Spiritual abuse occurs when an individual, church or a belief system, whether well intentioned or not, dominates, manipulates or castigates individuals through fear tactics, mind control, or some other psychological or emotional abuse. Breaking the Silence of Spiritual Abuse provides the first sustained examination of spiritual abuse within the Christian faith, exploring the definitions and historical context of spiritual abuse while giving voice to survivors' stories of their personal experiences. Providing a balance of empirical research and practical concerns, this ground-breaking book outlines a process model for the different stages of spiritual abuse and includes strategies for therapists working with survivors of spiritual abuse.

Exploring the interactions of the Buddhist world with the dominant cultures of Iran in pre- and post-Islamic times, this book demonstrates that the traces and cross-influences of Buddhism have brought the material and spiritual culture of Iran to its present state. Even after the term 'Buddhism' was eradicated from the literary and popular languages of the region, it has continued to have a significant impact on the culture as a whole. In the course of its history, Iranian culture adopted and assimilated a system of Buddhist art, iconography, religious symbolism, literature, and asceticism due to the open border of eastern Iran with the Buddhist regions, and the resultant intermingling of the two worlds.

This book tells the remarkable story of the friendship between Liria Hernandez, a Roma woman from Madrid, and Paloma Gay y Blasco, a non-Roma anthropologist. In this unique reciprocal experiment, the former informant returns the gaze to write about the anthropologist, her life and her environment. Through finely crafted and deeply moving text, Hernandez and Gay y Blasco suggest new ways of doing and writing anthropology. The dialogue between Hernandez and Gay y Blasco provides a courageous account of the entanglements and rewards of anthropological research. Drawing on letters, conversations, and fieldnotes gathered over twenty-five years, each of the authors talks about herself, the other, and the impact of anthropology on their two lives. They examine their intertwined trajectories as Spanish women and reflect on the challenges of devising their own reciprocal genre. Blending ethnography, life story and memoir, they undermine the dichotomy between author and subject around which scholarship still revolves.

This edited collection explores family relations in two types of 'migrant families' in Europe: mixed families and transnational families. Based on in-depth qualitative fieldwork and large surveys, the contributors analyse gender and intergenerational relations from a variety of standpoints and migratory flows. In their examination of family life in a migratory context, the authors develop theoretical approaches from the social sciences that go beyond migration studies, such as intersectionality, the solidarity paradigm, care circulation, reflexive modernization and gender convergence theory. Making Multicultural Families in Europe will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including migration and transnationalism studies, family studies, intergenerational studies, gender studies, cultural studies, development studies, globalization studies, ethnic studies, gerontology studies, social network analysis and social work.

The voices of second-generation Korean Americans echo throughout the pages of this book, which is a sensitive exploration of their struggles with minority, marginality, cultural ambiguity, and negative perceptions. Born in the United States, they are still viewed as foreigners because of their Korean appearance. Raised in American society, they are still tied to the cultural expectations of their Korean immigrant parents. While straddling two cultures, these individuals search for understanding and attempt to rewrite their identity in a new way. Through autobiographical reconstruction and identity transformation, they form a unique identity of their own-a Korean American identity. This book follows a group of second-generation Korean American Christians in the English-speaking ministry of a large suburban Korean church. It examines their conflicts with the conservative Korean-speaking ministry ruling the church and their quest to achieve independence and ultimately become a multicultural church.

This volume examines emotions and emotional well-being from a rich variety of theological, philosophical and scientific and therapeutic perspectives. To experience emotion is a part of being human; but what are emotions? How can theology, philosophy and the natural sciences unpack the nature and content of emotions? This volume is based on contributions to the 15th European Conference on Science and Theology held in Assisi, Italy. It brings together contributions from scholars of various academic backgrounds from around the world, whose individual insights are made all the richer by their juxtaposition with those from experts in other fields, leading to a unique exchange of ideas.

This book is open access under a CC BY license. This interdisciplinary book contains 22 essays and interventions on rest and restlessness, silence and noise, relaxation and work. It draws together approaches from artists, literary scholars, psychologists, activists, historians, geographers and sociologists who challenge assumptions about how rest operates across mind, bodies, and practices. Rest's presence or absence affects everyone. Nevertheless, defining rest is problematic: both its meaning and what it feels like are affected by many socio-political, economic and cultural factors. The authors open up unexplored corners and experimental pathways into this complex topic, with contributions ranging from investigations of daydreaming and mindwandering, through histories of therapeutic relaxation and laziness, and creative-critical pieces on lullabies and the Sabbath, to experimental methods to measure aircraft noise and track somatic vigilance in urban space. The essays are grouped by scale of enquiry, into mind, body and practice, allowing readers to draw new connections across apparently distinct phenomena. The book will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines in the social sciences, life sciences, arts and humanities.

Christians in the Middle East have come under increasing pressure in recent years with the rise of radical Islam. In Egypt, the large Coptic Christian community has traditionally played an important political and historical role. This book examines Egyptian Christians' responses to sectarian pressures in both national and local contexts.

This book examines the competing regimes of law and religion an offers a multidisciplinary approach to demonstrate the global scope of their influence. It argues that the tension between these two institutions results from their disagreements about the kinds of rule that should govern human life and society, and from where they should be derived.

Providing an expansive view of the making and meaning of African American conservatism, this volume examines the phenomenon in four spheres: the political realm, the academic world, the black church, and grass-roots activism movements. In his analysis of their activities in these realms, Louis Prisock examines the challenges African American conservatives face as they operate within the context of (largely white) conservatism. At the same time that African American conservatives challenge the white conservative movement's principle of "color blindness," they are accused of being "racial mascots," or "tokens" from those outside of it. Prisock unwinds the intricacies of black conservatives' relationships to both the wider conservative movement and the everyday life experiences of black Americans, showing that they are as vulnerable to the "inescability of race" as any other individual in a racialized America.

This book reveals how school memories offer not only a tool for accessing the school of the past, but also a key to understanding what people today know (or think they know) about the school of the past. It describes, in fact, how historians' work does not purely and simply consist in exploring school as it really was, but also in the complex process of defining the memory of school as one developed and revisited over time at both the individual and collective level. Further, it investigates the extent to which what people "know" reflects the reality or is in fact a product of stereotypes that are deeply rooted in common perceptions and thus exceedingly difficult to do away with. The book includes fifteen peer-reviewed contributions that were presented and discussed during the International Symposium "School Memories. New Trends in Historical Research into Education: Heuristic Perspectives and Methodological Issues" (Seville, 22-23 September, 2015).

This book questions the simplistic view that convenience food is unhealthy and environmentally unsustainable. By exploring how various types of convenience food have become embedded in consumers' lives, it considers what lessons can be learnt from the commercial success of convenience food for those who seek to promote healthier and more sustainable diets. The project draws on original findings from comparative research in the UK, Denmark, Germany and Sweden (funded through the ERA-Net Sustainable Food programme). Reframing Convenience Food avoids moral judgments about convenience food, and instead provides a refreshingly novel perspective guided by an understanding of everyday consumer practice. It will appeal to those with an interest in the sociology and politics behind health, consumerism, sustainability and society.

This book explores the concept of cyberplace as a mode of inhabiting the contemporary world. As a result, it suggests that, for many communities, unlocking cyberspace and inhabiting cyberplaces is now an integral part of their coming-to-the-globalised-world. Boos reviews in the detail the existing academic literature from cultural anthropology, human geography, and sociology on "cyberspace", concluding that a phenomenological perspective on cyberspace provides the possibility of gaining a deep understanding of our contemporary lifeworlds, in which on- and offline practices constantly intermingle. In four chapters, he applies the developed theoretical and methodological approaches to the case of Siena's neighbourhoods, the contrade, analysing their websites and discussing the implications of his findings for understanding contemporary processes of community building and for future research on cyberspace. This concise and accessible book will be of interest to advanced students and scholars in cultural anthropology, human geography, media studies and sociology.

"This book discusses the meaning and practice of British community cohesion policies, youth identities in racially-tense areas and the British government's attempts to "prevent violent extremism" amongst young Muslims"--

This book explores the role of religion in the everyday, transnational lives of Brazilian migrants in London and on their return to Brazil. It contributes to an emerging body of work that recognizes the importance of religion within transnational processes and foregrounds the experiences of Brazilians in London, a growing yet still largely invisible new migrant group in London. It works with the notion of religion as lived experience to give due weight to the perspectives of migrants themselves and examines the ways in which migrants negotiate their religious beliefs and practices in different places and create new connections between them. While focusing on the experience of Brazilian migrants - both in London and on their return - as a case study, it provides significant empirical and conceptual contributions to existing research through its innovative exploration of the interconnections between migration and religion, and moreover, through its inclusion of the return setting into its field of enquiry. Both these areas - religion and return - have been hitherto largely neglected within existing migration research.

A key intervention in the growing critical literature on race, this volume examines the social construction of race in contemporary Australia through the lenses of Indigenous sovereignty, nationhood, and whiteness. Informed by insights from white Australians in rural contexts, Koerner and Pillay attempt to answer how race shapes those who identify as white Australian; how those who self-identify thusly relate to the nation, multiculturalism, and Indigenous Sovereignties; and how white Australians understand and experience their own racialized position and its privilege. This "insider perspective" on the continuing construction of whiteness in Australia is analyzed and challenged through Indigenous Sovereign theoretical standpoints and voices. Ultimately, this investigation of the social construction of race not only extends conceptualizations of multiculturalism, but also informs governance policy in the light of changing national identity.

This book provides comparative, multi-disciplinary research on the surplus food distribution in Europe and its relation to food poverty, with a focus on the interaction of for-profit and non-profit organisations. It offers an informed and rich discussion in understanding the collaboration between profit and non-profit organisations involved in food recovery dynamics, and provides understanding as to how the two types of players create effective, innovative and sustainable processes. Building on sociology, food justice, and sustainable management fields, the book will be of interest to a diverse range of scholars, policy makers and practitioners inspiring innovation in how to address food poverty through surplus food recovery.

Are human tendencies toward religious and spiritual thoughts, feelings, and actions outcomes of "natural" cognition? This volume revisits the "naturalness theory of religious cognition" through discussion of new qualitative and quantitative studies examining the psychological foundations of religious and spiritual expression in historical and contemporary China. Naturalness theory has been challenged on the grounds that little of its supporting developmental and experimental research has drawn on participants from predominantly secular cultural environments. Given China's official secularity, its large proportion of atheists, and its alleged long history of dominant, nonreligious philosophies, can any broad claim for religion's psychological "naturalness" be plausible? Addressing this empirical gap, the studies discussed in this volume support core naturalness theory predictions for human reasoning about supernatural agency, intelligent design, the efficacy of rituals, and vitalistic causality. And yet each study elucidates, expands upon, or even challenges outright the logical assumptions of the naturalness theory. Written for a non-specialist audience, this volume introduces the naturalness theory and frames the significance of these new findings for students and scholars of cultural psychology, the psychology of religion, the anthropology of religion, and Chinese Studies.

This book offers an innovative examination of the utopian impulse through performance as a proposition of practical engagement in the contemporary Americas. The volume compiles unique multidisciplinary and exploratory texts, applying diverse critical and artistic approaches. Its contributors reconceptualize utopia as a creative and theoretical method based on a commitment to sociopolitical transformation. Chapters are organized around notions of mapping utopias, indigenizing practices, political manifestations, and the construction of social identities.

This volume explores theoretical discourses in which religion is used to legitimize political violence. It examines the ways in which Christianity and Islam are utilized for political ends, in particular how violence is used (or abused) as an expedient to justify political action. This research focuses on premodern as well as contemporary discourses in the Middle East and Latin America, identifying patterns frequently used to justify the deployment of violence in both hegemonic and anti-hegemonic discourses. In addition, it explores how premodern arguments and authorities are utilized and transformed in order to legitimize contemporary violence as well as the ways in which the use of religion as a means to justify violence alters the nature of conflicts that are not otherwise explicitly religious. It argues that most past and present conflicts, even if the discourses about them are conducted in religious terms, have origins other than religion and/or blend religion with other causes, namely socio-economic and political injustice and inequality. Understanding the use and abuse of religion to justify violence is a prerequisite to discerning the nature of a conflict and might thus contribute to conflict resolution.

This volume is an attempt to serve as a venue for giving a voice to queer people from all faiths and no faiths to describe how they negotiate or have negotiated spiritual violence in their lives, as well as the voices of heterosexual allies who strive for the inclusion of queer people as a counter narrative to spiritual violence of full inclusion and embracement and demonstrate that some communities of faith do not operate from paradigms of violence, but instead operate with love, affirmation, and inclusion. These counter narratives are important. This volume is a collection of narratives that describe a variety of experiences - stories of pain and rejection, joy, and overcoming and transformation. The voices of the authors in this collection are a mixture of personal narratives, theoretical or academic thought, and because art and spirituality often go hand-in-hand, some of the authors offer the reader more creative writing that reflects their ideas.

"Self, Culture, and Others in Womanist Practical Theology" argues for a critical engagement between womanist theology and psychoanalytic Self Psychology. Sheppard's position is that a psychoanalytically informed womanist practical theology will more fully account for the complexities of black women's experiences of self and black embodiment as well as the role of religion and cultural objects in self understanding. This psychoanalytic turn allows us not only to examine practices of care in relation to black women but also to direct a psychoanalytic lens toward womanist theological anthropology, embodiment, pedagogy, psychology of religion, as well as psychoanalytic reader response to engagement with scripture. In the end, her work challenges and advances both psychoanalysis and womanist thought.

This reference offers the nuanced understanding and practical guidance needed to address domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking in diverse religious communities. Introductory chapters sort through the complexities, from abusers' distorting of sacred texts to justifying their actions to survivors' conflicting feelings toward their faith. The core of the book surveys findings on gender violence across Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Eastern, and Indigenous traditions--both attitudes that promote abuse and spiritual resources that can be used to promote healing. Best practices are included for appropriate treatment of survivors, their children, and abusers; and for partnering with communities and clergy toward stemming violence against women. Among the topics featured: Ecclesiastical policies vs. lived social relationships: gender parity, attitudes, and ethics. Women's spiritual struggles and resources to cope with intimate partner aggression. Christian stereotypes and violence against North America's native women. Addressing intimate partner violence in rural church communities. Collaboration between community service agencies and faith-based institutions. Providing hope in faith communities: creating a domestic violence policy for families. Religion and Men's Violence against Women will gain a wide audience among psychologists, social workers, marriage and family therapists, and other mental health professionals who treat religious clients or specialize in treating survivors and perpetrators of domestic and intimate partner violence, stalking, sexual assault, rape, or human trafficking.

Both a scholarly and personal critique of current feminist Moroccan discourses, this book is a call for a larger-than-Islam framework that accommodates the Berber dimension. Sadiqi argues that current feminist discourse, both secular and Islamic ones, are not only divergent but limit the rich heritage, knowledge, and art of Berber women.