Abstract In a series of recent articles, including his Boyle Lecture, Rowan Williams has developed a theology of the role of intelligence and attention in spiritual life. There is a sense in which ...all intelligence is spiritual activity. Current approaches to intelligence are often mechanistic, but intelligence in spiritual life needs to be understood in a more embodied and organic way. Attention is often thought of as a matter of choosing which already‐formed objects to focus on. That overlooks the fact that sensory information is often confusing and ambiguous, and neglects how habits of attention make the world appear more atomized than it really is. If we can learn restraint in how we impose order upon the world around us in attending to it, there is an opportunity to encounter the divine Spirit which is the source of all that we experience. That leads to a more participatory, less objectifying, way of engaging with the world.
Decades of speculation about a warmer, wetter Mars climate in the planet's first billion years postulate a denser CO₂ -rich atmosphere than at present. Such an atmosphere should have led to the ...formation of outcrops rich in carbonate minerals, for which evidence has been sparse. Using the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit, we have now identified outcrops rich in magnesium-iron carbonate (16 to 34 weight percent) in the Columbia Hills of Gusev crater. Its composition approximates the average composition of the carbonate globules in martian meteorite ALH 84001. The Gusev carbonate probably precipitated from carbonate-bearing solutions under hydrothermal conditions at near-neutral pH in association with volcanic activity during the Noachian era.
From Feng Shui to holistic medicine, from aromatherapy candles to yoga weekends, spirituality is big business. It promises to soothe away the angst of modern living and to offer an antidote to ...shallow materialism.
Selling Spirituality is a short, sharp, attack on this fallacy. It shows how spirituality has in fact become a powerful commodity in the global marketplace - a cultural addiction that reflects orthodox politics, curbs self-expression and colonizes Eastern beliefs.Exposing how spirituality has today come to embody the privatization of religion in the modern West, Jeremy Carrette and Richard King reveal the people and brands who profit from this corporate hijack, and explore how spirituality can be reclaimed as a means of resistance to capitalism and its deceptions.
The essay focuses on four fundamental meanings of the concept of second nature in Hegel and reconstructs its links, internal connections and implications for the understanding of the whole ...Geistesphilosophie. Through the concept of second nature, in fact, it is possible to highlight the connection between subjective spirit and objective spirit and to show that the spheres of the spirit are not without unification and come from a common root. At the end of the essay it emerges that the concept of second nature has also an ambivalent status: on the one hand, it makes possible the idealization of nature and the elevation to the dimension of spirit, on the other hand, it implies a naturalization of spirit, that is, its autonegation.
Il saggio focalizza quattro significati fondamentali del concetto di seconda natura in Hegel e ne ricostruisce i legami, i nessi interni, le implicazioni per la comprensione dell’intera Geistesphilosophie. Attraverso il concetto di seconda natura, infatti, è possibile evidenziare la connessione tra spirito soggettivo e spirito oggettivo e mostrare che le sfere dello spirito non sono prive di unificazione e provengono da una radice comune. Al termine del saggio emerge che il concetto di seconda natura ha inoltre uno statuto ambivalente: da un lato, esso rende possibile l’idealizzazione della natura e l’innalzamento alla dimensione dello spirito, dall’altro implica una naturalizzazione dello spirito ossia la sua autonegazione.
This article explores the processes of transformation of the self in dang-ki healing, a form of Chinese spirit mediumship in Singapore, drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic research. In ...dang-ki healing, it is believed that a deity possesses a human, who is called a dang-ki, to help clients (i.e., devotees). Through the dang-ki, clients can interact with powerful deities in ways that help them feel hopeful and supported. The dang-kis themselves may also benefit therapeutically from their participation as mediums. Many dang-kis suffer from personal conflicts and distress before becoming a medium and they express and transform their distress through the idiom of spirit possession. Since deities represent traits and moral values promoted in Chinese culture, possession by a deity allows the dang-ki to embody an ideal self and to acquire spiritual knowledge by engaging in ritual practices involving cleansing, self-mortification, stereotyped movements, and altered consciousness. At the same time, junior possessing deities must undergo training under the guidance of senior deities to achieve a higher level of spiritual existence by helping clients through the dang-ki's body. Thus, in dang-ki healing, practitioners, clients and possessing deities are transformed in parallel ways. The dynamics of this reciprocal and interdependent healing process differ from the individualistic approaches in Western psychotherapy and shed light on the links between healing processes, cultural ontologies, and concepts of personhood.
Unruly Spirits connects the study of seances, telepathy, telekinesis, materializations, and other parapsychic phenomena in France during the age of Sigmund Freud to an epistemological crisis that ...would eventually yield the French adoption of psychoanalysis. Skillfully navigating experiments conducted by nineteenth-century French psychical researchers and the wide-ranging debates that surrounded their work, M. Brady Brower situates the institutional development of psychical research at the intersection of popular faith and the emergent discipline of psychology._x000B__x000B_Brower shows how spiritualist mediums were ignored by French academic scientists for nearly three decades. Only after the ideologues of the Third Republic turned to science to address what they took to be the excess of popular democracy would the marvels of mediumism begin to emerge as legitimate objects of scientific inquiry. Taken up by the most prominent physicists, physiologists, and psychologists of the last decades of the nineteenth century, psychical research would eventually stall in the 1920s as researchers struggled to come to terms with interpersonal phenomena (such as trust and good faith) that could not be measured within the framework of their experimental methods._x000B__x000B_In characterizing psychical research as something other than a mere echo of popular spirituality or an anomaly among the sciences, Brower argues that the questions surrounding mediums served to sustain the scientific project by forestalling the establishment of a closed and complete system of knowledge. By acknowledging persistent doubt about the intentions of its participants, psychical research would result in the realization of a subjectivity that was essentially indeterminate and would thus clear the way for the French reception of psychoanalysis and the Freudian unconscious and its more comprehensive account of subjective uncertainty.
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