Healing Social Divisions

Meditation can create social harmony

We live at a time when societies are riven with division and strife. What hope is there for us to heal? Healing Social Divisions provides a radically new, non-ideological and effective consciousness- based approach for transforming our societies. Peer-reviewed research provides evidence that it is possible to neutralise stress in the collective consciousness of a society. This then promotes life, liberty, happiness, heals social divisions and creates the platform for good governance. The research challenges the conventional wisdom that consciousness is only a by-product of brain functioning. Along the route it examines our self-concept, freeing us from the biases of reductionism that impede the development of morality in our public life.

Poverty. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Still, poverty is an ever-present reality, even in so-called first world nations like the United States. If the Holy Spirit is the member of the Trinity that is ever present in our world, perhaps the Spirit can be a resource to address poverty. In this pneumatological theology of poverty, Brandon Kertson explores the current state of poverty in the United States, arguing its complexities also require complex answers demanding a pneumatological approach that has yet to be offered. Using Renewal theology and pneumatology, Kertson develops a pneumatological four-fold gospel based on Jesus’ pneumatic declaration of Luke 4. He explores how the Spirit addresses poverty through Jesus and the historic and global church, and how we can begin to address poverty through the Spirit today. The Spirit as savior, baptizer, healer, and entelechy of the kingdom lays the foundation for a holistic response to the complex problem of poverty in our country.

Aiming to develop a less studied literary genre, this book provides a well-rounded picture of spiritual and physical diseases and their remedies as they were ingrained in the imagination and practices of Middle Eastern Abrahamic cultures, with a special emphasis of Christian communities (Greeks/Byzantines, Syrians, Armenians, Georgians, Ethiopians). The volume traces traditions dealing with the onset of a disease in the body and soul, the search for remedy, the maintenance of healing, and the engagement of these processes with faith—either through their affirmation in the public sphere or remaining within the personal framework, as in monastic traditions. A recurring presence in religious literature and the history of the intellectual world, the confrontation between disease and healing may well still be current for our modern understanding of the paths to seeking and maintaining the health of one’s body and soul, without excluding the factor of faith as a core principle.

Cure a nosebleed by holding a silver quarter on the back of the neck. Treat an earache with sweet oil drops. Wear plant roots to keep from catching colds. Within many African American families, these kinds of practices continue today, woven into the fabric of black culture, often communicated through women. Such folk practices shape the concepts about healing that are diffused throughout African American communities and are expressed in myriad ways, from faith healing to making a mojo. Stephanie Y. Mitchem presents a fascinating study of African American healing. She sheds light on a variety of folk practices and traces their development from the time of slavery through the Great Migrations. She explores how they have continued into the present and their relationship with alternative medicines. Through conversations with black Americans, she demonstrates how herbs, charms, and rituals continue folk healing performances. Mitchem shows that these practices are not simply about healing; they are linked to expressions of faith, delineating aspects of a holistic epistemology and pointing to disjunctures between African American views of wellness and illness and those of the culture of institutional medicine.

Commemorating 60 years of War Studies at King’s College London, this incisive and adroitly crafted book acts as a comprehensive introduction to the multidisciplinary field of war, conflict and security. Adopting a global approach, it adeptly navigates a broad spectrum of themes and theoretical perspectives which lie at the heart of this important area of study.

Voluntary associations have been presented as a solution to political apathy and cynicism towards representative democracy. The authors collected in this volume, however, argue that these claims require more robust substantiation and seek to critically examine the crucial link between the associative sector and the health of democracy. Focusing on the role of context and using diverse approaches and empirical material, they explore whether these associations in differing socio-political contexts actually undermine rather than reinvigorate democracy.