Sanctification

Abstract: Despite ample evidence that global indexes of religiousness are linked to family functioning, the mechanisms by which religion uniquely influences family dynamics are not well understood or empirically documented. To advance the scientific study of religion role in families, we delineate how the construct of sanctification applies to marital and parent-child relationships as well as to the entire family systems according to diverse religious traditions. We define sanctification as a psychological process in which aspects of life are perceived as having spiritual character and significance. We summarize the psychotmetric properties of two sets of measures that we have developed to assess the sanctification of marriage, parent-child relationships, and sexuality: Manifestation of God and Sacred Qualities scales. We hypothesize that sanctification has desirable implications for family life, supporting this assertion with initial empirical findings from our program of research. We also highlight the potential harm that may result from the sanctification of family relationships and discuss circumstances that may present particular risks (unavoidable challenges, violations by family members, loss. conflict, and intrapsychic and institutional barriers). Finally, we discuss future research directions to study more closely the influence of religion and sanctification on family life.

Abstract: The Reformation was about ideas and power, but it was also about real human lives. Alec Ryrie provides the first comprehensive account of what it actually meant to live a Protestant life in England and Scotland between c. 1530-1640, drawing on a rich mixture of contemporary devotional works, sermons, diaries, biographies, and autobiographies to uncover the lived experience of early modern Protestantism. Beginning from the surprisingly urgent, multifaceted emotions of Protestantism, Ryrie explores practices of prayer, of family and public worship, and of reading and writing, tracking them through the life course from childhood through conversion and vocation to the deathbed. He examines what Protestant piety drew from its Catholic predecessors and contemporaries, and grounds that piety in material realities such as posture, food and tears. This perspective shows us what it meant to be Protestant in the British Reformations: a meeting of intensity (a religion which sought authentic feeling above all, and which dreaded hypocrisy and hard-heartedness) with dynamism (a progressive religion, relentlessly pursuing sanctification and dreading idleness). That combination, for good or ill, gave the Protestant experience its particular quality of restless, creative zeal. The Protestant devotional experience also shows us that this was a broad-based religion: for all the differences across time, between two countries, between men and women, and between puritans and conformists, this was recognisably a unified culture, in which common experiences and practices cut across supposed divides. Alec Ryrie shows us Protestantism, not as the preachers on all sides imagined it, but as it was really lived.

Abstract: IN RECENT YEARS, A PATTERN HAS EMERGED, A SEEMINGLY SELF-EVIDENT TREND toward restricting, regulating, and removing from public view persons commonly referred to categorically as "the homeless." I first encountered these processes in a variety of scholarly and journalistic sources and, most acutely, in my then place of residence, Tempe, Arizona, a southwestern "college town" of just under 200,000 that is often seen as the social and recreational center of the Phoenix metropolitan area. While exploring these questions theoretically and pragmatically, I discovered that rather than an "emerging" trend, patterns of spatial exclusion and marginalization of the impoverished that have existed throughout modern history have reemerged. As such, this study attempts to locate contemporary manifestations of these patterns in their historical contexts, comprising a theoretical overview of anti-homeless legislation and regimes of spatial control. Moreover, these inquiries are grounded in events and activities observed in practice, drawing upon various media publications, government and corporate documents, participant observations of homeless communities, and open-ended interviews with street people in Tempe (approximately 75, conducted over a three-year period from 1998 to 2001). In the end, both my theoretical exposition and grounded case study conclude that homeless street people have been frequent subjects of demonization and criminalization, and that contemporary trends reflect even further "advancements" in patterns of regulatory fervor and casual brutality. Accordingly, this study aims to illuminate these trends, to raise awareness about and encourage activism around the implications for the homeless and the public spaces they often occupy, and to make "legible" the violence that pervades such social policies. What is it about the homeless that inspires such overt antipathy from mainstream society? What is so special about their particular variety of deviance that elicits such a vehement and violent response to their presence? After all, "the homeless" as a class lack almost all indicia of societal power, posing no viable political, economic, or military threat to the dominant culture. Of course, as studies of deviance have continually borne out, a society's response to "deviant" elements is rarely linked in a direct way to any actual or credible threat. The threat is more one of perception than reality, more of a societal preemptive strike against an as-yet-unborn threat that often originates within the dominant culture itself, but finds concrete expression in some abject, powerless element of society. As such, depictions of "deviant subcultures" in the mainstream media are likely to feed into stereotypes of danger, disorder, disease, and criminality, helping to construct "the other" as inferior, inhuman, unsympathetic, deserving of their fate, and perhaps even requiring punitive measures. That all of this arises more from perception than fact testifies to the power of human emotions and collective consciousness, as well as to their horror. It is, after all, a short journey from diversity to deviance, from deification to demonization, and from sanctification to criminalization. Demonization and Disease As Henry Miller (1991) has observed, there have been times in history in which the image of the homeless beggar was one of sacrificial piety and mendicant holiness. Nevertheless, such characterizations have been the exception, and, at least since the enclosure of the common lands in 16th-century England, almost nonexistent. Once domains of private property began to dominate the cultural and physical landscape, "vagrancy began to be seen as a threat to the order of things"; later, as urban centers began to develop and market economies took hold, "vagrancy was to be perceived as a threat to capitalism" (Ibid.: 9). This was particularly true in the developing United States, where a version of the Protestant Work Ethic is intimately connected to the national mythos of equal opportunity and free-market meritocracy (cf. …

Abstract: For Scanlon authority and power occur in opposition His subject is the exemplum, which he defines as "a narrative enactment of cultural authority" (p 34) He traces the inter-related histories of auctoritas and the exemplum from classical times up to Chaucer, who provides the focus of his study Just as the church had earlier appropriated the exemplum form from its pagan predecessors in order to establish its own auctoritas, Scanlon argues, Chaucer and other contemporary writers appropriated the exemplum anew in order to assert the authority of vernacular poetry in face of that of the church His reading of Chaucer, emphasizing the poet's engagement with the problem of his own authority, is detailed and complex, and needs to be examined to be appreciated Scanlon treats Gower in his second to last chapter (pp 245-97), before turning to his conclusion on "The Chaucerian Tradition in the fifteenth century" He has less to say about Gower's use of the exemplum form precisely than he does about the theoretical issues that the form raises He describes CA as "a sustained meditation on the contingencies of cultural authority" (p 267) He attributes to Gower just as much self-consciousness about his role as he does to Chaucer, but describes him as having a very different agenda: more explicitly anticlerical, Gower places lay political authority (rather than the poet's) over that of the church, while also arguing for the interdependence of the prince and poetry In Scanlon's words, "To the extent moral disorder characterizes the Church, it demonstrates the need for the sort of order provided by the king But to the extent such disorder also affects kingship, it demonstrates the indispensability of the moral correction that comes from the poet" (p 249) Scanlon finds a point by point development of this argument in his examination of CA In the Prologue and Books 1 and 2, "Gower is expecially concerned to demonstrate the necessity of lay authority by means of anti-clerical critique But he is just as concerned to demonstrate the irreducibly double nature of such authority, the interdependence between poet and prince, and the extent to which the prince's authority is discursively constructed" (pp 249-50) The Prologue juxtaposes the moral bankruptcy of the Church with Gower's call for a "new Arion," both set within his presentation of his poem to the king Book 1 introduces Genius, who embodies Gower's "middel weie," hovering "uncertainly between the clerical and the lay" (p 256) Key tales in Books 1 and 2 explore the discursive nature of all authority The tale of Boniface sets the pope — who usurps not only the papacy but also (literally) the voice of God and also temporal authority — against the virtuous king who restores order to the church The tale of Constantine with which that tale is paired not only "foregrounds Christianity's dependence on material reality" (p 266) in its conclusion, but also defines an important aspect of kingship in Constantine's conversion When Constantine beholds the mothers and their children, "it is as if monarchical power, in its supreme amorality, stimulates from its possessor an irresistable need for moral order," demonstrating "monarchy's inherently self-regulating character, the paradoxical but inevitable logic whereby absolute prerogative produces its own self-generated restraint" (p 265) In Books 3 through 6, Gower distinguishes this view of monarchy from the chivalric view of lay authority with a critique of the values embodied in romance, focusing particularly on the delusions of fin' amors in tales such as "Canace and Machaire," "Pyramus and Thisbe," and "Orestes," while offering a "demystified" view of the claims of chivalry in his discussion of "Prouesse" in Book 4 In the final tale of Book 6, he offers another version of the self-regulating nature of the monarch's power Alexander's arbitrary act of shoving Nectanabus off the tower ironically fulfills the prophecy that provokes it; it also corrects the arbitrariness of the act by which Alexander was originally conceived Divine authority works obliquely through Alexander's action "By pushing the oblique relation between divine authority and temporal power to the extreme, Gower is able to authorize lay power precisely in its transgressive coerciveness For it is precisely the self-regulating structure of that transgressiveness that Gower takes as divine authorization Lay power is by its very nature contingent and incomplete But for Gower its continual reassertions of it contingency and incompletion produce a self-regulation that is continually able to point beyond that incompletion" (pp 281-82) This tale opens the way for Book 7, which emphasizes the need for secular rule — "Monarchy inevitably produces social order, because it is the only form order can take" (p 291) — and the unbreakable link between power and self-restraint One form of that self-restraint, of course, is chastity, the last of the kingly virtues that Gower discusses, which replaces fin' amors with an ideal of behavior that recalls that imposed on the clergy and thus constitutes a sanctification of lay authority Gower's engagement with political issues, he concludes, was no less important to the poets that followed in the next century than was Chaucer's reappropriation of the clerical tradition There is more Scanlon has a great deal to say about many other issues both theoretical and practical that come up along the way (see, for instance, his speculation on Derrida's debt to St Paul on p 51) But his discussion is also firmly grounded in some of the most traditional questions of Chaucer and Gower scholarship In one sense, his reading of Gower puts him in a long line of critics who have emphasized Gower's political views, but he brings an entirely different perspective from earlier commentators And while he attempts to overcome the antithesis between morality and poetry that lies, as he observes, at the base of most comparisons between Chaucer and Gower, he also sees important differences between these two poets, which he defines in a new and very different light This is a challenging work, and well worth close study [PN Copyright The John Gower Society JGN142]