ESPIRITUALIDADE E ARTE: Um estudo do Processo de Transcendência na Produção e Contemplação da Cerâmica

O presente estudo, objeto desta dissertação de mestrado, visa demonstrar a transcendência que ocorre na produção e contemplação da cerâmica. Em outras palavras, apresentar o vínculo entre Espiritualidade e Arte e, para tanto, os conceitos sobre espiritualidade pontuados por Leonardo Boff e de Meishu-Sama constituem os pontos de apoio para o estudo. Acrescentamos igualmente as considerações de Meishu-Sama relativamente à arte, as quais constituem a forma central para estruturação da pesquisa. Todo o processo de produção da Arte Cerâmica desde a escolha da argila até as queimas é descrito na dissertação. Concomitantemente, a fase de contemplação da obra é igualmente levada em consideração a partir do resfriamento do forno até o encontro do ceramista com sua obra. Paralelamente à teoria acerca da transcendência, espiritualidade e arte, fotografias explicam as fases do fazer cerâmico, e peças de cerâmicas auxiliam na compreensão do que pretendemos analisar a presença da espiritualidade durante a produção de uma obra artística aqui, mais especificamente, a cerâmica.

A BUSCA DO SAGRADO Um enfoque da religião na obra de Richard Wagner na perspectiva teológica de Paul Tillich

Richard Wagner concebia a arte como uma atividade similar à religião, que deveria conduzir o ser humano à reflexão sobre as questões principais de sua existência e levá-lo ao aperfeiçoamento. Wagner sempre foi obcecado pela ideia da redenção e a preocupação do compositor com a regeneração do ser humano perpassa toda a sua obra. Os conceitos religiosos de Wagner, presentes em sua obra musical e em seus ensaios literários, reúnem tradições cristãs e budistas, ideias políticas e preceitos mitológicos que delineiam o seu credo pessoal, uma forma de religião sincrética na qual a arte tem o seu lugar como elemento de transcendência, cumprindo a função de interpretar os símbolos míticos para torna-los compreensíveis à percepção do espírito humano. Os ideais artísticos de Wagner vão ao encontro do pensamento de Paul Tillich e a sua Teologia da Cultura. Tillich afirma que a religião não está restrita aos limites dos templos religiosos ou aos domínios institucionais, mas encontra-se em qualquer expressão humana na qual se manifeste a preocupação suprema . Ela pode ser reconhecida em qualquer situação onde se encontre o elemento incondicional, nas manifestações da criatividade humana e na cultura, na busca honesta da verdade ou na procura de solução para as adversidades da existência. Portanto, o objetivo desse estudo é buscar no pensamento tillichiano uma correlação teológica para os anseios de redenção evidenciados na obra de arte wagneriana.

EXISTÊNCIA E RELIGIÃO EM ALBERT CAMUS: Relações entre o absurdo e a revolta

A presente pesquisa busca, a partir dos dois pólos fundamentais ao pensamento de Albert Camus, a saber, o absurdo e a revolta, discutir a relação do pensamento camusiano com a religião, no que tange fundamentalmente à sua recusa frente a um pensamento ou atitude que recorra a um sentido além da existência humana. Camus escritor franco-argelino e Prêmio Nobel de Literatura em 1959 concebeu o absurdo como a experiência resultante da consciência de assimetria vigente na existência humana. Esta assimetria se estabelece na polarização entre o anseio humano por felicidade, união e plenitude e a evidência expressa pela existência de dor, fragmentação e limite. A revolta subsiste neste cenário como resposta camusina: esta é concomitantemente reivindicação de justiça e insurreição contra a morte. No que concerne à religião, Camus compreende uma fuga fundamentada na esperança. Esta fuga negligencia e impede a consideração radical da condição humana. A esperança religiosa, em suma, anula a revolta como resposta legitima a condição existencial: pretende justificar o injusto com base em um mistério. Realizada a descrição do absurdo e da revolta, recorre-se ao pensamento do teólogo e filósofo alemão Paul Tillich, como referencial teórico para a análise específica da relação entre religião e pensamento camusiano. O conceito de religião e fé em Paul Tillich apresenta-se como elemento importante para a consideração desta relação ao salientar a vigência da ambigüidade na experiência religiosa, interpretada em Paul Tillich a partir da experiência dialógica entre o finito e o infinito, ou, em outros termos, entre o ser e o não-ser. A partir de Paul Tillich pergunta-se sobre a possibilidade da religião, mesmo em meio à afirmação da impossibilidade do eterno. Caminha-se, assim, para a consideração da efetividade da experiência religiosa em Camus como expressão de uma transcendência profana , onde a recusa a Deus comunga com uma perene reivindicação da perfeição e do eterno.

Evaluating the motives of informal entrepreneurs: some lessons from Ukraine

To understand entrepreneurs' motivations, it has become increasingly common to distinguish between those driven by necessity (or pushed) and those driven by opportunity (or pulled) into entrepreneurship. Until now, entrepreneurs operating wholly or partially in the informal economy have been widely assumed to be necessity-driven, pushed into this enterprise as a survival strategy in the absence of alternatives. To evaluate whether this is indeed the case, this paper reports one of the first surveys of informal entrepreneurs' motives. Reporting face-to-face interviews conducted in Ukraine during 2005–06 with 298 informal entrepreneurs, the finding is although most identified themselves as necessity entrepreneurs when initially asked whether they were either pushed or pulled, subsequent questions reveal in the vast majority of cases, there were not only both push and pull factors driving their original decision to start-up informal enterprises, but also a clear shift among these entrepreneurs as their business became established away from necessity-oriented motivations and toward more opportunity-oriented motivations. The outcome is a call for a transcendence of a static either/or approach and the adoption of a dynamic both/and approach that recognizes the coexistence of necessity- and opportunity-drivers as well as the fluidity of entrepreneurs' motivations.

Are indigenous approaches to achieving influence in business organizations distinctive? A comparative study of guanxi, wasta, jeitinho, svyazi and pulling strings

Managers in five nations rated scenarios exemplifying indigenous forms of informal influence whose cultural origins were concealed. Locally generated scenarios illustrated episodes of guanxi, wasta, jeitinho, svyazi and pulling strings. Local scenarios were judged representative of local influence processes but so too were some scenarios derived from other contexts. Furthermore, many scenarios were rated as more typical in non-local contexts. While these influence processes are found to be widely disseminated, they occur more frequently in contexts characterized by high self-enhancement values, low self-transcendence values and high endorsement of business corruptibility. Implications for a fuller understanding of local business practices are discussed. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

Nothing Normal Happens to Me: True Stories of a Journey from Madness to Motherhood

Written in first person, NOTHING NORMAL HAPPENS TO ME is a memoir in essays that traces the narrator’s journey from self-destruction to creation. Part one encompasses the narrator’s lost years, after she breaks free from the tyranny of her mentally ill mother and goes to live on her own at 17. Part two provides context for those bad girl years, exploring her childhood when she identified with her histrionic mother. Part three comprises stories about the narrator’s years of awakening when she seeks out transcendence, faith, and a family of her own. The pieces vary tonally and stylistically as they attempt to trace the maturing voice of the narrator. Like SEEKING RAPTURE: SCENES FROM A WOMAN’S LIFE by Kathryn Harrison, this collection centers on a young girl, who without her mother’s love, struggles to love herself. It is both a cautionary tale and a story of redemption.

Safety in bear country

Safety in Bear Country tells the story of Serena Palmer’s twenty-second year. At a time when she thought she would be making a living in Toronto as an artist and as an independent adult, the economic times and her emotionally fragile state due to the demise of a romantic relationship, prove obstructive. Instead, she lives in the basement of her parents’ home and works for the town’s largest employer, a mental institution. Here she embarks on an internal quest for meaning and a truer understanding of love. Specifically, as the novel’s action shifts through Australia and then to Northern Canada, ending with her near-death and shamanistic spiritual transcendence, Serena explores the contradictions that exist between love and fear: in order to ever fully love, one must make oneself vulnerable at the deepest level. And, in order to ever make oneself vulnerable, one must conquer fear. In this way, fear and love are inextricably connected. Here in lies the irony of the title: Safety in Bear Country.

Spic'ing into Existence: Epitaph, Epithet, and the Ethnopoetic Imagination

Quién Es, Quién Somos? Spic’ing into Existence claims a four-fold close-reading: first, analysis of texts: from theoretical meditations to (prison) memoir and film. Second, a half dozen central figures appear, largely Latinx and black American. They cut across a score of registers, socio-economics, ideological reservations, but all are, as Carl Carlton sang, poetry in motion. Writers, poets, theologians, pathologists, artists, comedians, actors, students whose vocation is invocation, the inner surge of their calling. Third, the manuscript draws from a series of historical moments—from radical liberation of the late 60s, to contemporary student activism. Finally, this body of work is movement, in all its social, gestural, and kinesthetic viscera. From this last heading, we peel away layers of what I call the ethnopoet, the fascia undoing that reveals its bio-political anatomy, dressing its bare life with kinship speech. First, the social revolutions of the Civil Rights, Black Power, abolitionism, the Black Panthers and Young Lords, boycotts and jarring artistic performances. These events are superficial not in vain sense, but key epicenters of underground murmurings, the workings of a cunning assailant. She robs not lavish estates, but another day to breathe. Gesturally, as perhaps the interlocutor, lies this author, interspersing his own diatribes to conjure her presence. The final branch is admittedly the most intangible. Kinesthetically, we map the nimbleness, footwork lígera of what I call the ethnopoet. Ethnopoet is no mere aggregate of ethnicity and poetry, but like chemical reaction, the descriptor for its behavior under certain pressures, temperatures, and elements. Elusive and resisting confinement, and therefore definition, the ethnopoet is a shapeshifting figure of how racialized bodies [people of color] respond to hegemonic powers. She is, at bottom, however, a native translator, the plural-lensed subject whose loyalty is only to the imagination of a different world, one whose survival is not contingent upon her exploitation. The native translator’s constant re-calibrations of oppressive power apparatuses seem taxing at best, and near-impossible, at worst. To effectively navigate through these polarized loci, she must identify ideologies that in turn seek “affective liberatory sances” in relation to the dominant social order (43). In a kind of performative contradiction, she must marshall the knowledge necessary to “break with ideology” while speaking within it. Chicana Studies scholar, Chela Sandoval, describes this dual movement as “meta-ideologizing”: the appropriation of hegemonic ideological forms in order to transform them (82). Nuestros padres se subieron encima de La Bestia, y por eso somos pasageros a ese tren. Y ya, dentro su pansa, tenemos que ser vigilantes cuando plantamos las bombas. In Methodology of the Oppressed, Sandoval schematizes this oppositional consciousness around five principle categories: “equal rights,” “revolutionary,” “supremacist,” “separatist,” and “differential.” Taken by themselves, the first four modes appear mutually exclusive, incapable of occupying the same plane, until a fifth pillar emerges. Cinematographic in nature, differential consciousness, as Sandoval defines it, is “a kinetic motion that maneuvers, poetically transfigures, and orchestrates while demanding alienation, perversion, and reformation in both spectators and practitioners” (44). For Sandoval, then, differential consciousness is a methodology that privileges an incredible sense mobility, one reaching artistic sensibilities. Our fourth and final analytic of movement serves an apt example of this dual meaning. Lexically speaking, ‘movement’ may be regarded as a political mobilization of aggrieved populations (through sustained efforts), or the process of moving objects (people or otherwise) from one location to another. Praxis-wise, it is both action and ideal, content and form. Thus, an ethnic poetics must be regarded less as a series of stanzas, shortened lyric, or even arrangement of language, but as a lens through which peripheralized peoples kaleidecope ideological positions in an “original, eccentric, and queer sight” (43). Taking note of the advantages of postponing identifications, the thesis stands its ground on the term ethnopoet. Its abstraction is not dewey-eyed philosophy, but an anticipation of poetic justice, of what’s to come from callused hands. This thesis is divided into 7.5 chapters. The first maps out the ethnopoet’s cartographies of struggle. By revisiting that alleged Tío Tomas, Richard Rodriguez, we unearth the tensions that negatively, deny citizenship to one silo, but on the flipside, engender manifold ways of seeing, hearing, and moving . The second, through George Jackson’s prison memoirs, pans out from this ethnography of power, groping for an apparatus that feigns an impervious prestige: ‘the aesthetic regime of coercion.’ In half-way cut, the thesis sidesteps to spic into existence, formally announcing, through Aime Cesaire, myself, and Pedro Pietri, the poeticization of trauma. Such uplift denies New Age transcendence of self, but a rehearsal of our entrapment in these mortal envelopes. Thirdly, conscious of the bleeding ethnic body, we cut open the incipient corpse to observe her pathologist. Her native autopsies offer the ethnic body’s posthumous recognition, the ethnopoetics ability to speak for and through the dead. Chapter five examines prolific black artists—Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar—to elide the circumvention of their consumption via invoking radical black hi/her-stories, ones fragmenting the black body. Sixth, the paper compares the Black Power Salute of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics to Duke’s Mi Gente Boycott of their Latino Student Recruitment Weekend. Both wielded “silent gestures,” that shrewdly interfered with white noise of numbed negligence. Finally, ‘taking the mask off’ that are her functionalities, the CODA expounds on ethnopoet’s interiority, particularly after the rapid re-calibration of her politics. Through a rerun of El Chavo del Ocho, one of Mexican television’s most cherished shows, we tune into the heart-breaking indigence of barrio residents, only to marvel at the power of humor to, as Friday’s John Witherspoon put it, “fight another day.” This thesis is the tip of my tongue. Y por una vez, déjala que cante.

Music therapy, in tuning at the end of life

In this article music therapy is presented as a helpful tool to support the persons (and their relatives) living at the end of their life and, also, as a non pharmacological and complementary therapy in an integral and holistic medicine. What we report here comes from the direct experience, nourished after many years of interventions and reflections in oncology and palliative care units. We’re talking about silence, music, therapy, models and techniques. We will read and feel therapeutic sessions… but above all, we’re talking about life, conscience and love.

Los ungüentarios de alabastro en el Mediterráneo. Primer Milenio a. C.

A partir del hallazgo de un tipo particular de envases: ungüentarios y perfumarios en una nueva tumba en el territorio de Arados/Amrit, observamos cómo se incrementa la presencia de estos envases en tumbas de incineración e inhumación durante el primer milenio antes de Cristo en la cuenca mediterránea. Hemos elaborado una serie de análisis y discusiones sobre su distribución, cronología, significado y uso social, tratando de establecer una periodización de sus usos y una contextualización cultural y social dentro del ritual funerario y del uso de determinadas materias primas empleadas para su elaboración.

La praxis dans le Marx de Michel Henry

Si le Marx de Michel Henry reconduit plusieurs thèses développées dans les écrits antérieurs et anticipe celles de « la trilogie » sur le christianisme, le dialogue qu’il instaure autour du thème de la praxis lui confère un statut singulier dans l’ensemble de l’oeuvre. Parce que Marx attribue à la pratique de l’individu et aux rapports réels entre les pratiques le pouvoir de créer les idéalités, notamment celle de la valeur, Henry est lui-même conduit à déplacer le champ d’immanence qu’il avait jusque-là situé du côté de l’ego et du corps vers la pratique et le système du travail vivant aux prises avec le monde objectif. Or du point de vue d’une phénoménologie matérielle, pour autant qu’il renvoie à un point de vue extérieur à la stricte immanence, le seul usage de la notion d’« individu » manifeste déjà une prise en compte de « la transcendance », poussant Henry à suspendre pour une part l’approche phénoménologique. Même si l’acosmisme de L’essence de la manifestation transparait encore dans le Marx, il est mis en tension extrême avec le monde des déterminations sociales et économiques et contraint l’auteur à développer la thèse de l’enracinement de ces déterminations dans l’immanence de la vie et de la praxis. C’est en même temps ce qui fait la force et l’originalité de la lecture henryenne de Marx. D’un autre côté, quand bien même elle hérite d’une éthique de la praxis, la trilogie semble perdre de vue la stricte individualité de la praxis qui apparaît dans le Marx. C’est ainsi que le concept de Vie Absolue qu’elle promeut est associé à une exigence d’universel que Henry avait préalablement disqualifiée, notamment à travers sa critique de Hegel. La thèse qu’on va lire cherche ainsi à rendre compte de l’originalité absolue du Marx dans l’oeuvre du phénoménologue français.

Warunki wstępne interpretacji doświadczenia religijnego. Pomiędzy »logos spermatikos« a »qehal el«

Nowadays we observe social transformations that have no counterparts in previous ages. Social dependences are expressed in forms that change and increase with unprecedented intensity. Human beings in their individual experience, particularly religious, realize themselves through dynamic relations to the surrounding world, other people and God. People desire a deepened interpretation what they experience. In this article I seek research tools which can help investigations in the area of fundamental theology which is expected to transform or translate individual experience in a rational way into an objective interpretative pattern. We seek such models of reality, which will ground theological investigations in the social relation of an individual person to world [in general] and to transcendence. Two investigative categories from the Christian tradition are accepted in the article: logos spermatikos and assembly of God – qehal which especially take into account the salvific perspective of the history of creation. These notions allow us to describe phenomena not only as static; they also allow us to interpret dynamic relations underway in our time. In the accepted investigative model (model 2) both the beginning and the aim of creation are qualified as dynamic realities. They influence and react to everything that happens in creation. We should therefore interpret the precondition of individual religious experience as dynamic. This will let us describe the .transient relations. as a basis in these investigations. Such an approach will prevent us from deprecating individuality in favor of the community, or the reverse.

The Buddhist Coleridge: Creating Space for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner within Buddhist Romantic Studies

The popularization of academic spaces that combine Buddhist philosophy with the literature of the Romantic period – a discipline I refer to as Buddhist Romantic Studies – have exposed the lack of scholarly attention Samuel Taylor Coleridge and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner have received within such studies. Validating Coleridge’s right to exist within Buddhist Romantic spheres, my thesis argues that Coleridge was cognizant of Buddhism through historical and textual encounters. To create a space for The Rime within Buddhist Romantic Studies, my thesis provides an interpretation of the poem that centers on the concept of prajna, or wisdom, as a vital tool for cultivating the mind. Focusing on prajna, I argue that the Mariner’s didactic story traces his cognitive voyage from ignorance to enlightenment. By examining The Rime within the framework of Buddhism, readers will also be able to grasp the importance of cultivating the mind and transcending ignorance.

Aproximaciones a mindfulness en la psicología contemporánea

Este trabajo es una revisión de literatura que abarca una selección de artículos disponibles en bases de datos especializadas y publicados en el periodo comprendido entre los años 2006 a 2016 para artículos científicos y entre los años 2000 a 2016 para libros. En total se revisaron: 1 tesis doctoral, 1 tesis magistral, 111 artículos y 9 libros o capítulos de libros. Se presentan diversas definiciones de mindfulness y formas de conceptualizarla, sus mecanismos de acción, sus enfoques psicoterapéuticos predominantes, los efectos de su práctica estable, sus principales campos de acción y la importancia de la formación de los docentes que imparten la práctica. Finalmente se presentan algunas conclusiones acerca del diálogo entre la literatura psicológica sobre mindfulness y algunas de las concepciones de la tradición budista en torno a la meditación.