Reflections on Healing Rituals, Practices and Discourse in Contemporary Religious Groups
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This special issue presents contributions by writers who deal with the significance of in widely diverse religious and cultural contexts today. In out ongoing research on religion in contemporary Quebec (1) we have round that healing, or a certain conception of healing, is ubiquitous in contemporary religious ritual and discourse. This is most evident in or spiritually-oriented practices that have emerged among non-immigrant Quebecois in recent years, such as, for example, Spiritualism, neo-shamanism, including Druidry, Wicca, yoga and various forms of Native spirituality (e.g. Corneiller 2011; Normandin 2010) that are attracting many non-Natives, especially young people. (See Rosemary Roberts' contribution to this issue.) The same tendency can be round in longer-established religious currents such as Catholicism and the various offshoots of Protestantism (baptism, Pentecostalism, etc.), as well as in the discourse of some people who practice Islam (Mossiere infra). Besides the Charismatic Catholic rituals found in our study (e.g. Bouchard 2009, Ruiz, In press) and in earlier studies (Cote et Zylberberg 1990), there are the ceremonies whose goal is to provide comfort and support for victims of AIDs, as described in the research for our study of a Catholic parish located in Montreal's Gay Village, whose ministry in general is seen as having a effect on parishioners (Koussens 2007, 2009 and Forthcoming). Though religious sometimes addresses physical diseases and pain, it also appears to offer psychological support and emotional relief. Dericquebourg (1988) speaks of healing religions in his study of three relatively recent (Antoinism, Christian Science and Scientology); in fact, our research has found that is a prominent feature in many religious currents today. The near omnipresence of in contemporary spiritualities is hardly limited to Quebec, as is evident in the works of McGuire (1996, 2008), Csordas (1994, 2001, 2002), Aubree (2003), Corten (1995) and others, including Cristina Rocha, Cristophe Monnot and Philippe Gonzalez and Laurent Denizeau, whose work can be found in this issue. Moreover, several of the contributions to this issue attest to the power of spiritual rituals and of practitioners to attract participants and clients across national and religious boundaries, leading to transnational networks of practitioners and clients; for example, Vodou priests and priestesses often circulate between Montreal, Miami and Haiti, as do those seeking their help (Drotbohm 2009). Cristina Rocha's article in this issue shows how Australians seek from a Brazilian practitioner, John of God, coming from a spiritual tradition (Spiritism) few of them know about, in a country few have ever visited, and who speaks a language that is not their own. As the aforementioned examples suggest, religious takes many different forms; there are rituals of catharsis that liberate emotions and provide a social setting for emotional release (to be found, for example, in charismatic groups, both Catholic and Protestant), along with rituals oriented to individuals or the earth; for some, pilgrimage is a form of (Boutin 2008), while for others, yoga meditation in a group (McGuire 2008: 139) may have a similar effect. (2) In some cases, such as the Soiree miracles described by Denizeau in this issue, prayer (by the supplicant and the other participants) is an integral part of the techniques of healing. More generally, practices of bodily ascesis prescribed by religion may be interpreted as a means of for oneself or for others, as, for example, the fasting of Hindu wives for the good of their husbands and families (Betbeder 2009); as Geraldine Mossiere's article shows, the regulation of the body prescribed by Islam (modesty and dietary rules) are interpreted by converts as having psychic and physical benefits. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".