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This article begins with a review of studies in perception and depth psychology concerning the experience of exposure to sacred artworks in Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox contexts. This follows with the results of a qualitative inquiry involving 45 Roman Catholic, Eastern and Coptic Orthodox, and Protestant Christians in Canada. First, participants composed narratives detailing memories of spiritual experiences involving iconography. Then, in the context of a darkened room evocative of a sacred space, they viewed artworks depicting Biblical themes and interpreted their meanings. Stimuli included "Western" paintings from the Roman tradition—a selection from the Gothic, Northern Renaissance, and Renaissance canon—and matched "Eastern" icons in the Byzantine style. Spiritual experience narratives were analyzed in terms of word frequencies, and interpretations of sacred artworks were analyzed thematically. Catholics tended to utilize emotional language when recalling their spiritual experiences, while religious activity was most often the concern of Protestants, and Orthodox Christians wrote most about spiritual figures and their signifiers. A taxonomy of response styles was developed to account for participants' interpretations of Western and Eastern artworks, with content ranging from detached descriptions to projective engagement with the art-objects. Our approach allows for representation of diverse Christians' interpretations of sacred art, taking into consideration personal, collective, and cultural-religious sources of meaning. Our paradigm also offers to enrich our understanding of the numinous or emotional dimension of mystical contact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current era of citizenship politics, both legal citizenship and cultural citizenship have become highly contested social categories and new bases for social discrimination. Psychological studies of migration thus need to consider more explicitly how shifting sociopolitical contexts shape migrant life opportunities and how migrants respond to their shifting circumstances. Cultural psychologists have much to contribute to this project given their focus on the ways cultural experiences are shaped at once by broader social determinants and the intentional acts of social agents who navigate diversely organized worlds. However, we argue that cultural psychologists need to integrate critical concepts into cultural psychological studies of migration to avoid both overlooking important determinants of migrant lives and inadvertently perpetuating social inequalities and discriminatory policies. Drawing upon qualitative research conducted with Polish "irregular" migrants in Canada and Sikh Americans, we show how critical concepts such as "illegalization," "deportability," and "cultural citizenship" can help expand cultural psychological inquiry to better understand contemporary immigrant experiences. We conclude with discipline-specific recommendations for building a cultural psychology fit for the study of migration in the 21st-century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To better understand the preferred role of faith-based organizations in secular society, the Canadian Council of Churches partnered with researchers to explore current systems of poverty reduction. The nature of the systems involved in attending to the underlying collective subjectivities (i.e., group/communally-shaped psychological experiences such as shared motivations, values, and aspirations) often being overlooked was justification for the importance of the research. These collective subjectivities are the forces that often drive system functioning. We conducted exploratory qualitative work situated in a theoretical frame informed by bringing together systems theory along with cultural psychology (an approach that focuses on socio-communally shaped collective subjectivities). In turn, this theoretical frame-shaped how Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis was employed. A total of 33 participants' collective subjectivities undergirding systems surrounding poverty reduction reveals a missional faith foundation leading toward perceived essential processes of advocacy and congregational connections bridging communal divisions. They see themselves as distinctly striving to create opportunities that encourage poverty alleviation in a holistic and dignified manner reflected in a multidimensional understanding of poverty. Perceived procedural tension exists between giving (that has long-lasting change and resonates with colonial forms of charity) and forming relationships can help people more effectively., (© 2021 Wiley Periodicals LLC.)