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In Matthew 6 and Luke 12, Christ instructs his listeners to consider the “birds of the air” and “lilies of the field.” For Martin Luther, this instruction essentially amounts to a reprimand: as human beings are naturally dominant over non-rational animals, Christ’s instruction to learn from these creatures is intended to elicit guilt and shame. Against this backdrop, I explore a fundamentally different interpretation in Søren Kierkegaard’s “Godly,” “Upbuilding,” and “Christian” discourses with normative implications for humanity’s reciprocity with other animals.

The script of parenting shifts when parents learn of their child’s Down syndrome diagnosis. To build a theory of the diagnostic experience and early family sense-making process, we interviewed 33 parents and nine grandparents living in the United States who learned prenatally or neonatally of their child’s diagnosis. The core category of rescuing hope for the future encompassed the social process of sense-making over time as parents managed their sorrow, shock, and grief and amassed meaningful messages that anchored them as they looked toward the future. Application of the theory to practice underscores the import of early professional support offered to parents at key points in the sense-making process: Early as they disclose the news of the diagnosis to family and friends, and later close friends and kin assimilate meaningful messages about what the diagnosis means as they recalibrate expectations for a hopeful future.

This examination of north central Indiana between 1890 and 1940 offers a unique insight into the historic response to stillborn and newborn infant deaths. With a remarkable record of those interred, as well as local newspapers from these communities, the records of families who endured these losses allow us to discover their public responses to stillbirths. This examination also considers the broader social and cultural forces that shaped how families and communities responded to stillbirths, including advertisements for the famous patent medicine, Dr. Pierce’s, which promised that women taking their pills would prevent a stillborn baby, and the heavily reported Canadian Great Stork Derby.

The authors of this paper explore the distress that terminally ill children experience when they see the suffering their illness and dying is causing their parents. The authors refer to this experience as special sorrow. The conceptual framework that guides this reflection of the terminally ill child’s experience is the Roy adaptation model. The goal of this paper is to explore the concept of special sorrow as lived, so as to help nurses be with such children and their parents in a way that eases sorrow through effective adaptation and transcendence.

We learn by returning. To our classrooms, our publics, our bodies. This performance text returns us to these places which remain the relics of affective encounters, the sticky sites of emotional residue, historical fragments that tell us what we can bear to remember about ourselves. These histories rely on ‘the moving, the deja-felt in all of its uncanniness’, (Manning, 2013, p. 84), a now which coagulates the push and pull of memory, interiority, and external struggle in time and space or spacetime. We return by building, commemorating, protesting, and then tearing down. Research, activism, education, and love intersect in lives of engaged social action and through a sometimes-reluctant return to sites of consciousness-raising with one common aim: Let us learn.

This article focuses on the substance of centering on a nursing disciplinary theoretical approach accomplished through a brief review of the phenomena of joy-sorrow from a research and practice perspective. When practice is designed from a theoretical conceptual system, it takes form and provides tangible benefits through the creative conceptualizations and connectedness that arise to influence persons who seek healthcare. Although the article espouses a humanbecoming framework, the take-away is that a nursing disciplinary approach promotes congruence among theory, research, practice, and education, thereby advancing the discipline’s meaning and contributions.

The overarching aim of this study is to analyse how social media communication can impact the formation of cultural trauma discourses in the aftermath of disruptive societal events. The article focuses on how the hashtag #openstockholm was used on Twitter for support, sharing and cooperation after the Stockholm lorry attack in 2017. Much of the content posted with this hashtag had a light-hearted tone, flouting the conventional trauma discourses of grief and sorrow in a way that was surprising, and perhaps even provocative, to some. A thematic analysis of tweets shows the different uses of the hashtag over time, as well as distinguishes two conflicting discourses that either downplayed or amplified the cultural trauma narrative. The study shows that the responses to traumatic events may depend on a culturally specific logic of collective action frames which implies the need for contextual understandings of how cultural trauma discourses are negotiated.

© The Author(s) 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

When we reflect on music and theology, we find that questions about God and religious practice are also questions about deep human emotions: awe, wonder, fear, grief, sorrow, confusion, joy, hope, gratitude, and ecstatic praise. Music can sound the language of the heart before God and neighbor, into mystery and suffering.

The music that chronicles the African American experience is marked in profound but subtle and contradictory ways by the law, perhaps the most pervasive presence in black life since enslaved Africans arrived in the New World. From the mournful but veiled complaints of the sorrow songs to Jay Z’s boastful narration of a pretextual traffic stop, at the heart of so much of the music of black culture lies a wary appraisal, and often an outright rejection, of the “justice” of American law. This Commentary reviews the fraught relationship between the law and the tradition of African American music.

This performance-based autoethnographic work is inspired by the epiphanic moment in the author’s life. By depicting a woman struggling between families’ expectations to her and her own dream, the author demonstrates the complicated nature of the structure–agency interaction and sympathizes with those obedient daughters who inherit the family traditions with understanding but simultaneously are confined by the past. The haunting ghost of the woman’s family is her late grandfather who was executed as a political criminal. Always trying to please others and compensate the loss and sorrow in the family, she finally failed in intimate relationships and expelled herself to an exotic culture, where she felt settled since she carries no labels or past there. The moment of reconciliation did not solve physical problems, but helped her reexamine the painful family memory and move on with courage and agency.

Prostate cancer and its outcomes are a real threat for health and well-being for men living in the Western world. The number of men with a diagnosis of prostate cancer, before the age of 65 years, has increased in recent decades. The aim of this study was to explore how some of these Swedish men experienced and talked about their sexuality. Four focus group discussions were performed in the context of associations for prostate cancer. Using qualitative content analysis, it was identified how the diagnosis was a threat to their male identity; the men’s vulnerability as a group in society was made explicit. Their sexuality was diminished by their illness experiences. These experiences were difficult to share and talk about with others and therefore connected with silence and sorrow. As a result of this, the informants often played a passive role when or if they discussed issues related to sexuality with someone in the health care organizations. The possibility of voluntarily joining a cancer association was probably highly beneficial for these men. During the sessions, several men expressed the opinion that “it is always great to talk.”

Robert Browning's Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day has eluded generic identification. One possible solution to this critical problem is to view the poem as falling within the tradition of meditational verse. Evidence for such a reading may be drawn from a look at the origin of the poem as well as the literary relationship between Browning and John Donne. This essay offers a reading of the poem that focuses on identifying and illustrating its characteristics as a meditation. ********** As Barbara Ryerse has recently noted, Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day stands alone as an "exceptional piece" within the Browning canon (49). We have little to go on from Browning himself that would clarify either his purpose or his meaning in the work. Critics have frequently looked for explanations stemming from Browning's own life, and indeed there is some evidence that the poem may be at least in part confessional. A letter written on July 31, 1845, by Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning illuminates the origin of the poem: "Did you hear," she asks playfully, "that I was one of 'those schismatiques of Amsterdam' whom your Dr. Donne would have put into the dykes?" She then proceeds to express her preference for the simplicity of the Dissenters' chapel over all of the "dogmas and doxies." Browning responds, "Can it be ... you are a schismatic and frequenter of Independent Dissenting Chapels? And you confess this to me--whose father and mother went this morning to the very Independent Chapel where they took me, all these years back, to be baptized" (Letters 140-41). Basing their conclusions on this passage as well as other bits and pieces from the correspondence, including a letter of May, 1846, in which Elizabeth urges Robert to speak in his own voice, a number of scholars have advanced a biographical reading of the poem. Among these is William Clyde DeVane, who calls the work "Browning's attempt to use the 'white light' of his own personality, rather than the 'broken lights' of the characters through whom he had spoken hitherto" (196-97). J. M. Cohen asserts that "clearly Browning was recalling some feeling of imminent revelation he had himself known, perhaps in his childhood" (66). We might also easily note that Robert was in a particularly reflective mood at the time since his much-loved mother had died just nine days before his only son was born. W. Hall Griffin and Harry Minchin explain the emotional tone of the poem by pointing out that "Browning's thoughts had lately been recalled by sorrow to his home in England, and to his mother's religious faith" (176). Clyde Ryals links the events in Browning's own life with the subject matter of the poem by musing that it was "perhaps inevitable" that "he should turn to religion for [his] subject" (94). He goes further: "Browning no doubt wished to heed his wife's advice and speak in his own voice when in the summer of 1849 she set him the task of composition to relieve his sorrow and idleness" (95). E. LeRoy Lawson, while admitting the distance between poet and speaker, claims that Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day is one of Browning's "more autobiographical" poems (94). Addison Bross identifies the search for belief in the poem with Browning's own search (21). Constance Hassett views the poem as confessional at the very least, if not strictly autobiographical (58). William E. Harrold states rather tentatively, "The experimental structure in Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day, which combines the dream vision with dramatic scenes, dialogue, and narrative, allows the poet to speak more personally than in many of the stricter monologues" (90). Richard Kennedy and Donald Hair also see the poem through the lens of confession and suggest that the poet's creative purpose was a "reexamination of his faith" (188). Andrew Tate argues that in Christmas-Eve Browning conducts a "search for authentic religious experience" and concludes that the poet, through his speaker, "reconciles himself to an aspect of his [Protestant] heritage" (49). …

Through examining the emotion-laden encounters between veterinarians and bereaved pet owners, this study focuses attention on a group of medical professionals who manage the emotions of their clients in light of opposing contextual goals. While negotiating possible outcomes for animal patients, veterinary emotion work is designed to assuage guilt and grief to facilitate timely and rational decisions. However, after clients make the difficult decision to euthanize their pet, veterinary emotion work is geared toward creating “safe” emotional space for grieving clients. This study illustrates that veterinarians have a growing commitment to comforting the owners of euthanized animals and to validating their feelings of grief, pain, and sorrow. On a broader, theoretical level, this study also applies and extends concepts developed in previous sociological analyses of emotion management and human–animal relationships.

A diverse range of commemorative practices developed in the wake of the First World War as collective means for performing private trauma and loss. Public commemorative silence became adopted as a key feature of Armistice Day from 1919 onwards. This practice can be treated as a “social technology,” which is here defined as the mediational means for the reflexive self-modification of the subjective state of affairs of human subjects. Social technologies produce novel experiences, new modalities for performing the psychological. When a social remembering approach to memory is adopted, the Armistice silence can be compared to more recent uses of public silence with respect to how the past is mobilized in the present. In current, highly technologically mediated versions, public silence effectively disposes of those it is supposed to commemorate and makes of silence a spectacle where participants are absorbed in their own enactment of empathy and sorrow. When disconnected from other forms of remembrance, public silence tends not to open the past up for interpretation and debate and should therefore be reconsidered as a means of “one-off” commemoration.

Up to 15 percent of all diagnosed pregnancies end in miscarriage. The loss can cause deep sorrow with complex emotional reactions as a result. Research shows that women often feel alone with their ...

If Only We Could See: Mystical Vision and Social Transformation. By Gary Commins. Eugene, Ore.: Cascade Books, 2015. xiv + 502 pp. $59.00 (paper).Gary Commins has written a truly remarkable book. Like his earlier published writing, it is an exploration of the passions and assumptions that have shaped his career as a parish priest in challenging urban settings.Ten years ago, Commins published Becoming Bridges: The Spirit and Practice of Diversity (2007), reflecting on his own experience of ministry in congregations far more diverse than the average Episcopal parish. A decade earlier, he had written Spiritual People, Radical Lives (1995), a study of four Christians often identified as social activists-Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton, and A. J. Muste-to demonstrate that while all four had highly visible encounters with the social ills of their day, in each case their activity was undergirded by a profound faith more commonly identified with the mystical tradition. But his intention in this work goes beyond the symbiotic relationship between the two. He insists that "there is an intrinsic connection between prayer and social action because Christian spirituality is always incamational," and that social transformation is "always undergirded, encompassed, and made more urgent by transcendence" (pp. 11-12). Furthermore, "mystics and activists are deemed threatening because they are dangerous to every empire, every religious, political, and economic system, and every status quo of any kind, because no status quo is ever the realm of God. Their experiences of God and their faith in God make them all dangerous" (p. 12). This is the premise that he has undertaken to describe and document in If Only We Could See.Unlike his earlier books, the present volume is a dense and scrupulously documented study of the relationship between what Commins calls "mystical vision and social transformation"-a belief that has obviously undergirded his own decades-long ministry. His investigations have taken him far and wide, and include fiction and poetry as well as twenty centuries of Christian experience and insights from Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, and Sufi Muslim voices. The "Glossary of Names," which offers one-line biographical information for each of the persons cited, includes, by my count, 227 individuals plus four of Francis of Assisi's brothers and sixteen Desert Fathers and Mothers. Each chapter except the first (an introduction) and the last (which ends with a prayer) begins and ends with a brief meditation by Commins, drawing on his own experience as pastor and parent, and sometimes the connection between the two.The book is divided into ten chapters, each of which is loosely organized around a central theme: the importance of vision for both religious experience and activism, both of which he considers as rooted in the experience of God; the inevitable sorrow of really seeing the world as it is; the light of God; the hiddenness of the divine; the pain that customarily accompanies both the mystical and the activist way; the challenge to see and share God's love for all human beings, and indeed the whole creation ; the holiness of the body and of human relationship (borrowing a phrase from the nineteenthcentury Anglican priest and Christian Socialist Charles Kingsley, Commins entitles this chapter "Holy Communists"); God's often hidden glory; and the peace of God, an "inner peace that forever rests in restlessness" (p. …

Psychologists have mostly overlooked the topic of anger toward God. The current study tested an intervention based on the biblical psalms of lament, consisting of 20 devotional readings and weekly experiential assignments, delivered electronically over a four-week period. A total of 192 college students at Christian institutions across the United States completed the study, and were randomly assigned to the experimental condition, an attention control condition, or a no-contact condition. The expected findings--that the experimental intervention would cause decreased feelings of anger and complaint toward God, as well as increased intimacy with God over time--were not confirmed. However, those participants who reported maximum compliance with the intervention showed increased ratings on Communion with God. Implications are discussed. 'I love God." Countless believers throughout time have uttered this phrase. But what about the other side of human emotions? What about anger or frustration toward God? Anger toward the divine is nothing new, though it may remain a taboo subject among certain religious groups. Anger, confusion, disillusionment, and frustration with God have affected numerous people throughout centuries. Within the Old Testament, the Book of Psalms is full of honest discourse with God that reflects the gamut of emotions. For example, recorded as the 13th Psalm, we find the following words of angst and desperation (Book of Psalms, NIV, 2000): "How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart?" Relationship with the divine is a topic that has been long explored, both by theologians and social scientists. However, the topic of anger and disappointment toward God, though valued within religious literature, has been mostly neglected within psychological research until recently. A number of articles pioneering the subject have now emerged (e.g., Exline & Martin, 2005; Wood, Worthington, Exline, Yali, Aten & McMinn, 2010). Anger toward God is certainly not an uncommon phenomenon. A recent study examined the prevalence of anger toward God in a large national sample revealing that 62% of Americans sometimes experience anger toward God, while 2.5% reported that they are often angry with God (Exline, Park, Smyth, & Carey, 2011). According to this data, anger toward God is a relevant topic affecting a majority of Americans at some time during their lives, while a minority of individuals experience anger toward God on a frequent or persistent basis. Beyond being a widespread phenomena, Exline et al. (2011) concluded that anger toward God is measurable within a variety of contexts and populations. Relevance of Anger toward God To grasp the importance of anger toward God, it is helpful to consider the broader phenomenon of religious struggle and coping. When people are faced with stressful life events or crises, they often turn to religion as a resource for coping. In fact, studies have shown that a majority of Americans employ religious coping during difficult times (Schotten-bauer, Klimes-Dougan, Rodriguez, Arnkoff, Glass, et al., 2006). Religious coping is multidimensional; it refers to the vast array of ways that people think, feel, and behave regarding their religious beliefs following a stressful event (Pargament, Smith, Koenig, & Perez, 1998). Many methods of religious coping have been identified and categorized; for example, the terms positive and negative religious coping have been coined, referring to patterns of religious coping that have been associated with either positive health benefits or health risks (Zinnbauer, & Pargament, 2005). Four broad categories of religious coping have been defined as: 1) passively deferring control of life to God, 2) self-directing, seeking control through personal initiative rather than through God, 3) pleading in order to work through God via petitioning, and 4) collaborative, partnering with God in problem-solving (Pargament, 1997). …

To live on the Islands of the Blest means that the dwellers do not grow old or die but live an eternal life in a world closed and separated from the rest of the world. Is this what has happened to group analysis? Has it happened to us as group analysts? Has it happened to our groups? If this is so and we want to change it, what are we to do? Could it be that the myth might show us, I wonder? I emphasize the need for critical reflection and possible refinement of group analytic thinking and practice, as well as proper research to support this, and the need for us as group analytic societies and as practitioners to dare to take on authority marketing group analytic psychotherapy as a relevant and valuable choice of treatment. If not we may end up like the small group trying to make the culture of books and reading survive in Fahrenheit 451, the film by Truffaut. That is to me an image of desperation, anxiety and sorrow, not eternal bliss.

Review of the monograph: Pierre Englebert (2009), Africa: Unity, Sovereignty, and Sorrow , Boulder, Co. & London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, ISBN: 978-1-58826-646-0 (Hardcover) / 978-1-58826-623-1 (Paperback), 310 pages.

This essay reexamines George W. Bush’s post-9/11 rhetoric of escalation for the way it articulated a war of totality with a nationalist sentiment of giddy victimage. My analysis pivots around a speech Mr. Bush delivered in the fall of 2005 at Norfolk Naval Base. Steeped in figures of amplification, the speech is a dramatic exemplar of Mr. Bush’s habit of articulating totality with pleasure. His performance conjoined the “whatever-it-takes” commitment of the nation’s socioeconomic and human resources with a dark strain of civic pathos. I thus argue that the challenge for critics of public discourse is figuring out how to disentangle the threads of sorrow and giddiness that produce rhetorics of escalation and wars of totality. This in turn requires grappling with the sensation of ecstatic victimage that dwells in the bosom of national trauma.

It avails not, time nor place--distance avails not. --Walt Whitman, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" The Rev. John Ames knows he is dying. His challenge is to record his memories so that his young son can "know his begats" and learn the life lessons of a father he barely has time to know (Robinson, Gilead 75, 133). Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead, (1) told in Ames' voice, is the story of a man sifting, analyzing, and categorizing memories to fight the true enemy--not physical death, but linear time and the inevitable process of forgetting. He describes the problem by quoting a stanza of Isaac Watts' 1719 hymn, "O, God, Our Help in Ages Past": Time, like an ever-rolling stream, Bears all its sons away; They fly forgotten, as a dream Dies at the opening day. (103) These lines, quoted frequently on American tombstones of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, are especially appropriate for a novel full of burials, from literal graves for bodies, Bibles, hymnals, and guns to the narrator's burial of a story that hovers over Ames' life until he resurrects it in the second half of the book. Ritualized burial, of course, is not so much a matter of disposal as of memorialization: a way to attach the abstract to the concrete and thus fix it in time and space so that it is always at hand. Memorialization--the physical presence of a tombstone, for example--ensures that what time bears away is not, indeed, forgotten. The rest of Watts' hymn also counters the mutability of physical life by imagining personal identity subsumed eventually within the unchanging nature of an eternal God, who, as Ames says later, "holds the whole of our lives in memory" (115). And herein is a paradox: both memorialization and theology suggest that the only way to preserve the memory of a life may be to lose it in collective memory, a process that Ames resists rather decisively. If the end of human life means the unalloyed joy of what Watts calls "our eternal home" in God, Ames is skeptical. He is not willing to "believe we will forget our sorrow altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking" (104). In other words, he can come to grips with being gone, but not with forgetting or being forgotten. And so he engages in an act of creation that echoes the mythic narratives of Genesis 1 and 2, in which God creates the world with words. Quoting George Herbert a few pages later, Ames acknowledges that "Preservation is a Creation, and more, it is a continued Creation, and a Creation every moment" (111). Writing, a sacred act that has always felt to Ames "like praying," both creates his life in all its singularity and situates it within the eternal (19). Like prayer, writing allows mortals to commune with the immortal. As Ames tells his son, "while you read this, I am imperishable" (53). Looking at it another way, writing mediates between what Laura Tanner calls the "textured particularity" of Ames' daily existence in time and his perception that daily life can also be part of an eternal realm in which time has no sway. This mediation process raises two questions: "How does a person facing death experience life in a meaningful way?" and "How does a person immersed in savoring his last days face death in its most horrifying form, the possibility of ceasing to exist even in memory?" Tanner is interested in the first question and I in the second. She describes the way Ames' "perception sharpens and slows" so that his senses function with greater clarity and time seems to slow down, a compensatory process neuroscientists associate with the old or gravely ill people facing their own death. She notes that this heightened perception allows Ames to live in the concrete world even while he is building memories by translating his life into abstract "typological patterns," (229-33). (2) By "typological patterns" I assume she means those biblical stories such as the Exodus that often serve Christians as a shorthand version of human experience--what some might see as the substitution of a cliche for thoughtful reflection. …

Research with adults has found consistent metonymic mappings between emotions and temperature (e.g., anger is metonymically described with heat). The present study investigated the development of these relationships in early middle childhood. 30 7-yr.-olds, 30 9-yr.-olds, and 60 adults ( M age = 18 yr., 3 mo.) matched the emotions of anger, fear, sorrow, love, hate, happiness, embarrassment, and shame to the temperature dimension. Age-related differences in the mappings were observed for all emotions except fear. Findings are discussed in terms of Kovecses' analyses of temperature-emotion metonymies in adults.

The beginning of the academic year (the occasion when this paper was delivered at the United Faculty of Theology) is not only a time to gather but also a time when people and ideas are scattered in various ways for the sake of theological education. Several biblical and early Christian texts deal with the themes of scattering and gathering, particularly in three interlocking contexts: the sowing of seed to produce a harvest that will be gathered in; the dispersal of a multitude and its subsequent restoration to its own land; and the assembly of a group followed by its sending forth to various places with the group's goals in mind. Scattering comes with high risk, and often grief and sorrow, but bears the potential for joy at the attainment of the harvest or other goals. The Gospel of John is notable for portraying the crucifixion as both a time of scattering and grief (followed by regathering and joy at the resurrection) and a time of gathering and triumph.

This article focuses on representations of forgiveness as adopted or assumed by processes of collective amelioration experienced in the aftermath of mass atrocity. It seeks to demonstrate how each representative approach to forgiveness captures some of the torment, pain, and suffering of survivor and successor generations, but also that each fails to accommodate the depths and complexities of personal grief and collective mourning. Too often transnational justice in the aftermath of political evil becomes grounded in assumptions of justice, truth, and apology that are severely delimited. Such strategic and theoretical perspectives are insufficiently attuned to the needs of bereavement as a political form because they fail to promote social solace by means of collective atonement on the part of survivor and successor generations who inherit the legacies of sorrow. If political bereavement conducive to collective amelioration is to occur in any one polity, it should be legitimated by a transnational system of “transnational legacy sites” exclusively devoted to the designation, protection, and intercultural connection of all the many places where political evil may be said to have occurred.

The aim of this article is to defend the politics of official apologies as part of a liberal conception of state and society. To acknowledge this is to defend a subjective conception of state legitimacy, not solely based on its objective efficiency but also on the meaning that citizens give to it and their belief in its legitimacy. I will argue that official apologies for past wrongs can be an essential component of this belief, and help building or rebuilding civic trust in the aftermath of mass atrocity. The acknowledgment of a wrongdoing, the acceptance of one's responsibility, and the expression of sorrow and regret for it can therefore appear as a reliable way to promote national reconciliation. I will show that in order to understand how pure words can provoke such an important shift, we need to `unfold' the meaning of an apology and to review our conception of reconciliation itself. Only if we consider reconciliation as the achievement of trust can apologies become part of the reconstruction process of post-conflict societies. I will draw upon a Habermassian conception of discursive solidarity to show that, rightly understood and formulated, apologies, as a form of dialogue, could become an essential norm-affirming and community-binding measure in the aftermath of mass atrocities, one compatible with a liberal project of transitional justice.

This article reflects on encounters that took place while doing fieldwork in Fiji. The writer thinks back on moods and acts that were, and still are, only partly understood. The writer has in earlier works discussed how Fijian people adhere to strict rules for body comportment and social intercourse, not least in their elaborate ceremonies that seem to continue unabated even in the urban areas. These rules are related to the status hierarchy of the chiefly system where communal values of kinship and social obligations reign supreme. Togetherness and a constant adjustment to others' expectations are the norms. A person seems hardly ever to be alone or free from obligations or duties to perform in one way or the other. This article, however, is a more personal account of people who became friends of the writer during fieldwork and yet in certain aspects, as the writer thinks back, remain riddles.

This was not the kind of multicultural harmony the visitor from Germany would have expected. It was a cold winter evening in Montreal when a heated debate took place in the city's congress hall."In our neighbourhood, the number of mosques is rising constantly, and the community forces even young girls to wear a headscarf," complained a blonde woman in her mid-40 s. "Immigrants don't intend to change your ways of life, so don't try to tell us what to do," replied a young woman with a headscarf who introduced herself as a Muslim feminist. "Our students can work as hard as they want and get good marks, they still will always get second-class jobs," complained a black teacher who teaches at a school with large numbers of students of visible minorities. "We have to stop allowing foreigners to tell us how we are supposed to live," shouted a dark-blond man with anger in his voice.One complaint was followed by another; immigrants and Canadian-born Montrealers exchanged accusations, laments, and occasional shouts. Meanwhile, at a small table at the head of the congress hall, philosopher Charles Taylor looked over the authence of 200 people and furrowed his brows. The tense face under his grey hair seemed to express sorrow, annoyance, and quite a bit of incomprehension. This is probably not how he - the 7 5 -year-old mastermind of multiculturalism - expected things to turn.For decades, Taylor has been advocating this particular Canadian philosophy that evolved in the 1960s and is based on the assumption that in liberal, democratic immigration societies such as Canada, it is one of the state's core responsibilities to protect and encourage cultural diversity. Starting from Canada, this concept found numerous supporters around the world, especially in countries such as Australia and the United Kingdom. It found a lot of followers in Germany as well, especially in left-wing and alternative-minded circles represented by the Green party. More recently, the concept of multiculturalism has become something like a swear word in Germany, though. It has been used as a catchword in the ongoing debate about failed immigration policies and deficiencies towards the integration of immigrants. This was summarized in a now-famous, widely reported, and much- supported statement by the local mayor of Berlin's Neukolln district, Heinz Buschkowsky, who said: "Multiculturalism has failed." His district is home to a large number of immigrants and faces huge socioeconomic challenges.Based on the original intention of multiculturalism, as I will explain, statements such as the above one show a profound misunderstanding of what the concept was meant to be about. This becomes obvious once one looks into the origins of multiculturalism in the 1960s and 70s, as well as when you have a closer look at the current Canadian debate. Based on my studies of Canadian multiculturalism, I would summarize my observations in two hypotheses. First, multiculturalism as a concept has not failed. It can work very well, as it has, by and large, in Canada during the last few decades. Second, multiculturalism is nota static, fix-it-all solution for challenges that stem from immigration and integration of an ethnically, religiously, and culturally diverse population. I would argue that instead of flatly declaring it a failed concept - as is the case in Germany - the Canadian way of redefining multiculturalism and trying to adapt it to new challenges is the more promising treatment. This is especially true for one of the main concerns at the heart of much of the current Canadian debate: the integration of - mostly Muslim - immigrants who are often seen as representing values and lifestyles that potentially contradict the western - and liberal - self-image that many Canadians have of themselves.As the above-mentioned example of the Montreal debate shows, the concept in its current understanding has obviously reached certain limits, or at least serious challenges, in its country of origin. …

INTRODUCTION AND CHOICE OF TOPIC I must admit that in starting the study of emotion in the New Testament, I did not think about integration. Not did I plan for the study to lead me down roads in so many different disciplines--psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, sociology, philosophy and church history to name the major avenues. My only goal, starting out, was to find out what the New Testament had to say about how we should feel as Christians. It seemed to me that even in the midst of extensive linguistic and theological analysis of words such as love, joy, sorrow, and anger we (biblical scholars) were still missing something. I began to study under a world-class New Testament scholar. After more than a year of preparatory study I was passed on to a junior colleague with the thought that most everything that was needed had been said about the emotions in the New Testament. There was no condescension or negativity from him in this whatsoever; he is not that kind of man. He just did not know how to advise me on how to do more on this specific topic. The fact is, I had not yet begun my interdisciplinary study and did not have strong thoughts that actually went beyond what had been already been written. All I had was a strong hunch. His contention was actually true when speaking of strictly theological studies. Completing my PhD, this same professor was one of my examiners and was extremely generous--without his good words I am confident Faithful Feelings would never have been published. All this is to say that the interdisciplinary study of emotions made all the difference. My study would not have been possible without the work of so many in each of these other disciplines. The roads I roamed were well-traveled; the problem was that many of us (biblical scholars) had not traveled widely enough to connect our paths to yours. So first, a word of thanks for all your good work on how we as humans, created in God's image, function. I look forward to a lifetime of working together to learn how the latest research and observations in the field of psychology can help us understand the Bible. Further, I am confident that having a humble and teachable spirit combined with comprehensive research will yield exciting results for all of us. When I first read Dr. Beck's analysis I was both honored and a bit perplexed--to be totally honest. Honored, because he affirmed what was written so gracefully and perplexed at the fact that, having been asked to write an article interacting with Dr. Beck's comments, I did not have many criticisms to answer. I began to think on the implication of Dr. Beck's affirmation and analysis of the task of integration for my response. Feeling sure that there will be plenty of arguments and counter-arguments to contend with in the future, I decided to take a breath of fresh air and ask myself the question, "If Faithful Feelings is a good result in integrating theology and psychology, how did I get to it?" The following are the major principles I used in research and in the writing of the book. I am not saying that these are normative or essential for successful integration. My aim is much simpler. I wish to share some thoughts and reflections on the process that I followed in hopes that it might be helpful to both me and others in future attempts at integration. READ WIDELY TO CREATE CONTEXT I had read widely enough in New Testament studies during the first year of my journey toward a PhD on the subject of emotion to know "most everything that was needed had been said about the emotions in the New Testament." I had not read enough beyond the world of New Testament studies to know that much of what was presumed about emotion in our discipline was misguided. For example, the idea that love, the feeling, cannot be commanded is based on a faulty understanding of the fundamental nature of emotional love, not on the text of the New Testament. …

Some enraged kids in clinical settings are youth who have been simply and narrowly judged as “bad kids” by many of the adults in their lives. But most of these youngsters have suffered major and repeated losses, and in some cases traumatic losses. These losses were not recognized by others or grieved by the children, nor did the children receive support from the adults in their lives. This deep reservoir of unrequited sorrow is the smoldering emotional underbelly to their violence. Also in this deeper place in which the true essence of the child lives are their untapped human potential and redeeming qualities. The metaphor of “fawns in gorilla suits” was introduced in previous writing to highlight the features of these foster care kids who have suffered severe losses and for whom modifications in the empirically supported treatment protocols are needed to adequately and safely undertake therapeutic exploration of their traumatic grief.

Sandage, Worthington, Jr., Hight, and Berry (2000) pointed out that most of the research on forgiveness has focused on the process of granting forgiveness rather than seeking forgiveness. Therefore, in this project, college students were asked to recall a recent event from their past where they harmed someone with whom they had a relationship. They were then asked to rate their feelings following the transgression such that it was possible to determine the extent to which they experienced sorrow or guilt (Narramore, 1984). Participants also indicated how they responded to the situation. In addition, a few weeks later, these same students were invited to respond to a dispositional measure designed to tap their general tendencies toward experiencing sorrow or guilt. One of the particularly interesting findings from this study was that the efforts to measure sorrow seemed to split into two factors. One of these sorrow factors seemed to predict healthy patterns of seeking forgiveness while the other factor did not.

It is an unfortunate fact that Ruth Pitter (1897-1992)--an important twentieth-century British poet who won the Hawthornden Prize in 1937 for A Trophy of Arms (1936), the William E. Heinemann Award for The Ermine (1953), and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1955--is little known in America. When her name is recognized, it is usually in the context of "the woman who should have married C. S. Lewis." (2) Yet Pitter is an accomplished poet, having produced eighteen volumes of new and collected verse in her lifetime. (3) Although it is too much to call this article an attempt to "rehabilitate" Pitter, it is accurate to describe it as an effort to expose how Pitter's poetic impulse, the desire "to express something of the secret meanings which haunt life and language" places her in the mainstream of twentieth-century British poetry. (4) Because she was never associated with a literary group or movement, she has not attracted widespread critical notice in spite of the many poets and writers who admired her work. (5) Pitter, in contrast to T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and W. H. Auden, is a traditional poet in the line of George Herbert, Thomas Traherne, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, W. B. Yeats, and Philip Larkin. Unlike the modernists, she rarely experiments with meter or verse form, nor does she explore modernist themes or offer critiques of modern English society. Instead, she works with familiar meters and verse forms, and her reluctance to alter her voice to follow in the modernist line explains in part why critics have overlooked her poetry. She is not trendy, avant-garde, nor, thankfully, impenetrable. (6) As a result, for many years she labored at her craft "in comparative but wholly unjustified obscurity" (Schlueter). Moreover, when significant literary success came, contemporary critical recognition of her achievements was restrained. I believe the failure to bring a critical perspective to her life and work is a serious aesthetic, intellectual, and literary oversight. The intensity, passion, yet controlled insight about the human condition and her mystical reflections on the natural world merit sustained scholarly attention and broad exposure. However, of particular importance is her religious poetry because one can chart through it a pilgrimage of faith--a journey beginning with a conciliatory acquiescence to a veiled transcendence moving through acceptance of a distant, impersonal deity and ending with commitment to orthodox Christianity. This journey of faith is reflected in the mature poetry of Pitter, most of it written from 1935 to 1953, a period dominated by the growing threat of fascism and the very real worry that Western civilization was on the verge of destruction. The intent here is to offer a broad overview of Pitter's spiritual maturation through her religious poetry as well as an indication of her gifts as a poet. A Trophy of Arms Her first mature volume of poetry, A Trophy of Arms: Poems 1926-1935 (1936) is a collection of poems that explores the melancholic reality of the human condition; yet, at the same time, it is neither depressing nor despairing. Instead, it is a clarion call to embrace sorrow, loss, and loneliness through either the lens of nature or a veiled, transcendent power. Often, her poems focusing upon spiritual themes are vaguely hopeful. For instance, "Sudden Heaven" is a powerful affirmation of hope. Pitter combines a clipped, terse style with an incisive eye to create a poem of startling power about unexpected, unsolicited joy: All was as it had ever been-- The worn familiar book, The oak beyond the hawthorn seen, The misty woodland's look: The starling perched upon the tree With his long tress of straw-When suddenly heaven blazed on me, And suddenly I saw: Saw all as it would ever be, In bliss too great to tell; For ever safe, for ever free, All bright with miracle: Saw as in heaven the thorn arrayed, The tree beside the door; And I must die--but O my shade Shall dwell there evermore. …

Between 1955 and 1983, three French film documentaries displaced our understanding of the events of World War II: Nuit et brouillard by Alain Resnais, Le Chagrin et la pitié by Marcel Ophuls and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. These are films that reveal specific moments in France’s difficult path to assessing the events of the ‘dark years’. As markers of changes in the political, social and cultural attitude of France’s views of the war and Vichy, these films offer probing historical evidence of France’s struggles with its past, as well as compelling archival materials on the deportations, the occupation and the Holocaust. But, in addition, they also present us with exceptional illustrations of the vicissitudes of recollections, the unpredictable workings of memory, and the vicarious effects of visual and oral testimonies. They in turn testify to a contemporary cultural event: the displacement of traditional history in favour of testimony.

Songs My Grandma Sang. By Michael B. Curry. New York: Morehouse Publishing, 2015. xi + 131 pp. $18.00 (paper).There is a power in sharing faith through the love of music and beloved songs. Tunes, rhythms, and words can transport the weary soul to places of hope, peace, even glory! The book Songs My Grandma Sang introduces songs of resounding praise and songs of challenge as old allies on life's rugged journey. For Michael Curry, church songs are rich texts for faith formation, a hidden treasure and spiritual inheritance: "That treasure was a sung faith expressing a way of being in relationship with the living God of Jesus that was real, energizing, sustaining, loving, liberating, and life-giving" (p. 3). Curry draws the reader into an intimate circle as he shares the rich spiritual inheritance offered by songs of faith and their life lessons. This inheritance has no doubt been key to his vocation as an inspirational and powerful teacher, preacher, and pastor in the Episcopal Church.As an activist, pastor, and the first African American elected to the role of Presiding Bishop, he is no stranger to the gospel call to make the church a place for all. The songs he shares with the reader are part of the rich legacy his grandparents shared with him, and offer a vantage point through which to view sung prayer, hopes, dreams, and human desire. Curry uses songs to interpret moments of personal and social truth faced by our scriptural and spiritual ancestors, and shared by contemporary leaders and each one of us today. Through the wisdom of church songs, spirituals, work songs, blues, and gospel music, Curry was exposed to the pathos of what it means to live in the heat of "sorrow's kitchen," as he calls it. His writing is an unyielding and passionate claim on God's ability through Jesus to move us not away or above life's sorrows, but through them into glory. God's love is continually transforming our human nightmare into God's dream.Unapologetically written from the perspective of a pastor, bishop, and lifelong Episcopalian, this book is a "come to Jesus." Those familiar with Curry's public presentations or preaching will recognize his accessible and conversational style. He achieves this through the combination of personal story, retelling of scripture, and anecdotes that bring together many of his most memorable spiritual teachings. As in his preaching and teaching, emphasis is made by repeating and deepening his metaphors. Whether used for devotional purposes or as a resource for preaching and teaching about the power of church music and song, this slim volume will challenge the reader to awaken to the transforming power of God's love, and then do something about it! …

Tragedy has two faces. It is a source of horror, shame, and grief. It is also the opportunity to reflect on the possibility of a different future and a different path for human social evolution. The tragedy of September 11th also provides the circumstances for considering how we might proceed once we have grieved and acknowledged our losses. It is respectful of the human condition to consider what we might learn from this horror and what new guiding principles we might set in motion because of it. A second even more compelling tragedy looms if we learn only how to better defend ourselves and not also how to create a more peaceful and democratic world from the ashes of our sorrow.

Families who have a child with a chronic illness face losses in their lives and react in a variety of ways. The theory of constuctivism is used to examine these losses. The ongoing nature of these losses can lead to ongoing grief rather than acceptance. This is discussed within the themes of time-limited grief and chronic sorrow. The role of children’s community nurses in assisting families with resolving this sorrow is discussed, the mainsuggestions being the provision of an empathetic presence, time and the provision of accurate and specific information regarding the illness and the ways of managing it within the family’s life.

The aim of the thesis is to describe and analyse men's experience of testicular cancer, the interaction with caregivers during the course of the disease and in the subsequent medical care process and the attitude of close relatives during this period and how they describe their life during the medical care process.The results reported in article I describe, on the basis of audio-taped dialogues between patients and physicians and interviews between patients and physicians, the impact the medical care program SWENOTECA has on the interaction between patient and physician and on how the patients experience their disease and the follow-up of care and treatment. As a result of the medical care program SWENOTECA, oncological care and treatment is framed in a structured care context which gives the patients a perspective of the future and very much influences their sense of safety and security. Article II describes how, in interviews, men reconstructed their discovery of a testicular tumour, how they express their thoughts about and attitudes towards cancer. The men have a functionally oriented approach to their body, which means that the ability to work and carry out their day-to-day duties is a more important sign that they are not ill than are individual physical changes in an organ. In article III, the audio-taped dialogues between patients and physicians have been analysed in order to determine how routinization in the dialogue affects the patient's ability to talk about sensitive subjects and bring up questions and problems on his own initiative. A consequence of the routinised medical care context is that follow-up consultations between patients and physicians focus on restoring trust in the value of the check-ups and the prospects of the disease being cured. In article IV, interviews with close relatives of men treated for testicular cancer are analysed. In these interviews, the parties discussed how cancer affected family life and daily routines as well as how relationships and closeness developed and what the future held. Testicular cancer is something that very much affects the men's close relatives. They do not regard themselves, or are regarded by others, as people with needs of their own and the sorrow and fear they feel results in social isolation during the period of the disease.

This research is a case study of the effect of Dramatherapy with a client who was suffering from prolonged grief following stillbirth. The assumption was that an analysis of the Dramatherapy sessions could shed light on processes that may assist the client in relief of her unresolved grief and integration of her stillbirth, which were necessary in order to get on with her life. The Dramatherapy was based on Jennings’ (1992, 1993, 1998) EPR model. The analysis focused on the dramatherapeutic processes, specifically, dramatic reworking, retelling and projection, that accompanied the client's experience of relief and integration of her loss. The client, ‘Iris’ (a fictional name), is a career woman, who sought dramatherapeutic treatment in the hope that it might help her overcome her overwhelming feelings of distress and sorrow, which made it difficult for her to function, both physically and emotionally. The research examined the first six sessions of a longer-term therapy, during which the client's prolonged grief emerged as a major issue for her. The records kept by a participant observer (the researcher), the products of the client's art work, and audio recordings of the sessions served as the research data. The presentation of the data focused on changes in the client's appearance, body language, vocal presence, emotionality, and issues raised in the sessions.

“I want my daughters to be beautiful, accomplished, and good; to be admired, loved, and respected; to have a happy youth, to be well and wisely married, and to lead useful, pleasant lives, with as little care and sorrow to try them as God sees fit to send. To be loved and chosen by a good man is the best and sweetest thing which can happen to a woman, and I sincerely hope my girls may know this beautiful experience.” —Louisa May Alcott, Little Women