in religious communities was gender-dependent and how contemporaries perceived and described the roles of men and women in Baptist communities. The authors refer to materials from the town of Rasskazovo (a centre of Tambov region); there, the community of Baptists was led by Antonina Terekhova and Anna Zheltova. The documents studied demonstrate that the leaders of the community combined traditional “women’s” roles, such as looking after their children and grandchildren and running a household, with management of the religious community. This practice was heavily criticised and then persecuted by a governmental official, who, while restricting religious life in general, was also concerned about the gender of the community’s leader. The authors refer to such sources as oral accounts they collected, the archive of the Authorised Council for Religious Affairs (Tambov region), the archival collection of A. I. Klibanov’s expedition to Tambov region (1959), and the internal archive of the Russian Union of Evangelical Christian Baptists. The authors conclude that female leadership, often interpreted as “fanaticism”, was not suited for the format of religious life proposed by Soviet secular institutions. The fact that they had families made women more vulnerable to attacks from public institutions but also reduced the likelihood of direct repression.

Voluntary Departure of Clergy in the Secular Department in the First Half of the XIX Century: Causes, Results and Procedure of Office Work (on the Materials of the Tobolsk Spiritual Consistory)

The relevance of the study is largely due to the fact that at present, as in the period under consideration in the article, many clergy leave their work in the Church, and in the period of revival of the Russian Orthodox Church, this may become a significant problem for it. Its solution implies the need to study the history of this phenomenon. The author, based on the content of legislative acts and the interpretations of modern scholars, considered one of the main problems in the Russian Orthodox Church - voluntary care of the clergy in secular authority, during the XVIII - early XX centuries. On the basis of archival documents, the article reveals the main reasons that encourage young people of the spiritual Department to seek a place of service in secular institutions in the first half of the XIX century, the results of solving such cases by the Tobolsk spiritual Consistory, the terms and stages of office work. The methodological basis of this study was the most important principles of historical science, primarily such as system, historicism, interdisciplinarity and scientific objectivity, which allowed us to consider the studied phenomena in dynamics and interaction.

Soldiers and Scholars: Ritual Dilemmas among National Religious Combat Soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces

This article explores how the practice of Jewish rabbinic law within the combat ranks of the Israel Defense Forces can be used as an ethnographic medium through which anthropologists may better contextualize the social and political tensions that characterize Jewish religious nationalism in Israel. We argue that national religious combat soldiers rarely turn to rabbinic legal tracts, or to the overlapping levels of military and civilian rabbinic leadership in their immediate efforts to resolve the everyday ritual dilemmas of their service. Rather, these dilemmas are primarily addressed and (always imperfectly) resolved on the small-scale intra-unit level. Through this ethnographic window into the religious and ritual aspects of military life, this article ultimately argues that the experience of political piety in Israel (and perhaps the wider Middle East) hinges not so much upon the power play between opposing religious and secular institutions but rather in the daily ambivalences and ambiguities experienced by individual adherents as they go about their daily lives.

Conclusion

Chapter 7, the Conclusion, draws out the principal empirical findings of the study and argues that the instrumental reasoning missionaries adopted in the making of the Sunday school redefined the very values they sought to institutionalize. Missionaries bemoaned the secularization of schools, but readily copied the organizational forms of secular institutions; they deplored racism, but institutionalized racism in their own evangelical practice; they preached of the spiritual life, but displayed money-mindedness of an acute sort; they denounced “idolatry” and “heathenism,” but incorporated these very “defilements” as part of their schools’ functioning; and finally, they saw for themselves the disasters that British colonial rule brought upon an agrarian society, but justified its oppressions in the interests of Christianity. These were the workings of the “missionary calculus.” For “upper-caste” Indians, the organizational form that Sunday school missionaries brought to India offered them a new perspective on “modern,” systematic ways of representing belief and culture; and for “lower-caste” Indians, the Sunday school provided them with a social liberatory experience, an institution that was their very own, and for which they had legitimation from the most powerful forces in the land. In the absence of shared objectives, the Sunday school merely offered every group a platform for quid pro quo transactions. But in the making of their various compromises, participants, both Christian and non-Christian, showed that implicit in their actions were certain universal moral and educational values that transcended the doctrinal boundaries that Christian missionaries had prescribed for the Sunday school.