Remain Hopeful
Integrating Spiritual Healing Practices and Mental Health Services : An Examination of Treatment Outcomes
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Rebecca Vicente
This is a qualitative study to examine the positive therapeutic outcomes of integrating religious and spiritual practices and traditional mental health services. The study looked at the experiences and outcomes of clients who were using an integrated approach. It is a practice that while not typical, is being offered in the United States and globally. This research identifies subjects who were actively engaged in this integrated approach and recorded findings by interviewing each participant. This information is used to examine the implications for long-term treatment outcomes.
What Can We Deduce From Contemporary Individual Prayer Entries?: The Exploratory Potential of Texts in Prayer Books of Intentions
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Rafał Cekiera
The transformations in religiousness that have taken place in recent decades, which can be signaled by notions such as individualization, subjectivization, or privatization, are prompting the search for new forms of research into religious phenomena. One interesting and inspiring research material may be the contemporary prayer books of intentions recorded by orants in various sacred places. They also have increasingly popular online counterparts - places on the web where one can submit one's prayers. In the past, such texts used to have a very formalized canon - and were distinguished by a high level of formality. Nowadays, according to research, the texts written by orants in these kinds of prayer books are characterized by a considerable degree of polyphonic - both formally and thematically. They are a manifestation of different ways of life, narratives created about it, interpretation of one's own lot, perception of the world and its principles, as well as understanding one's own place in it and diversifying positively and negatively valued individual experiences. The paper presents my research results - analyses of traditional prayer books from various shrines (but also, for example, from the Chapel at Warsaw Chopin Airport) and prayer entries posted on the Internet. A methodological proposal for working with such highly intimate personal documents is also presented - together with an indication of their potential for identifying the religious worlds of contemporary man.
Journeys of Hope: Reflections on the Spiritual Power of Hope of Immigrant Children
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Wilma Robles Melendez
Children’s responses to day-to-day events unveil a perception making us conscious of their complex way to understand challenging realities, and clearly emerging the child’s hopeful perspective (Larson, 2022). Their answers, sentiments grounded on hope, point to children’s spiritual capacity. Underlining the child’s distinctive ways of understanding what is experienced, continues to be the focus of interest on what has been described as the spiritual self of the child (Falicov, 2009; Adams, 2008). Affirmed and verbalized in ways that resonate and stay with us, even in the most difficult moments, children's comments and responses many times defy their tender age, raising to a level of complexity and thoughtful optimistic perspective that intuitively reveals a profound sense of hope. This hope-centeredness also uncovers a level of transcendent understanding in what has been acknowledged as the spiritual way of the child (Rayburn, 2008; Harris, 2019). Experiences today are continuing to unveil children’s hope and spirituality. Today, in times of difficult challenges, it is through the experiential journeys of children when their voice and response to what is faced discloses the hopeful spiritual nature of the child’s way of understanding their realities. Bringing attention is the response of children experiencing and growing up amid a globally increasing migration movement, this project examines the role of hope as a spiritual force observed by child- immigrants, identifying elements defining children's hope-centered spiritual response to challenges during migration. This project aims to raise awareness about theneed for attending to children’ spirituality as a supporting wellbeing factor.
