Spirituality, Ethnography, & Teaching

Spirituality, Ethnography, & Teaching
Author: Will Ashton
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2006
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780820488790

Today more than ever, we need an ethnography of spirit so we can identify and describe how spirit dwells and how it communicates. Our lives and our humanity depend on making the connection to spirit more visible and concrete to ourselves, to those we love, and to those we fail to understand. Educators have a special role to play in making the connection to spirit more visible and concrete. In this vital new book, a wide range of scholars and educators share stories about their own personal calls to spirituality. From the Amazon to the coast of Ireland, from the Talmud to the Book of Mormon, and in classrooms across the world, contributors explore the scenes in which spirit lives through insightful autoethnographic research and reporting. Spirituality, Ethnography, and Teaching is dedicated to the journey to the heart of teaching and learning. Each chapter reveals that spirituality, ethnography, and teaching are linked concretely in our experience of and desire for freedom. This collection of stories invites the reader to share in a way of knowing that discloses a radical union in which freedom, communication, and spirit coalesce. This ethnography of spirit calls upon the reader to dwell more deeply in the humanness of life and vocation and to let love flow.

Anthropology of Religion: The Basics

Anthropology of Religion: The Basics
Author: James S Bielo
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2015-04-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317542827

Anthropology of Religion: The Basics is an accessible and engaging introductory text organized around key issues that all anthropologists of religion face. This book uses a wide range of historical and ethnographic examples to address not only what is studied by anthropologists of religion, but how such studies are approached. It addresses questions such as: How do human agents interact with gods and spirits? What is the nature of doing religious ethnography? Can the immaterial be embodied in the body, language and material objects? What is the role of ritual, time, and place in religion? Why is charisma important for religious movements? How do global processes interact with religions? With international case studies from a range of religious traditions, suggestions for further reading, and inventive reflection boxes, Anthropology of Religion: The Basics is an essential read for students approaching the subject for the first time.

Ethnography as Christian Theology and Ethics

Ethnography as Christian Theology and Ethics
Author: Aana Marie Vigen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2024-10-31
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0567710475

How can qualitative research methods be a tool for social change? Echoing the 'scandal of particularity' at the heart of the Christian tradition, theologians and ethicists involved in ethnographic research draw on the particular to seek out answers to core questions of their discipline. This new edition features a dynamic selection of nuanced and provocative voices in this area of ethics and theology, showing how, in the past decade, the kinds of qualitative methodologies employed have become more varied and sophisticated. The leading and emerging scholars featured in this book have much to share how they approach this kind of work, what they are learning in the process, and what sorts of change is possible as a result. This volume also pays tribute to the life and work of a pathbreaker in qualitative methods for the sake of theological imagination and social change, the Rev. Dr. Melissa D. Browning (1977-2021).

Spirituality in Higher Education

Spirituality in Higher Education
Author: Heewon Chang
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2016-09-16
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1315419793

This collection of articles explores how a wide range of academics-- diverse in location, rank and discipline-- understand and express how they deal with spirituality in their professional lives and how they integrate spirituality in teaching, research, administration, and advising. The contributors also analyze the culture of academia and its challenges to the spiritual development of those involved. Twenty chapter authors--from a variety of faith traditions--discuss the ways in which their own beliefs have affected their journeys through higher education. By using an autoethnographic, self-analytical lens, this collection shows how various spiritualities have influenced how higher education is understood, taught and performed. The book will stimulate debate and conversations on a topic traditionally ignored in academia

Personal Knowledge and Beyond

Personal Knowledge and Beyond
Author: James V. Spickard
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2002-02
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0814798039

Personal Knowledge and Beyond" seeks to foster a cross-disciplinary rethinking of ethnography's possibilities and limits for the study of religions. It provides an overview of recent debates while also pushing them in new directions

International Handbook of the Religious, Moral and Spiritual Dimensions in Education

International Handbook of the Religious, Moral and Spiritual Dimensions in Education
Author: Marian de Souza
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 1417
Release: 2007-06-04
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1402052464

In today’s pluralistic world, many cultures feel a shift in the relationship of people with religious traditions. A corresponding movement is a resurgence of interest in human spirituality. This Handbook presents the views of education scholars who engage these concepts every day, in a collection of essays reflecting the international state of the discipline. Out of these rises a vision for the emergence of a just and peaceful world.

Spirituality, Education & Society

Spirituality, Education & Society
Author: Njoki N. Wane
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2011-10-29
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9460916031

Spirituality, education and society: An integrated approach argues the value of spirituality in education as a way to address the lived experiences and personal knowledge of students, with the goal of creating a more holistic, transformative educational process. This edited volume has a wide array of viewpoints which all point to the importance of spirituality in the authors’ personal lives, their communities and society at large. Spirituality is conceptualised as a base from which to challenge dominant forms of knowing, while in the process being able to center and engage with an important aspect of the student that has been missing from current evaluations – their spiritual selves.Within the diversity of this volume it becomes evident that spirituality cannot be confined to a singular definition and that educators must be willing to create spaces to foster spiritual growth and exploration if we are to break away from the commoditized, disempowering system that is so dominant today. This edited collection is a valuable resource for students, practitioners, educators and administrators who wish to engage in transformational schooling. Its multidisciplinary approach engages ideas around critical pedagogy, sociology of education, and inclusive schooling. There is an increasing need for exploring novel paradigms of studying education in the context of the dynamics that straddle social, economic and technological processes that have come to characterize the world in recent years. This book is a timely contribution in this respect as its focus transcends hitherto applied approaches that depend largely on western orientation. The book breaks new grounds in studying education and society that find significant relevance in societies that are marginalized by the dominant western understanding. The authors draw from the rich heritage of spirituality that is akin to the non-western social paradigms to develop a rigorous but creative concept of schooling. I am sure practitioners, researchers and students of education will find it a valuable source of practical and theoretical information that would widen their horizon of understanding of sociology of education. - Tom Mongare Ndege, PhD, Moi University, Kenya The editors have compiled a brilliant collection of essays. Each piece of scholarly work shows how spirituality is a paramount part of our everyday lives and is connected to teaching, learning, living and healing. This is a timely and most relevant work that is sure to spur critical dialogue and discussion. This collection shows that while the spirit may be wounded it can never be broken. - Erica Neeganagwedgin, PhD, University of Toronto

The Modern Anthropology of India

The Modern Anthropology of India
Author: Peter Berger
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 546
Release: 2013-06-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134061188

The Modern Anthropology of India is an accessible textbook providing a critical overview of the ethnographic work done in India since 1947. It assesses the history of research in each region and serves as a practical and comprehensive guide to the main themes dealt with by ethnographers. It highlights key analytical concepts and paradigms that came to be of relevance in particular regions in the recent history of research in India, and which possibly gained a pan-Indian or even trans-Indian significance. Structured according to the states of the Indian union, contributors raise several key questions, including: What themes were ethnographers interested in? What are the significant ethnographic contributions? How are peoples, communities and cultural areas represented? How has the ethnographic research in the area developed? Filling a significant gap in the literature, the book is an invaluable resource to students and researchers in the field of Indian anthropology/ethnography, regional anthropology and postcolonial studies. It is also of interest to students of South Asian studies in general as it provides an extensive and critical overview of regionally based ethnographic activity undertaken in India.

A Diagram for Fire

A Diagram for Fire
Author: Jon Bialecki
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2017-03-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520967410

What is the work that miracles do in American Charismatic Evangelicalism? How can miracles be unanticipated and yet worked for? And finally, what do miracles tell us about other kinds of Christianity and even the category of religion? A Diagram for Fire engages with these questions in a detailed sociocultural ethnographic study of the Vineyard, an American Evangelical movement that originated in Southern California. The Vineyard is known worldwide for its intense musical forms of worship and for advocating the belief that all Christians can perform biblical-style miracles. Examining the miracle as both a strength and a challenge to institutional cohesion and human planning, this book situates the miracle as a fundamentally social means of producing change—surprise and the unexpected used to reimagine and reconfigure the will. Jon Bialecki shows how this configuration of the miraculous shapes typical Pentecostal and Charismatic religious practices as well as music, reading, economic choices, and conservative and progressive political imaginaries.

Ordinary Lives and Grand Schemes

Ordinary Lives and Grand Schemes
Author: Samuli Schielke
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2012-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0857455079

Everyday practice of religion is complex in its nature, ambivalent and at times contradictory. The task of an anthropology of religious practice is therefore precisely to see how people navigate and make sense of that complexity, and what the significance of religious beliefs and practices in a given setting can be. Rather than putting everyday practice and normative doctrine on different analytical planes, the authors argue that the articulation of religious doctrine is also an everyday practice and must be understood as such.