readings
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Notes on the book “Twice Dead” by Margaret Lock
This book presents an extensive review of the history and development of one of the most controversial medical practices – organ transplants. In fact, it would be fair to say that the book is not really about organ transplants but about the reinvention of death in the relatively new term “brain death”. Lock describes the making of this term, it’s popularization, the debates that surround it, and its cultural impact. Having worked for another project in Japan, Lock had an opportunity to research the issue of brain death there. This book provides a sort of comparison between the way the topic is approached in North America and in Japan. We…
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Thoughts on “Capitalist spirituality” – a term offered by J. Carrette and R. King
– a term offered in Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion by J. Carrette and R. King In their book Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion Jeremy Carrette and Richard King argue that the replacement of tradition-specific religion with a more free-form search for personal meaning has resulted in a sort of a vacuum that called for a new search for meaning, which in turn has been filled by branding. They describe this tendency as consumerist spirituality that promises the quick fixes, easy achievable states without much commitment or work done. The authors argue that the main problem with modern spiritualities is that they are not demanding enough,…
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Notes on the article by Anne Carolyn Klein “Seeing Mind, Being Body. Contemplative Practice and Buddhist Epistemology.”
The name of this article suggests that we are to be taken on a journey through the study of the nature and the knowledge behind the belief in Buddhist tradition. The author makes a strong point that it is impossible to grasp the idea of Buddhism only by reading texts, that is, only by considering the information the words carry. Instead, she shows that each word is basically charged with experience or experiential practice of the wisdom it holds, and that it is impossible to look into the living practices of Buddhists without considering such vital part as the energy work. Buddhist practices are aimed at several dimensions of learning,…
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Notes on the book by Puchalski, C. M., Ferrell, B. “Making Health Care Whole: Integrating Spirituality into Patient Care”
This book is created on the basis of the national conference, where spiritual and palliative care experts gathered to discuss guidelines for incorporating spirituality into palliative care. The question is vital as in the past years there has been more and more attention given to the role of spirituality within palliative care, its necessary part in caring for ill and dying patients. Simply recognizing the importance of addressing spiritual issues in healthcare proves not to be enough, and the healthcare professionals need to be educated specifically on what spirituality is and how spiritual care should be delivered. The book “Making Health Care Whole” is meant to provide necessary definitions of…
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Notes on “Midrash and Medicine. Healing Body and Soul in the Jewish Interpretive tradition”
The book is a collection of essays and articles that present the views of some of the most sensitive people to the ideas of jewish cultural tradition of midrash within the healthcare settings. The book is divided into themes, within each of them two different people present their perspective views on the given subject. These are not always the opposite views, I would rather call them complementary of each other. For example, in the first pair essays exploring the use of metaphors in the healing process both Rabbi Simka Y. Weintraub and Stuart Schoffman describe the use of metaphors in understanding of one’s illness and in accessing the healings. While…
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Notes on the book by Anne Fadiman “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down”
The book “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” raises many issues, including the cultural barriers, their impact on health care, immigration, racism, laws and rules, and many more. While the book is really about the collision of two systems – the system of medical care in United States and the world system of the Hmong population, it is also about the deeper reasons for the problems that rose in this story. A lot of the Hmong character, brave and noncompliant, is demonstrated through the history of the Hmong people, their involvement in the “American” war (where it was seen as an advantage), their belief that the U.S. is…
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Notes on categorization of SBNRs into various types by L. Mercadante in her book Belief Without Boarders: Inside the Minds of the Spiritual but not Religious”
Linda A. Mercadante points out in her book Belief Without Boarders: Inside the Minds of the Spiritual but not Religious that people unaffiliated with organized religion are an understudied group. There have been several attempts to arrange them into categories, as, for example, Robert Fuller who proposed in his Spiritual but not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America to divide the unchurched group into the totally indifferent, those with ambiguous relationship with organized religion, and the actual spiritual but not religious. Mercadante, though, looked even closer into the SBNR group and drew the distinctive categories within it. Understanding that there are several different types of people who identify themselves as spiritual but…
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Notes on “Possessing Spirits and Healing Selves. Embodiment and Transformation in an Afro-Brazilian Religion”
a book by by Rebecca Selligman This book describes an ethnographic study of the psychophysiology of Candomblé mediumship. Combining ethnography and psychophysiology proved to be hard, and the author describes several obstacles, including the difficulty of maintaining a balance between recruiting a large enough sample for the study to be valid and building a trusting rapport with the participants. The central premise of the book is that the process of self-transformation in Candomblé spirit possession mediumship is a process with the potential to heal both mind and body. This idea is based on the finding that all mediums that the author interviewed for the study had come to become mediums…
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Notes on “Health and Long Life The Chinese Way”
a book by Livia Kohn This book is a comprehensive guide through the Chinese system of viewing the person in the Universe. It is written in a very structured way, so that even those who are unfamiliar with the numerous words and concepts do not get confused and are able to grasp the idea of the Chinese view. The body in Chinese health and long life practices is a constantly moving and changing combination of different forms of Qi (life energy). The organs within the body are classified according to the five phases which correspond with the seasons and the Five elements, such as Wood, Metal, Earth, Water, and Fire.…
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Notes on “Healing Logics” edited by Erica Brady
This book is a collection of essays that was put together after the Utah State University’s conference on folk medicine, which made it evident that existing models of investigation and research proved to be limiting in exploration of the health belief systems that exist in multitude in the US. The general conclusion of this conference (and the collection of essays) is that these health belief systems are built on the bases of very diverse sources of authority, such as community and ethnic tradition, spiritual beliefs, personal experience, and persecutions of the formal medicine. Through the essays we can observe the relationship between these systems of authority being competing, conflicting, and…