Teresa of Avila and Jonathan Edwards on Prayer and Spirituality

Contemplative prayer has been a major source of contention in evangelical spirituality. Contemplative prayer is frequently mentioned as one apparent spiritual activity that is foreign to the scripture and Christian worldview and more resembling the New Age Movement and pantheistic Eastern religion by people who are skeptical of the mystical Christian tradition. This article will examine Teresa of Avila’s thought on mystical prayer, which is sometimes misinterpreted as a notion incompatible with evangelical theology of prayer. Hence, Teresa’s ideas of mystical prayer will be examined and compared with Jonathan Edwards’ concepts of prayer, which is considered to reflect evangelical theology of prayer. The comparison suggests that the contemplative, mystical prayer of Teresa is compatible with evangelical theology of prayer in its progress and purpose. Teresa and Edwards both understood prayer as an experience and progress that leads to the complete union with God, mediated by Christ and his words in scripture. This spiritual union with God will transform the devoted one with tremendous passion and strength to love and help others in their struggle and suffering. This study of Teresa’s thought of mystical prayer is expected to reinvigorate evangelical theology and praxis of prayer by learning from the rich spirituality of the Christian mystical tradition.

Localising Acoustic Ecology: A critique towards a relational collaborative paradigm

This article focuses on critically provincialising some of the ethico-political challenges inherent to much of the acoustic ecology vocabulary and conceptual framework. As we will demonstrate, much of the underlying limitations stem from an adherence to a particular self-transformation praxis (from the ‘New Age’ movement) alongside an overtly optimist and culturally selective outlook on how a well-informed acoustic designer would guide individuals and communities to a better sonic world. This epistemological and aesthetic outlook is presented in order to offer an alternative view on how collaborative works that deal with the sonic can take place within communities. One, where rigid hierarchies and orthodoxies are substituted by an intersubjective listening that changes all actors involved in the process. This is the framework from which we present Cildo Meireles’s Sal Sem Carne LP (1975) and Lilian Nakahodo’s sonic cartography Mapa sonoro CWB: Uma cartografia afetiva de Curitiba (2015–).

The Declaration on the Doctrine of Justifi cation — 20 Years Later

The Joint Declaration on Justification is the greatest achievement in the Catholic-Lutheran theological dialogue. In connection with the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Joint Declaration, the critical points of this document will be recalled. However, the document deserves much more than a reminder: its reception should continue. The lack of reception of the Joint Declaration would be a step backwards for Lutherans and Catholics on their way from conflict to community. Therefore, this paper will indicate the selected attempts of the reception of the Declaration. A threat to the Declaration would be not only the lack of reception, but also the context of post-modernity. Polish Catholic theologians have undertaken the task of reception of the Joint Declaration, and so it is in progress. Many treaties of dogmatic theology have room for the doctrine of justification. The task of the reception of the Joint Declaration it is not a matter of reinterpreting the whole of dogmatic theology in the light of the doctrine of justification, but of broadening individual treaties by showing their connection with justification. The teaching of justification is incomprehensible to many contemporary people, who are no longer interested in Martin Luther’s question, “where will I find a gracious God?”, that is, where will I find justification of a sinner by grace. The contemporary man does not consider himself to be a sinner at all, but a victim of various circumstances, and therefore, he seems to be reversing the problem: it is God, and not man, who needs justification, e.g. God should justify Himself before people because He allowed Auschwitz. While in the field of theology we find this reversal of the understanding of justification, outside theology, the terms used in the Joint Declaration no longer belong to the idiolect of the contemporary man. This applies above all to such terms as grace, sin and justification. Instead, we are witnessing a reinterpretation of these terms in the spirit of deep ecology promoted by the New Age movement.

Pacifica Radio’s Music from the Hearts of Space and the Ambient Sound of California’s New Age

Music from the Hearts of Space, a freeform music program that aired across Northern California on KPFA-FM Pacifica Radio from 1973, set forth an expansive transgeneric vision of contemplative atmospheric “space music” whose properties, in the following decades, would become more popularly codified as either “new age” or “ambient.” Histories of these latter genres typically separate out ambient’s avant-garde lineage and secular functionalism from new age’s therapeutic and spiritual concerns; but an examination of Hearts’s first decade on the air, leading up to its 1983 syndication via National Public Radio’s satellite network, reveals a sonic and cultural milieu that belies this eventual generic split. Through investigation of Hearts’s private archive and interviews with the program’s host Stephen Hill, as well as industry research, cultural-historical study, and style analysis, I situate the genesis of Hearts’s proto-ambient sound within the Bay Area’s new age movement of the 1970s and early 1980s. Informed by the metaphor of the global media environment established in systems theory and popularized by Marshall McLuhan and Stewart Brand, artists and media producers within this grassroots technoculture designed and spread “alternative” personal media for the development of holistic awareness. These media included slow, reverberant, hypnotic recorded music, as curated by Hill and his cohost Anna Turner under the guiding concept of “space music.” This early history and analysis of Hearts’s space music as an atmospheric medium for attuning the listening self to a worldwide media ecology deepens and complicates genealogies that isolate the formation of ambient music from that of new age, revealing a cross-pollination of highbrow and countercultural ideals that led many musicians associated with the new age movement to similar sonic conclusions to those of ambient music architect Brian Eno.

Ecstasy (MDMA): A rebellion coherent with the system

Aim: This study attempts to demonstrate the relevance of the socio-cultural model of drugs in explaining the impressive development of ecstasy in the last 45 years. Method: First the study describes the use of ecstasy by groups which have left their imprint on the substance: university students, gays, yuppies and the “New Age” movement. Then the link between ecstasy and techno music led to the socially integrated “club” phenomenon, and the “rave”, which began as a rupturing, nonconformist phenomenon. Findings: According to this argument, in spite of its clearly counterculture beginnings, the “rave” movement and its most characteristic drug, ecstasy, have gradually become integrated into mainstream culture, somehow reinforcing the functioning of capitalist postmodernity. Our study explains ecstasy’s history in reference to the cultural contradictions of capitalism and the functions that it currently fulfils for young people. Based on this analysis, the implications of the cultural perspective are discussed as a paradigm of research in drug use, stressing notions of subculture, myths and rituals. It also proposes a harmonious articulation of academic and common knowledge as the most appropriate method for their study. Conclusion: A cultural approach to drug use could assist in unblocking a field so in need of conceptual and empirical revision.

Chinese New Age milieu and the emergence of homo sentimentalis in the People’s Republic

The accelerating speed of economic, social, and cultural reforms in the past three decades in mainland China has created an atmosphere of moral uncertainty that encouraged many people to search for happiness by turning inwards. Shen xin ling (身心灵, translated as Body-Heart-Soul) fever refers to the growing interest among Chinese urbanites in various seminars that creatively transform the guiding principles of the Euro-American New Age movement, incorporating China into transnational networks of alternative spiritualities. This anthropological investigation into the shen xin ling milieu locates its genealogy in the progression of several post-Maoist self-cultivation fevers, most notably the recent ‘psycho-boom’. It focuses on Chinese New Agers’ practices of emotional release, conceptualizing them as ‘psy-venting’ spaces where the emotions that could result in resentment at those who perpetuate structural inequalities are released, dispersed, and channelled back to the individual. In so doing, these affective flows become carriers for Chinese state discourses related to therapeutic governing. This process is characterized by tensions as shen xin ling practitioners find themselves positioned at the intersections of state-endorsed discourses on consumerism, entrepreneurialism, the re-traditionalization of gender roles, and anxieties over multilevel marketing schemes and accusations of ‘evil cult’.

Conceptualising magic in 1950s Germany

In an effort to explore the gap between pre-war occultism and the New Age movement, this article examines the public areas of stage magic, folklore magic, and handbook magic between 1947 and 1960. It firstly investigates possible connections between stage performance and the implicit character of religious beliefs and combines these observations with the notion of magic in the field of parapsychology. Then the latter approach is put into the context of mental health discourse, scientific culture, and the metaphysics of nature. The field of handbook magic, finally, relates to public debates about rationality and superstition as an attempt to popularise and legitimise knowledge and techniques of twentieth-century ‘high magic’.

Irish Cursing and the Art of Magic, 1750–2018*

Fairies, leprechauns, banshees, witches, holy wells and rural remedies. Historic Ireland is famous for its superstitions, magic and ‘alternative beliefs’. Yet we should not ignore what was once the most widespread Irish magic of all: cursing. A righteous occult attack, a dark prayer for terrible pains to blight evildoers, cursing was unnervingly common from ancient times until the mid-twentieth century. This article explores its neglected modern history, since the late 1700s, by carefully scrutinizing the Irish style of cursing, relating it to wider social and economic conditions, and making comparisons with maledictions elsewhere. Irish imprecations can be analysed using familiar academic categories such as belief, ritual, symbolism, tradition and discourse. However, by repurposing an older way of thinking about magic, I argue that historic Irish cursing is best understood as an art, because it required knowledge, practice, wit, skill and composure. Intimidating, cathartic and virtuoso: cursing mingled gruesome yet poetic phrases with ostentatious rites, in the name of supernatural justice. It had many applications but was particularly valuable to Ireland’s marginalized people, fighting over food, religion, politics, land and family loyalties. Cursing rapidly faded from the mid-twentieth century and, unlike other forms of occultism, was not revived by the post 1970s ‘New Age’ movement. Its unusual history underlines three wider points: (i) magic can usefully thrive in modern societies, figuring in the most vital areas of life; (ii) different types of magic have distinct chronologies; (iii) the most psychologically powerful forms of magic are subtle arts that deserve our (begrudging) respect.