To Capture Personnel Spiritual Belief of the Nursing Students

Background: Science gets impact on physical health. “Science gets us physical comforts, spirituality brings us mental calm”. Dalai lama 2006. The meaning of spirituality and spiritual care among nurses is culturally constituted and influenced by many factors such as the nurse’s ethnic background, religious affiliation, level of education and clinical experience. Spiritual care is a recognized field in nursing (Bald acchino 2006) and an element of quality nursing care (Mc Even 2005). Many scientific studies have shown that when meditation and chanting is done in groups it has more benefits than when done individually. (Dr. K.K Aggarwal, 2017).

Anna Kingsford and the Intuitive Science of Occultism

Feminist, anti-vivisectionist, occultist, and one of the first British women to qualify as a medical doctor, Anna Kingsford remains notably absent from recent studies of Victorian science and spiritualism. Her efforts to synthesize occult and scientific worldviews have been side-lined by those of male contemporaries such as Oliver Lodge and Alfred Russel Wallace, ones whose professional status and gender coordinates more readily align with implicit assumptions about the kind of person for whom disenchantment posed an intellectual problem that might best be solved in the laboratory. My paper positions Kingsford at the very heart of the late Victorian project to accommodate scientific innovation and spiritual belief by tracing her attempts to forge an intuitive epistemology superior to what she viewed as the deeply suspect championship of objectivity. In doing so, it aims to expose and redress blind spots within recent esotericism studies-based approaches to the disenchantment debate.

Precolonial Igbo Voices in Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater (2018): A Palimpsestic Search for “Home”

The present article examines how Freshwater (2018), the debut novel of the Nigerian writer Akwaeke Emezi, offers a layered portrayal of precolonial Igbo and western narratives. By recourse to the auto-fictional narrative mode, the fiction deploys a constant tug of war which suggests the culturally hybrid nature of discourses connected to spiritual belief, self-identity dynamics and gender. My analysis pivots around three main discussions. Firstly, I trace and exemplify the aesthetic and thematic imbrication between Igbo cosmology (and Animism) and Christianity. Secondly, I seek to evince the unconventional depiction of plural consciousnesses coexisting in an individual in an effort to contest long-established truisms of self formation. I also focus on the ensuing amalgam between western conceptions of mental illness, trauma and Igbo mystic interpretations of reality. Considering the peripheral Igbo stance the novel depicts, the fiction will be contextualised within the current literary meta- and trans-modernist axis. Thirdly, I refer to transgender issues mapped up and brought to the fore through the main character’s predicament; a search for existential answers commingling divergent paradigms. Thus, Freshwater offers a peculiar polyphony of numinous narratorial voices which strive to question extant (neo)postcolonial truths.

Conclusion

This chapter steps back from the critical discussions of the previous chapters to contemplate the bigger picture of Melville’s wisdom project as a response to the condition of modernity. It intersperses brief excursions on Clarel and “The Apple-Tree Table” to show that Melville deemed the spiritual crisis of his day an inescapable conflict, but one that could be weathered while holding on to at least some kind of spiritual belief. Wisdom represented for Melville the best strategic guide to surviving this crisis, and the wisdom books, this chapter contends, helped Melville engage the Bible constructively rather than antagonistically. Literature for Melville is a space in which religious doubt, critical inquiry, and biblical language and philosophy may be juxtaposed, contemplated, and moderated, so as to avoid radical suspicion and skepticism.

Parental spiritual and religious beliefs and behaviour data collected from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, 2020

There are few studies that chart the ways in which the religious beliefs and practices of parents and their offspring vary over time. Even fewer can relate this to aspects of their physical and mental health or distinguish the different facets of the environment that may have influenced the development or loss of religious/spiritual belief and behaviours over time. This paper describes the recent data collection in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) on the beliefs and behaviours of the study parents some 27-28 years after the first measures were collected. Questions that were previously administered to the mother and her partner on religion, spirituality, behaviours, and beliefs (RSBB) were repeated for the fourth time, together with enhanced data on RSBB. The new data are described and compared with previous responses. The most notable difference between the 9 year and the 2020 sweep was the increase of professed non-believers in both the mothers (17.5% vs 29.8%) and partners (31.9% vs. 45.3%). As expected, on each occasion study partners were less likely to acknowledge RSBB compared to the study mothers. In the latest sweep, respondents were less likely to be unsure if they believed and more likely to not believe. Responses to “Do you believe in God or a divine power?” in mothers ranged from 49.9% stating ‘yes’ antenatally to 43.5% doing so in 2020; 14.9% vs 29.8% for ‘no’ and 35.2% to 26.6% for ‘not sure’. For partners, the corresponding figures are: ‘yes’ 37.0% vs. 30.0%; ‘no’ 28.6% vs. 45.3% and ‘not sure’ 34.5% vs. 24.6%. We plan to undertake detailed analyses of the antecedents and consequences of RBSS. All data are available for use by interested researchers.

‘When the Animals Came’: The Genesis and Writing of an Ecotheological Poem, with Commentary

This article traces the genesis and composition of my poetic sequence, ‘When the Animals Came’ including as illustration of the poetic process a section from Part IV, ‘Spring’ with commentary. In order to understand the culture, art and religious beliefs of Paleolithic society, extensive research was needed, both at prehistoric sites, and in the archaeological literature, which I discuss; writing this poem also led me to re-assess how deeply and anciently faith is linked to our place in nature. Thus, the compositional process afforded me a new understanding of the complex relationship between humankind, environment and spiritual belief. Paleolithic culture engaged all three directly, seeing them as interdependent; this has considerable relevance to modern ecological concerns. My poem is an attempt to show creatively how such engagement constitutes part of our identity as human beings.

Psychotic-like experiences? Trajectories and typologies of hallucinations and delusions from early adolescence to early adulthood in a population-based sample of Irish youth

Objectives: Hallucinations and delusions that occur in the absence of a psychotic disorder are common in children and adolescents. Longitudinal phenomenological studies exploring these experiences are notably lacking. The objective of the current paper was to explore the phenomenology and characteristics of hallucinations and delusions from early adolescence to early adulthood. Methods: Participants were 17 young people aged 18–21 years from the general population, all of whom had a history of childhood hallucinations and/or delusions. Longitudinal data on the phenomenological characteristics and attributions of reported hallucinatory and delusional phenomena spanning nine years were explored using content analysis. Results: Hallucinatory and delusional phenomena were transient for two-thirds of the sample. The remaining one-third reported reoccurring hallucinatory and delusional phenomena into early adulthood. In those, two typologies were identified: (1) Paranormal typology and (2) Pathological typology. The former was characterised by hallucinatory and delusional phenomena that were exclusively grounded in subcultural paranormal or spiritual belief systems and not a source of distress. The latter was characterised by delusion-like beliefs that were enmeshed with individuals’ mood states and a source of distress. The perceived source, the subcultural context and how young people appraised and integrated their experiences differentiated the Paranormal and Pathological typologies. Conclusions: Not all hallucinatory and delusion-like experiences are psychotic-like in nature. To reliably differentiate between pathological and non-pathological hallucinations and delusions, assessments need to explore factors including the phenomenology of individuals’ experiences, how people make sense and appraise them, and the subcultural contexts within which they are experienced.