"They shall not grow old" and "Mimesis: African soldier"

This paper will examine and compare two recent visual explorations of the experience of soldiers in World War I. Director Peter Jackson’s documentary They Shall Not Grow Old has been called an immersive, haunting and often transcendent experience that’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. By using modern digital film technology, he has restored the visuals and added sounds and speech via Automatic Dialogue Replacement, colorized, changed the speed, and brought 3D depth to the old footage from the Imperial War Museum. Jackson has either, using the terminology of William Guynn (Unspeakable Histories: Film and the Experience of Catastrophe), employed this technology to trigger “moments of heightened awareness in which the reality of the past may be recovered in its material being”. Or, do these computer generated technological affects, “….stand in for the ‘truth’ and obscure just how constructed the ‘history’ Jackson is telling actually is?” John Akomfrah’s video/sound three screen performance/display installation Mimesis: African Soldier uses silent actors, archive film and photographs, ethnographic sound recordings, new filmed footage with and without actors, and a sound track by Trevor Mathison, to document the experience of those, among many, left out of Jackson’s film: colonial subjects as soldiers. Akomfrah “does not put colour back in the cheeks of the dead”, but rather warns the viewer that remembrance can come in many forms, some of them unrealiable. All of this leads to a conclusion, as Avishai Margalit put it in Ethics of Memory, that “memory…is knowledge from the past. It is not necessarily knowledge about the past.”

Transcendent Experiences Among Pilgrims to Lourdes: A Qualitative Investigation

Millions of pilgrims visit Lourdes each year, often seeking revitalisation rather than miraculous cures. We sought to understand the phenomenon of transcendent experiences. We spoke with 67 pilgrims including assisted pilgrims, young volunteers and medical staff. About two in five reported a transcendent experience: some felt they had communicated or had close contact with a divine presence, while others reported a powerful experience of something intangible and otherworldly. Transcendent experiences are an important feature of pilgrimage to Lourdes and the place offers the faithful a means of connecting with the divine, with nature and with the self.

Ontology of Gerhard Oberhammer’s Transcendent Experience as an Experience of Thinking on the Border of Reason

The article presents an attempt by one of the most interesting modern thinkers, the Austrian scientist Gerhard Oberhammer, to substantiate the possibility of a transcendental experience of meeting with God and the philosophical-hermeneutic objectification of this experience. Based on the traditions of Kant’s transcendental philosophy and its hermeneutical interpretation by Karl-Otto Apel, Oberhammer also draws on the productive intentions of Karl Jaspers’ con­cept of the “ciphers of the transcendent”, experience as a person’s being captured by Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas’ hypostase. The article deals with a heuristic interpretation of these concepts for Oberhammer’s explanation of the possibility of a transcendent experience as an experience of an absolute meeting of man with God. According to the Austrian philosopher and Indologist, the place of transcendent experience is the inner world of the subject, which is characterized by two main properties: depth and openness. The latter allows us to hope for the possibility of meeting with the other, but again, not outside the subject, but inside it, realizing the hidden structures of the inner world, as a world correlated with what is outside it. That is, according to Gerhard Ober­hammer, the transcendent experience of the subject can be comprehended in its two interdependent moments related to the subject’s situation, namely, the mo­ment of its self-explanation and the moment of its correlation. The Austrian philosopher represents the religious subject as being in a constant self-overcom­ing of its limited isolation and finding its true essence, which implicitly contains both its depth and its correlation with the other, as its ability to accept this other into itself. The article substantiates the idea that the Austrian scientist builds his concept of religious and philosophical hermeneutics with a firm belief in its pro­ductivity and the possibility of using it for the analysis of any religion, since he focuses on universal transformations and events that occur in the life of a be­liever, regardless of the religious tradition to which he belongs.

Transcendent experience of St. Laura Montoya y Upegui

The paper focuses on the life and written work of the Colombian Catholic mystic St. Laura Montoya y Upegui (1874–1949), known also as Mother Laura. The life of this mystic was marked by a mystical experience from her early childhood. In the work she left us, especially in her autobiography entitled History of the Mercies of God in a Soul [Historia de las misericordias de Dios en un alma], she tries to talk about her unique experience, although this task is not easy. She tends to speak about her mystical experience with God mainly through specific images of her own inner world. The aim of this study is to bring these images closer to the reader, analyse them and reconcile them with the aesthetic qualities of the narration, which helps to form more complete and complex image not only of the mystical experience, but also of the work by St. Laura.

Dispositional awe and prosocial tendency: The mediating roles of selftranscendent meaning in life and spiritual self-transcendence

Dispositional awe is a self-transcendent experience that has been investigated in few empirical studies. We explored the mediating effects of both self-transcendent meaning in life and spiritual selftranscendence in the relationship between dispositional awe and prosocial tendency. Participants were 1,907 Chinese undergraduates. As predicted, self-transcendent meaning in life and spiritual selftranscendence mediated the relationship between dispositional awe and prosocial behavior. These findings not only demonstrate the mediating effect of self-transcendence on prosocial tendency, but also support dispositional awe as an element of self-transcendence.

Kaplice grobowe a współczesna kultura wizualne

Można wskazać wiele czynników determinujących formy grobowców wznoszonych na cmentarzach w drugiej połowie XX w. Po pierwsze, jest to specyfika miejsca silnie nacechowanego religijnym i duchowym kontekstem a zarazem świeckimi wpływami i ideami. Po drugie, są nimi kulturowe i – dość często – historyczne uwarunkowania. W przypadku kaplic grobowych dominującą tendencją jest neomodernizm. Charakterystyczne jest poszukiwanie wzajemnych relacji pomiędzy przestrzenią, światłem, materiałem – współoddziaływania kształtów i symboliki, sprzyjającego indywidualnej kontemplacji. Wyraźnie czytelne jest dążenie do dematerializacji i podwójnego kodowania. Z jednej strony, zewnętrzny, fizyczny blok; z drugiej – jego wnętrze nakierowane na pozazmysłowe doświadczenie. Otwarcie na czysto zmysłowe bodźce, które wzmacniają odczuwanie doświadczenia „innego”. Przywołane w artykule obiekty odznaczają się oryginalnością form i – w pewnym stopniu – różnorodnością materiałów. Jednakże, o ile formalne rozwiązania odbiegają od siebie nawzajem, o tyle w zasadzie zauważamy wspólne dążenie do kreowania form, które pomagają nadać doświadczeniu śmierci indywidualny charakter. Tomb-Chapel and Contemporary Visual Culture Undoubtedly, there are numerous factors determining the forms of located at cementeries tombs built in the second half of the 20th century. Firstly, it is the specificity of the place strongly affected by the religious and spiritual context but also by atheistic concepts. Secondly, we encounter cultural – and quite often – historical conditions. In the case of tombs, the dominant tendencies are close to neomodernism. What is characteristic is the search for the interplay of space, lighting, materials and reflections – the interplay fostering individual contemplation with its shape and symbolic. The striving for dematerialization and double-coding is very clear. On the one hand, an external, physical block; on the other hand – its interior directed towards the transcendent experience. Open to purely sensory stimuli which strengthen the feeling of experiencing “the other”. The mentioned examples are characterized by originality of the form and – to some extend – diversity of materials. Insofar as, however, the formal solutions considerably differ from each other, we principally observe the pursuit of creating forms that help individualize the experience of death.