Spiritual Homelands

Homeland, Exile, Imagined Homelands are features of the modern experience and relate to the cultural and historical dilemmas of loss, nostalgia, utopia, travel, longing, and are central for Jews and others. This book is an exploration into a world of boundary crossings and of desired places and alternate identities, into a world of adopted kin and invented allegiances.

This collection focuses fresh attention on the relationships between "homeland" and "diaspora" communities in today's world. Based on in-depth anthropological studies by leading scholars in the field, the book highlights the changing character of homeland-diaspora ties. Homelands and Diasporas offers new understandings of the issues that these communities face and explores the roots of their fascinating, yet sometimes paradoxical, interactions. The book provides a keen look at how "homeland" and "diaspora" appear in the lives of both Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians and also explores how these issues influence Pakistanis who make their home in England, Armenians in Cyprus and England, Cambodians in France, and African-Americans in Israel. The critical views advanced in this collection should lead to a reorientation in diaspora studies and to a better understanding of the often contradictory changes in the relationships between people whose lives are led both "at home and away."

The Dene, a traditionally nomadic people, have no word for homelessness, a rare condition in the Canadian North prior to the 1990s. Julia Christensen documents the rise of Indigenous homelessness and proposes solutions by interweaving analysis of the region’s unique history with personal narratives of homeless men and women in two cities – Yellowknife and Inuvik. What emerges is a larger story of displacement and intergenerational trauma, hope and renewal. Understanding what it means to be homeless in the North and how Indigenous people think about home and homemaking is the first step, Christensen argues, on the path to decolonizing existing approaches and practices.

This book historically surveys the contested poetics of space and place associated with the term « homeland in the Middle East, Balkans, Ireland, South Africa and Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These cases of contested homeland discourses are contrasted with a case of non-contention in Sweden. The contributors do not narrate events preceding the conflicts in these divisive areas of the world, they offer and confront representations of homeland from multiple and, at times, unusual perspectives. Ambiguity and variety are one common denominator of this very uncommon collection. These scholarly representations of homeland are saturated with the contradictions of imagination and culture. They all contain a subtext concerning the role of the nation state and its relationships to multiple understandings of homeland in contemporary global cultures and politics. The different and sometimes incompatible opinions voiced here are bound by a common hope to affect the current discourse on nationalism, community, homeland and exile.

In the second half of the twentieth century, Reiki went from an obscure therapy practiced by a few thousand Japanese and Japanese Americans to a global phenomenon. By the early twenty-first century, people in nearly every corner of the world have undergone the initiations that authorize them to channel a cosmic energy—known as Reiki—to heal body, mind, and spirit. They lay hands on themselves and others, use secret symbols and incantations to send Reiki to distant recipients, and strive to follow five precepts to cultivate their spiritual growth. Reiki’s international rise and development is due to the work of Hawayo Takata (1900–1980), a Hawai‘i-born Japanese American woman who brought Reiki out of Japan and adapted it for thousands of students in Hawai‘i and North America, shaping interconnections across the North Pacific region as well as cultural transformations over the transwar period spanning World War II. Alternate Currents: Reiki’s Circulation in the Twentieth-Century North Pacific analyzes how, from her training in Japan in the mid-1930s to her death in Iowa in 1980, Takata built a vast trans-Pacific network that connected Japanese American laborers on plantations in Hawai‘i to social elites in Tokyo, Hollywood, and New York; middle-class housewives in American suburbs; and off-the-grid tree planters in the mountains of British Columbia. Using recently uncovered archival materials and original oral histories, Justin B. Stein examines how these relationships between healer and patient, master and disciple, became deeply infused with values of their time and place and how they interplayed with Reiki’s circulation, performance, and meanings along with broader cultural shifts in the twentieth-century North Pacific. Highly readable and informative, each chapter is structured around a period in the life of Takata, the charismatic, rags-to-riches architect of the network in which Reiki spread for decades. Alternate Currents explores Reiki as an exemplary transnational spiritual therapy, demonstrating how lived practices transcend artificial distinctions between religion and medicine, and circulate in global systems while maintaining strong connections with the practices’ homeland.

Spirituality and Chemical Dependency shares current thinking on how spirituality is used in recovery from alcoholism and other forms of chemical dependency. The 12-Step programs have been the most successful form of treatment thus far; you will find the insight in this book to be revealing as to why. Each of the contributors has devoted a significant part of his or her life to help those suffering from chemical addiction. In each chapter, the author gives ideas on specific aspects of spirituality in the 12-Step context and answers the ever-important question "So what? " to provide guidelines for healthy spirituality in the addicted person.

Atea: Nature and Divinity in Polynesia focuses on an array of artistic creations that illuminate how Polynesians traditionally understood their relationship with the divine as active, dynamic, and manifested in the plants, feathers, and fibers of the islands they inhabited. Featuring some thirty exceptional works of Polynesian art that date from the late eighteenth to the nineteenth century, Atea examines celebrated examples of figural sculpture in wood and whale ivory; superbly executed feather headdresses and cloaks; and visually compelling fiber works, such as painted barkcloths and a small-scale spirit house, or temple. The author’s compelling essay represents a new phase in scholarship that looks to recover the early ritual landscape of Polynesia by examining the material nature of the art itself.

People worldwide find themselves part of overlapping communities of identity and belonging--racial, political, cultural, sexual, ideological. Some identities, like brand loyalties, are chosen; some, like class identity, are imposed. As followers of Jesus Christ, those called to live iln between the age that is and the age to come, Christians ask what it means to be part of the body of Christ, God's new creation from among the nations, in a world filled with other nations. "Who--and whose--are we?" There is no easy answer, no time at which Christians got it completely right. Yet such questions must be addressed, and the stakes are high. Matters of war and peace, exclusion and inclusion, who starves and who does not, the credibility of the gospel itself--all are caught up in the whirl of identities, allegiances imposed or refused, and questions about what "the church" might possibly mean in such circumstances. In this book, a distinguished group of scholars from five continents asks, "How can the church respect the diversity of its members--many nations, cultures, and communities--while maintaining a coherent witness to the kingdom of God that is not undermined by more parochial ideologies or priorities?" Chapter Contributors: Braden Anderson Maria Clara Lucchetti Bingemer Michael Budde Matthew Butler William Cavanaugh Jose Mario Francisco Peter Galadza Stanley Hauerwas Daniel Izuzquiza Slavica Jakelic Pantelis Kalaitzidis Eunice Karanja Kamaara Emmanuel Katongole Dorian Llywelyn Martin Menke Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator A. Alexander Stummvoll