Postmodern Spiritual Practices

"Postmodern Spiritual Practices: The Construction of the Subject and the Reception of Plato in Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, by Paul Allen Miller, argues that a key element of postmodern French intellectual life has been the reception of Plato. This fact has gone underappreciated in the Anglophone world due to a fundamental division in culture. Until very recently, the concerns of academic philosophy and philology have had little in common. On the one hand, this is due to analytic philosophy's self-confinement to questions of epistemology, speech act theory, and philosophy of science. As such, it has had little to say about the relation between antique and contemporary modes of thought." "On the other hand, blindness to the merits of postmodern thought is also due to Anglo-American philology's own parochial instincts. Ensconced within a nineteenth-century model of Alterumswissenchaft, only a minority of classicists have made forays into philosophical, psychoanalytic, and other speculative modes of inquiry. The result has been that postmodern French thought has largely been the province of scholars of modern languages." "A situation thus emerges in which most classicists do not know theory, and so cannot appreciate the scope of these thinkers' contribution to our understanding of the genealogy of Western thought, while most theorists do not know the Platonic texts and their contexts that ground them. This book bridges this gap, offering detailed and theoretically informed readings of French postmodernism's chief thinkers' debts to Plato and the ancient world."--BOOK JACKET.

This is an invitation to a spiritual awakening. The author demonstrates the relevance of spiritual issues to pragmatic concerns - of modern life, weaving the diverse insights of spiritual traditions into a tapestry of creativity and renewal. By the author of Lost Goddesses of Early Greece.

This book offers a challenging spirituality for a world filled with uncertainty and emotional struggle. Drawing from the work of ancient and contemporary thinkers, the author constructs a path to understanding oneself and understanding God in new and profound ways. This end is pursued by the use of spiritual exercises, mental practices which make changing one's way of life a real possibility. Further, by engaging directly with nothingness, meaninglessness, and the sheer lack of certain knowledge possessed by humans, an alternative form of spirituality is offered, one that prepares the contemporary Christian for all that life will bring.

Drawing on psychological, theological, and cultural studies on suffering, Carrie Doehring encourages counselors to view their ministry through trifocal lenses and include approaches that are premodern (apprehending God through religious rituals), modern (consulting rational and empirical sources), and postmodern (acknowledging the contextual nature of knowledge). Utilizing strategies from all three perspectives, Doehring describes the basic ingredients of a caregiving relationship, shows how to use the caregiver's life experience as a source of authority, and demonstrates how to develop the skill of listening and establish the actual relationship. She then explains the steps of psychological assessment, systemic assessment, and theological reflection, and finally she delineates the basic steps for plans of care: attending to the careseeker's safety, building trust, mourning losses, and reconnecting with the ordinariness of life.

This book shows the interconnections between postmodernism, religion, politics, economics, and art. It shows that the awareness of interconnectedness is at the center of the postmodern sensibility. Sacred Interconnections illustrates the rejection of the modern idea that these subjects can be discussed as separate disciplines. While the term “postmodern” has been widely used for deconstructive, cynical, even nihilistic attitude, especially in the world of art and literature, the book represents the emergence of a reconstructive, reenchanting postmodernism, even within the artistic and literary circles.

This book offers a challenging spirituality for a world filled with uncertainty and emotional struggle. Drawing from the work of ancient and contemporary thinkers, the author constructs a path to understanding oneself and understanding God in new and profound ways. This end is pursued by the use of spiritual exercises, mental practices which make changing one’s way of life a real possibility. Further, by engaging directly with nothingness, meaninglessness, and the sheer lack of certain knowledge possessed by humans, an alternative form of spirituality is offered, one that prepares the contemporary Christian for all that life will bring.