Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/20440243.2020.1812886
Heather Tan, Bruce Rumbold, F. Gardner, D. Glenister, Annie Forrest, Luke Bowen
ABSTRACT There is strong movement worldwide towards the professionalisation of spiritual care in the healthcare system, accompanied by appropriate education pathways, defining of best-practice care models, and evidence-based practice. The aim of the study reported here was to explore the understanding and expectations of healthcare service staff, across the spectrum of staffing levels, in relation to the provision of spiritual care in their facility. It utilised semi-structured interviews with 32 staff members from three large metropolitan general hospitals in Victoria Australia. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed and thematically analysed. Overall, it was considered that spiritual care is an integral part of whole person care; more resources and in-house education of other staff are needed; and referral systems could be improved to better serve patient, family and staff spiritual care needs. Responses of clinical staff able to make referrals were compared with those of non-clinical staff who cannot make referrals. Spiritual care was regarded as important by all staff, but those who could make referrals were more likely to make specific improvement suggestions. Outcomes of this study are similar to others which have investigated these issues.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/20440243.2020.1812885
F. Gardner
ABSTRACT This article argues for the inclusion of critical reflection in spiritual care training and practice, including Clinical Pastoral Education. Most spiritual care training emphasizes the importance of listening well and deeply, combined with awareness of the listener’s personal reactions. Critical reflection makes explicit the importance of understanding the influence of the social context on the listening experience, and articulating the underlying assumptions and values that may be influencing the spiritual carer and those to whom they are listening. This approach fosters seeing the connections to what is happening in an individual’s external world, in their family and community and in the broader social and historical context. Individuals may thereby become conscious that external change is needed as well as, or instead of, internal: the attitudes and values expressed in an organisation or culture may be the issue rather than only the internal state of the client. Using critical reflection to complement existing training in listening will foster greater capacity to seek change where it is needed, and to encourage more socially just organisations and communities.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/20440243.2020.1817249
A. Possamai, T. Jinks, V. Counted
This study examines sociodemographic and wellbeing factors associated with forms of religiosity involving conventional religious belief (CRB) and daily spiritual experience (DSE), and unconventional paranormal beliefs in lifeforms (UPBL) and paranormal beliefs excluding extraordinary lifeforms (UPBEEL). Self-reported data collected from Australian Facebook users (N=760; Female: 57%) suggest that CRB was significantly higher in Christian participants and lower in those who identify as non-religious and spiritual. However, levels of unconventional religiosity involving UPBL and UPBEEL were significantly higher among Pagans and those who identify as spiritual but not religious, but lower among non-religious participants. Compared to Christian participants, being spiritual and pagan were negatively associated with the level of security. After controlling for relevant sociodemographic characteristics, conventional forms of religiosity involving DSE were positively related to life satisfaction, life security, and trust level. UPBL was also positively associated with wellbeing outcomes but UPBEEL was inversely related to all wellbeing outcomes. Further analysis reveals that religious status moderates the links between conventional and unconventional forms of religiosity, such that paranormal beliefs tended to be higher when CRB and DSE each had a unique interaction with religious status. These results show that forms of religiosity are related to wellbeing differently and suggest the influence of cognitive biases related to religious/spiritual teachings and experiences in enacting the quest for deeper spiritual, paranormal experiences. Study limitations are discussed.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/20440243.2020.1817248
J. Swinton
In order to write well about spirituality, you need to have a gentleness of spirit, a sensitivity to the ways of God and an ability to research and reflect using approaches that are academically ri...
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/20440243.2020.1812883
Roderick Hunt
This book emerged from a series of Campbell Lectures given in the School of Humanities at Rice University, Houston, Texas. Each year since 2005, a distinguished scholar has spoken on a topic of bro...
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/20440243.2020.1812884
D. Lorimer
Dr Larry Culliford is a retired psychiatrist who has been active at the interface between psychiatry and spirituality. He was one of the founders of the spirituality and psychiatry special interest...
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/20440243.2020.1818177
Cheryl Hunt
This issue marks the end of the first decade in the publishing history of the Journal for the Study of Spirituality. I trust it also heralds the start of many more decades of successful growth for ...
这一期标志着《灵性研究杂志》出版历史上第一个十年的结束。我相信这也预示着未来几十年成功增长的开始。
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/20440243.2020.1726046
June Boyce-Tillman
ABSTRACT This article will examine the historical and contemporary literature in this area, to produce a model of the phenomenography of the musical experience which is linked with strands in the literature exploring the relationship between religion and spirituality. It interrogates the attitude of Christian theologians to the place of music in worship and its relationship to the sacred. It charts the move from this to a more generalised view of the spiritual dimension of music linking these with cataphatic and apophatic theological traditions. It uses frames from Buber’s view of encounter and Turner’s notion of liminality to link strands in the spirituality literature to the musical domains and the transformative properties of the liminal space.
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/20440243.2020.1731789
Cheryl Hunt
The British Association for the Study of Spirituality (BASS) was launched in January 2010 in the splendid surroundings of the Charterhouse in London, a building that ‘has been living the nation’s history since 1348’. The launch may have been a very small step in that history but, as Bailey (2011, 10–12) records, for the ‘small ad hoc group of volunteers’ who, for more than two years, ‘with no designated funding and no permanent meeting place’ had been exploring ‘what might be possible in terms of creating a network of academics, scholars and practitioners interested in the study of spirituality’, it represented a giant ‘leap of faith’. A decade later, it gives me great pleasure, as one of those original volunteers, to see the energy of that leap continuing to flow through the work of BASS and this journal. The volunteer group had come together in the hope of forging links between various professional and disciplinary ‘silos’ in which separate discussions and studies of spirituality were taking place, but rarely engaging with each other. One of our key aspirations for BASS was to: ‘Encourage and facilitate scholarship and research in spirituality through the development of a journal, joint collaborative research projects, and a biennial conference’. In June of this year, 2020, the tenth anniversary of the Journal for the Study of Spirituality (JSS) will coincide with the Sixth International BASS Conference in York. The conference title, ‘Spirituality in Research, Professional Practice and Education’, reflects the three primary interests that have guided the development of both BASS and JSS. This anniversary issue of JSS is intended as a celebration of the 10-year journey from Charterhouse to York, and the milestones that have been passed along the way. In the lead article, John Swinton revisits and further develops the substance of the inaugural address he gave at Charterhouse. He notes that the launch of BASS was the product of ‘multiple minds, much passion and many invaluable gifts of time’. So, too, is this journal. It would not exist without the work of its contributors, editorial board, guest reviewers, and production teams, past and present. It is my privilege to have worked alongside them all. There have been times over the past decade when the future of JSS has looked bleak. Indeed, it almost did not come into being at all. The original proposal for a yet-to-be-named journal which would focus on the study of spirituality was written in 2008. It was subsequently rejected by several publishers on the grounds of financial viability and the nature of the field. Feedback included:
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Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/20440243.2020.1729045
L. Culliford
This impressive volume vigorously promotes a new paradigm for human self-understanding, one that necessarily includes a spiritual dimension. Providing more than a benchmark of current thinking and research, it will serve for many as a reliable signpost, a genuine beacon of hope, lighting and brightening the way forward. For both their vision and hard work, the publishers, editors and authors are to be thanked and congratulated. Bookended by the editorial ‘Introduction’ and final ‘Way forward’, 51 chapters are arranged under six headings: ‘Facets of spirituality’; ‘Nature’; ‘Home and community’; ‘Healing’; ‘Economy, politics, and law’; and ‘Knowledge and education’. There are 68 contributing authors, from all the globe’s six inhabited continents, making this a truly international endeavor, and proving that spirituality knows no boundaries; although this very thought gives rise to an interesting problem: ‘How to define that which is boundless’. Adrian-Maria Gellel (in the chapter on ‘Children and spirituality’) suggests: ‘We may not agree on the precise definition but there is general agreement on the main elements that inform our understanding of spirituality’ (125). Wisely, the editors offer ‘a working definition [to be] used as a point of departure’ in the book’s first sentence: ‘Spirituality is people’s multiform search for a transcendent meaning of life that connects them to all living beings and brings them in touch with God or Ultimate Reality’ (3). Spiritual writer Thomas Merton (1915–1968) put it more succinctly: ‘We are all already one’ (1973, 308). With six chapters on the subject of Nature (in Part III), it is clear that this holistic vision of seamless connectivity between people, each other and the divine, also includes an intimate – thus spiritual – bond with everything else, animate and inanimate, the entirety of the cosmos. The editors and authors are, in the main, academics – university researchers and teachers – so the book has a decidedly academic flavor and thrust but, taken as a whole, it seems much more than that. Whereas each of the chapters tends to be scholarly, cautious and well-referenced, attempting to encapsulate spirituality in a specific context, read together they announce something wonderful, a significant measure of agreement in every sphere of human endeavor covered. This is important in the world today. Here, for example, is another guiding quotation from the Introduction: ‘Numerous studies document that the more people prioritize materialistic goals, the lower their well-being and the more likely they are to engage in manipulative, competitive, and ecologically degrading behaviours’ (3). Then a further claim:
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