Keeping a Clean Heart (Chapter 7 of For Today: A Prayer When Life Gets Messy)

Excerpt: When I heard that some of the kids at school received an allowance, money their parents actually gave to them for no particular reason other than to do a few chores around the house, I could hardly believe it. It seemed too good to be true. I never received an allowance, and the idea of having some spending money of any kind was usually out of the question. Once in a while, my mother would give my brothers and me a quarter each to go to the municipal swimming pool if we hoed five rows of corn in the garden, but that was the extent of it. Honestly, we had a loving and supportive family life and there was always good food on the table and clean clothes in the closet, but there wasn\u27t any extra money for extravagances like allowances. We lived paycheck to paycheck, and my parents fretted far more than I knew about running out of money before the end of the month. So, I decided to earn my own spending money. At the age of thirteen, I became an independent businessman- peddling papers for the Saginaw News

Passages and Patterns of Paschal Faith

(Except) The Roman Catholic Rite for the Christian Initiation of Adults has been a marvelous instrument for facilitating liturgical renewal throughout the church. Its culmination in the celebration of the paschal feast has contributed mightily to making the Easter vigil the primary liturgical event of the church year. The rite has also helped us to recover the emphasis on the unitary nature of the sacraments of initiation: baptism-confirmation-communion, all celebrated in sequence at the paschal feast. The RCIA can also provide us a perspective from which to examine the formation and transformation of paschal faith. What makes it such a useful perspective for such an examination is that there is such a clear line of differentiation between the before and after of adult initiation, and the term we most often use to make that line of demarcation is conversion. Before the sacraments of initiation comes the training of the catechumenate, climaxing in the Lenten cycle prior to the paschal feast. After Easter comes the mystagogy of post-baptismal catechesis, unpacking the meaning of the sacramental life of the church for the new converts to enable them to reflect on the mysteries they are now experiencing from within the full fellowship of the redeemed

Edna Manley\u27s The Diaries : Cultural Politics and the Discourse of Self

A critic of imperialism, race and class privilege, sculptor Edna Manley contributed to the ascendancy of a West Indian cultural aesthetic. Her productivity in the creative arts and her promotion of indigenous cultural organizations were vital to the growth of a post-colonial identity expressing Jamaican national unity and cultural plurality. The wife of Premier Norman W. Manley and the mother of Michael Manley, Jamaica\u27s former Prime Minister, she drew strength from her cross-cultural heritage as a British-trained artist seeking to express the collective unconsciousness of her people. Her creative work finds its symbols in the subaltern currents of Caribbean life in the ongoing processes of community-making that forge a national identity out of peoples displaced from many lands. Her art is integrative: Afro-Caribbean and European themes merge in a symbolic universe suggesting wholeness. Her self-reflections, in diary form, also illustrate her determination to link opposing metaphors of the self into a central, organizing image

Academic reflections between Polynesian tattooing and reflective practice

In Polynesian culture stories which may be generations old are told via tattoo art: the Tahitian word ‘tatu’ or ‘ta-tu’ means to strike something and links directly to the ancient art of tattooing to preserve an ancestral lineage and/or record a particular event or story that has been handed down from generation to generation via the same method (Villequette, 1998). Some scholars such as Gell (1993), and Schrader (2000) and Jones (2000) in Schildkrout (2004), write of tattoos being associated with “subsidiary selves, spirits, ancestors, rulers and victims” that are resident within the tattooed individual, while some write of ethnographic work being inscribed on bodies (Sparkes, 2000, p. 21 and Schildkrout, 2004, p. 322). Auto-ethnographic study (the study of ourselves) is a relatively new field and is often associated with qualitative analysis; as such it has stimulated the author to introduce the term ‘internal’ reflection. I believe that this may describe a ‘personal’ or ‘internal’ reflection that is transmitted to the outside world in the form of a tattoo. Drawing on the work of Sparkes, an auto-ethnography is a narrative of self, although this research offers tattoos as a viable alternative to narrative and suggests that auto-ethnographic tattoos are not only commonplace but that they can also be very real transcripts of the narrative equivalent. Further, this research shows that different cultures reflect in different ways and that the tattoo is a popular and essential method of ethnographic captur

Tourism and the smartphone app: capabilities, emerging practice and scope in the travel domain.

Based on its advanced computing capabilities and ubiquity, the smartphone has rapidly been adopted as a tourism travel tool.With a growing number of users and a wide varietyof applications emerging, the smartphone is fundamentally altering our current use and understanding of the transport network and tourism travel. Based on a review of smartphone apps, this article evaluates the current functionalities used in the domestic tourism travel domain and highlights where the next major developments lie. Then, at a more conceptual level, the article analyses how the smartphone mediates tourism travel and the role it might play in more collaborative and dynamic travel decisions to facilitate sustainable travel. Some emerging research challenges are discussed

Jewish Revenge: Haredi Action in the Zionist Sphere

This is a pre-copyedited version of an article accepted for publication in (journal title, volume and issue numbers, and year) following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version is available from Wayne State University Press.Jewish ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) cinema in Israel has become increasingly prominent in recent years. Emerging as a highly controversial, secluded, and gender-segregated form of “amateur cinema,” it is currently seeing gradual professionalization. This article discusses Haredi cinema in the context of the Haredi community’s relationship with the Israeli state and the doctrine of Zionism. Appropriating generic conventions of mainstream Hollywood cinema, yet keeping within the secluded Haredi space, this form of minority cinema functions as an alternative (virtual) sphere in which a complex set of negotiations occurs between Jewish ultra-Orthodox ideals and those of the surrounding Israeli society and Zionism. It is reflective of and engaged in the production of recent social and discursive transformations within the Haredi community in Israel. We examine this phenomenon through a focused analysis of the male action genre, specifically the popular series Jewish Revenge (Yehuda Grovais, 2000–2010). As we demonstrate, the mode of representation and the narratives of these films bring models of masculinities and notions of heroism under scrutiny. The Zionist narrative, the national body, and the (imaginary) place of the Haredi within it are being reconfigured through the prism of body politics and fantasies of transgression

Journeying to visibility:an autoethnography of self-harm scars in the therapy room

This autoethnography explores the experience of a therapist negotiating the visibility of their self‐harm scars in the therapy room. Its form takes the shape of the author's personal meaning‐making journey, beginning by exploring the construction of the therapist identity before going on to consider the wounded healer paradigm and the navigation of self‐disclosure. A thread throughout is finding ways to resist fear and shame as both a researcher and counsellor. The author concludes by recounting fragments of sessions from the first client she worked with while having her scars visible. While not every therapist will have self‐harm scars, all therapists have a body which plays “a significant part of his or her unique contribution to therapy” (Burka, 2013, p. 257). This paper is, therefore, potentially valuable to any therapist, at any stage of development, who seeks to reflect on the role of the body and use of the self

Women and the art of fiction

Women wrote about art in the nineteenth century in a variety of genres, ranging from the formal historical or technical treatise and professional art journalism, to travel writing, poetry, and fiction. Their fiction is often less ideologically circumscribed than their formal art histories: the visual arts constituted a language for writing about the social position of women, and about questions of gender and sexuality. This essay considers how women introduced the visual arts and artist figures into their fiction in critically distinctive ways, and can be said in this form to have contributed to nineteenth-century art discourse and debate