Hearing Visions And Seeing Voices

TABLE OF CONTENTS: Introduction to historical and conceptual issues / Gerrit Glas -- Psychiatry and religion: an unconsummated marriage / Herman van Praag -- Biblical narratives as history: biblical persons as objects of historical faith / C. Stephen Evans -- Introduction to prophecy: theological and psychological aspects / Gerrit Glas -- The dynamics of prophecy in the writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel / Neil Gillman -- The prophets as persons / Bob Becking -- Jeremiah interpreted: a rabbinic analysis of the prophet / Bryna Jocheved Levy -- Introduction to martyrdom: theological and psychological aspects / Gerrit Glas -- Martyrdom: theological and psychological aspects. Martyrdom in Judaism / Hyam Maccoby -- The martyrdom of Paul / Jakob van Bruggen -- Spiritual, human, and psychological dimensions / Msngr. H.W.M. Tájirá. Introduction to messianism: theological and psychological aspects / Gerrit Glas -- Casting a psychological look on Jesus the marginal Jew / Antoine Vergote -- The land of Israel: desire and dread in Jewish literature / Aviezer Ravitzky -- The person of Jesus / Abraham van de Beek -- Imagining Jesus: to portray or betray? Psycho (-patho)logical aspects of attempts to discuss the historical individual / Peter J. Verhagen -- Introduction to interdisciplinary issues: prospects for the future / Gerrit Glas -- The hidden subject of Job: mirroring and the anguish of interminable desire / Moshe Halevi Spero -- Biblical themes in psychiatric practice: implications for psychopathology and psychotherapy / Samuel Pfeifer -- The bible and psychology: new directions in biblical scholarship / Wayne G. Rollins -- Searching for the dynamic 'within'. Concluding remarks on 'psychological aspects of biblical concepts and personalities' / Gerrit Glas.

Like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, this is a fascinating voyage into a strange and wonderful land, a provocative meditation on communication, biology, adaptation, and culture. In Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks turns his attention to the subject of deafness, and the result is a deeply felt portrait of a minority struggling for recognition and respect — a minority with its own rich, sometimes astonishing, culture and unique visual language, an extraordinary mode of communication that tells us much about the basis of language in hearing people as well. Seeing Voices is, as Studs Terkel has written, "an exquisite, as well as revelatory, work."

The breakdown of traditional African values and the consequences of disconnection from African ancestral beliefs are examined in this attempt to understand the vicious cycle of community violence.

This book’s aim is to enrich and deepen our psychological understanding of biblical concepts and personalities. The book contains masterful analysis of biblical personalities, such as Job, Jeremiah, Paul, and Jesus. It may help theologians to contextualize their discipline by bringing it into contact with contemporary psychological and existential issues and tensions, both at an individual and a societal level.

This book examines how the experiences of hearing voices and seeing visions were understood within the cultural, literary, and intellectual contexts of the medieval and early modern periods. In the Middle Ages, these experiences were interpreted according to frameworks that could credit visionaries or voice-hearers with spiritual knowledge, and allow them to inhabit social roles that were as much desired as feared. Voice-hearing and visionary experience offered powerful creative possibilities in imaginative literature and were often central to the writing of inner, spiritual lives. Ideas about such experience were taken up and reshaped in response to the cultural shifts of the early modern period. These essays, which consider the period 1100 to 1700, offer diverse new insights into a complex, controversial, and contested category of human experience, exploring literary and spiritual works as illuminated by scientific and medical writings, natural philosophy and theology, and the visual arts. In extending and challenging contemporary bio-medical perspectives through the insights and methodologies of the arts and humanities, the volume offers a timely intervention within the wider project of the medical humanities. Chapters 2 and 5 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book examines how the experiences of hearing voices and seeing visions were understood within the cultural, literary, and intellectual contexts of the medieval and early modern periods. In the Middle Ages, these experiences were interpreted according to frameworks that could credit visionaries or voice-hearers with spiritual knowledge, and allow them to inhabit social roles that were as much desired as feared. Voice-hearing and visionary experience offered powerful creative possibilities in imaginative literature and were often central to the writing of inner, spiritual lives. Ideas about such experience were taken up and reshaped in response to the cultural shifts of the early modern period. These essays, which consider the period 1100 to 1700, offer diverse new insights into a complex, controversial, and contested category of human experience, exploring literary and spiritual works as illuminated by scientific and medical writings, natural philosophy and theology, and the visual arts. In extending and challenging contemporary bio-medical perspectives through the insights and methodologies of the arts and humanities, the volume offers a timely intervention within the wider project of the medical humanities. Chapters 2 and 5 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781472453983, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivative 4.0 license. Experiences of hearing the voice of God (or angels, demons, or other spiritual beings) have generally been understood either as religious experiences or else as a feature of mental illness. Some critics of traditional religious faith have dismissed the visions and voices attributed to biblical characters and saints as evidence of mental disorder. However, it is now known that many ordinary people, with no other evidence of mental disorder, also hear voices and that these voices not infrequently include spiritual or religious content. Psychological and interdisciplinary research has shed a revealing light on these experiences in recent years, so that we now know much more about the phenomenon of "hearing voices" than ever before. The present work considers biblical, historical, and scientific accounts of spiritual and mystical experiences of voice hearing in the Christian tradition in order to explore how some voices may be understood theologically as revelatory. It is proposed that in the incarnation, Christian faith finds both an understanding of what it is to be fully human (a theological anthropology), and God’s perfect self-disclosure (revelation). Within such an understanding, revelatory voices represent a key point of interpersonal encounter between human beings and God.

In this insightful book, accounts of voice hearers are presented, evaluated and interpreted by a Christian theologian and psychiatrist. By listening to the first-hand experiences of voice hearers and evaluating them in the light of Christian theology, the book enables the reader to understand the experiences of voice hearers as a part of Christian experience and to engage with the theological issues raised by them, including the nature of revelation. This engaging and thought-provoking collection looks at a range of stories - ranging from comforting to complex to simply conversational - to encourage debate and search for meaning and also show how the reader can adapt clinical and pastoral practice to better aid people in this situation.