The Power of Journaling: A Dynamic Tool for Evaluating Student Teacher Adjustment in Cross-Cultural Contexts

Journaling is an acceptable pedagogical and assessment tool used to help leverage a university student teacher’s emotional and spiritual growth in a 10 week cross-cultural student teaching experience. The process requires students to document their life and learning experiences. Questions are designed for student response. Student teachers are encouraged to draw personal connections between their lives and new experiences. This article will show how journaling helped four student teachers process what Kelly and Meyers (1995) identify as the four components of cross-cultural adaptability: (1) emotional resilience, (2) flexibility/openness, (3) perceptual acuity and (4) personal autonomy. Excerpts from the personal journals of students are included for each of these four components. The journals are used to assess student preparation for cross-cultural living, weekly physical, emotional and spiritual health, the learning environment, and the learning process

Kyiv Theological Academy Professors at the Beginning of the 20th Century: At the Intersection of Cultures

This article attempts to reveal intercultural connections at the Kyiv Theological Academy at the beginning of the 20th century by reconstructing the spiritual biographies of two theological academy professors: Archimandrite (later, Archbishop of Berlin and Germany) Tykhon (Tymofii Liashchenko) and Petro Kudriavtsev. The article demonstrates how different cultural traditions intersected and combined in the spiritual experience of these figures. The author of the article argues that, as a result of revolutionary events in 1917–1919, both Kyiv Theological Academy professors experienced transformations in personal cultural identity, and their spiritual biographies reveal a transition from Russian to Western European and a combination of both (Tykhon (Liashchenko) identities), and from Russian to Ukrainian ideological cultural orientation (Petro Kudriavtsev)

Understanding Spiritual Experience in Christian Spirituality

A spiritual experience for some means a mere fabrication of the mind. For others it is pathological and the consequence of psychiatric disturbances and psychological disorders. Others acknowledge that certain role-players are present when spiritual experiences occur. However, the identification of the involvement of these role-players by no means minimises the spiritual experience to a level of being non-significant. A spiritual experience in Christian spirituality assumes as its foundation that a personal relationship with Christ exists. It further signifies spiritual interaction as a result of the relationship. Taking different possibilities into account, this article contends that whatever scientists make of spiritual experience, it can never be reduced to mere fabrications of the mind, or psychological disorders. A spiritual experience in a Christian context signifies the interaction of God. Furthermore, spiritual experience is an important aspect of Christian spirituality that in essence indicates a relationship and interaction between the believer and God

The Mountain Stands: An Autoethnographic Inquiry into Zulu Christians\u27 Approaches to Spiritual Health

Spiritual health is a vital component of individual wellness that can be described in many ways; most commonly, it is thought of as the connectivity of the inner spirit to others, the world, transcendental beings, and more. From personal experience, I know that the state of my spiritual wellbeing can greatly impact my physical and mental health. For this reason, actively considered how to think about spiritual health for one of the first times in my life. This project sought to explore Zulu Christians’ approaches to spiritual health in concurrence with my own. This was done by interviewing one Swazi and eight Zulu Christians to hear narratives about spiritual health and how their relationships with God and/or ancestors affects their spirituality. My shared Christian identity with participants provided the opportunity to reflect deeply on my own personal spirituality and spiritual health in the form of an autoethnography. This project showed me that spiritual health is a deeply personal experience. Rather than reading about extracted patterns or generalizations about Zulu Christians’ health, readers of this project are instead taken along on my journey through participant narratives to recognize my changing spiritual health and subsequently “find myself again.

Turning Inside Out: Reading and Writing Godly Identity in Seventeenth-Century Narratives of Spiritual Experience

Writing about personal experience was a central component of early modern Protestant devotional practice. It was also, this dissertation argues, a creative and social practice through which the godly imagined and crafted their own spiritual identities and constructed interpretive communities into which these identities might be accepted and valued. Exploring the ways in which seventeenth-century Protestants examined interior experience and transformed interiority into a legible expression of the spiritual self, this project proposes that believers used spiritual autobiography to substantiate the intangible and invisible signs of God’s grace, employing narrative and imaginative structures to render idiosyncratic personal experiences familiar, shareable, and recognizably Christian. Spiritual autobiographies are often approached as transparent records of past experience or as sources of information about the spiritual lives of believers. By contrast, this project reads personal narratives as literary texts and as creative exercises in spiritual interpretation. In order to draw out and examine the fictive and transformative elements of these “truthful” documents, I explore the autobiographical “experience” narratives of Dionys Fitzherbert (c. 1580-1641), Agnes Beaumont (1652-1720), and John Bunyan (1628-88) alongside more ostensibly literary or innovative texts like John Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624) and, most experimentally, the spiritual narratives constructed by characters in John Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671). I argue that the process of creating and structuring godly identity through autobiographical writing cultivated spiritual assurance by providing imaginative access to inaccessible salvific truths. Looking specifically at texts that were written for circulation (in print or in manuscript, for friends or for the public), I further investigate the social functions of these deeply introspective texts, arguing that autobiographical writing allowed individuals to affirm personal godliness through shared interpretations of events and communal validation. The project complicates the notion of an “inward turn” in Protestant spirituality and alternatively offers the concept of turning the self “inside out”: using the text to place the self on display, seventeenth-century spiritual autobiographers materialized subjective experience and forged godly identities through the processes of sharing their stories with like-minded believers

Daily Spiritual Experience and Religious Believe

Spiritual experience is often realized as a personal reality that is different from the doctrine of religious beliefs, but whether spiritual experience and religious beliefs are two constructs that are not related to each other is still a subject of debate on this secular oriented world. This study aims to explain the relationship between daily spiritual experience and religious beliefs. The subjects in this study were 69 early adults. The method of data collection in this study was carried out using the Daily Spiritual Experience Scale-Short Form and Religious Belief and Values Scale-Short Form. The results of the research data were analyzed using the Pearson product-moment correlation technique. The result shows a positive relationship between daily spiritual experiences and religious beliefs. Religious beliefs and values can encourage someone to find feelings of love, peace, and happiness in their daily spiritual experiences

Hardiness & Spiritual Well-being as Moderators of Burnout in Professional Nurses

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of hardiness and spiritual well-being as moderators of burnout in a random sample of professional nurses in Oregon. The first hypothesis stated that higher levels of hardiness and spiritual well-being would be related to lower levels of burnout. A second hypothesis stated that existential well-being would be positively correlated with hardiness. The third hypothesis stated that age, years of experience, spiritual well-being and hardiness would be related to lower burnout. Hardiness and its components of commitment, challenge and control were measured by the Personal Views Survey II. Spiritual well-being, existential well-being and religious well-being were measured by the Spiritual Well-being Scale. The Maslach Burnout Inventory measured the burnout components of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and personal accomplishment. A demographic form provided descriptive data of the participants. Results indicated that hardiness and spiritual wellbeing correlated negatively with emotional exhaustion and depersonalization and positively with personal accomplishment. Existential well-being correlated positively with hardiness and its components of control, challenge and commitment. Age, years of experience, spiritual wellbeing and hardiness explained 33% of the variance in emotional exhaustion scores and 21 % of the variance in depersonalization and personal accomplishment scores. Step-wise regression analysis showed that age of nurse, workplace support and commitment explained 46% of the variance in emotional exhaustion scores. Commitment, time with patients and workplace support explained 33% of the variance in depersonalization scores. Commitment and time with clients explained 27% of the variance in personal achievement scores. These findings suggest that hardiness and spiritual well-being serve as moderators of burnout. Age, years of experience, time spent with patients and workplace support should be considered as contributing factors in reducing burnout. Implications include the need to consider the role of existential significance in nurses\u27 work and in the prevention and reduction of burnout. Provision of mentoring for young, less experienced nurses, time for involvement with people in workload assignments, and workplace support are suggested interventions

Mystical Poetry and Imagination: Inspiring Transpersonal Awareness of Spiritual Freedom

The author describes the philosophical and empirical aspects of an intuitive inquiry that explored 24 individuals’ (ages 30-80) mental images and creative expression in response to selected mystical poetry through a three-step procedure named Imaginal Resonance. Participants’ imaginal encounters with the poems inspired transpersonal awareness of spiritual freedom—a participatory, co-creative experience of self-awareness beyond personal concerns. Intuitive examination of the data and a hermeneutic analysis uncovered participants’ symbolic expressions of qualities such as awakening, personal development, introversion, expansion, connection, and liberation. Imaginal resonance facilitated a temporary glimpse of spiritual freedom, which was soon hindered by reasoning, questioning, commentary, comparison, anticipation, and judgment of the imagery and the experience as a whole. While the memory of the creative imagery lingered, the immediate experience of spiritual freedom diminished considerably with the return to discursive thought

The Correlation between Spiritual Well-Being and Burnout of Teachers

This study examines the correlation between spiritual well-being and burnout symptoms, including emotional exhaustion (EE), depersonalisation (DP), and personal accomplishment (PA), among Chinese secondary school teachers in Hong Kong. The data were collected from 427 Chinese secondary school teachers (189 males, 238 females) aged 25–37 from different schools with one to eight years of teaching experience. The participants completed the Spiritual Health and Life-orientation Measure (SHALOM) to evaluate the status of their spiritual well-being in the personal and communal, environmental, and transcendental domains. The Maslach Burnout Inventory—Human Services Survey (MBI-HSS) was also used to measure the extent of burnout in the workplace. All domains of spiritual well-being were negatively associated with EE and DP, while the personal and communal domain and the transcendental domain of spiritual well-being were positively associated with PA. Multiple regression analysis revealed that all the specific domains of spiritual well-being explained 68.6% and 54.0% of the variance in teachers’ EE and DP, respectively. Meanwhile, the same analysis found that the personal–communal and transcendental domains explained 74.9% of the variance in teachers’ PA. The personal–communal domain of spiritual well-being was the strongest predictor of burnout