Oblation

Abstract: The article examines the activity of writing case-notes. For this purpose, case-notes are broadly defined as textual records of encounters between mental health practitioners and their clients. The primary focus is on psychotherapy notes, written for private use. It suggests that note writing is potentially a lively addition to the dialogue within the therapy room, an essential part of the unique relationship that grows between practitioner and client. In particular, it looks at the possibilities of representing intersubjectivity, the third voice, emerging from the dialogue between two subjectivities, in ways that forward both theoretical understanding and the therapeutic endeavour. It will argue that serious engagement with case-notes must of necessity tackle questions of voice, speaking rights, a variety of deafnesses, power, the inscription or oblation of race and gender in professional discourses, and reclamation of knowledge colonized by patriarchal and colonial structures of authority. It is feminis...

Abstract: Practices derived from the ‘vita contemplativa’ and other spiritual sources are drawn upon by management, but as the power of human resources management (HRM) is extended so the relationship between ‘contemplation’ and the surrender of self-identity required by HRM demands critical examination. The conscious construction of the individual has become a social and political goal. Subjects are required to strip away attributes of their identity that might impede protocols that cascade down from the executive. Total transparency becomes a condition of the re-creation of individual identity. Practices drawn from religious and spiritual traditions that enact the surrender of the self facilitate submission to the demands of the Performative Absolute, the immanent sublime, Demiurge or dieu cache articulated by HRM. The informed passivity of the employee precedes oblation, the sacrificial offering of the self that facilitates the donation by HRM of the attuned identity that ensures the organisational survival of t...

Abstract: In the twelfth century, when military orders were first being established, the custom of child oblation was in decline in western monasteries, and the novitiate was acquiring a new importance. New foundations of monks and regular canons sought to ensure that recruits were subjected to a period of testing and training before they made their profession, while at Cluny Peter the Venerable insisted on a probationary period of at least a month. Since the rules governing their conventual life were based upon those of existing religious institutions, the military orders were inevitably influenced by these trends. They rejected the practice of child oblation and in most cases instituted a period of probation for recruits. The rule which was compiled in 1128 for the Temple the earliest of the military orders made provision for a novitiate,1 and at the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Templar regulations were adopted both by the Teutonic order and by the Swordbrethren in Livonia.2 The customs of the Teutonic order were in turn borrowed several decades later by the brothers of St. Thomas of Acre.3 Decrees concerning a probationary period were included in a new version of the rule of the Teutonic order drawn up towards the middle of the thirteenth century, and also in the rule which Urban IV gave in 1261 to the order of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which had been founded in Italy and whose members became known as fratres gaudentes.4 The military orders which were linked either directly or indirectly with the Cistercians including not only Calatrava but also lesser foundations such as Avis were expected to follow Cistercian practice and therefore also instituted a novitiate, as is clear from some of their decrees.5

Abstract: In his paper The Parish Communion, delivered when he was Bishop of Durham, and reprinted in his collected DurhamEssaysand .Addresses), the present Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Michael Ramsey, set himself, in his own words, "to assess the gains, the losses, the hopes, the dangers" of the parish communion movement, which means, broadly speaking, the liturgical movement at the ordinary parochial level in the Church of England. Prominent among the dangers he ranked an unbalanced doctrine of the eucharistic sacrifice: