The doctrine of the spiritual senses has played a significant role in the history of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox spirituality. What has been largely unremarked is that the doctrine also played a significant role in classical Protestant thought, and that analogous concepts can be found in Indian theism. In spite of the doctrine’s significance, however, the only analytic philosopher to consider it has been Nelson Pike. I will argue that his treatment is inadequate, show how the development (...) of the doctrine in Puritan thought and spirituality fills a serious lacuna in Pike’s treatment, and conclude with some suggestions as to where the discussion should go next. (shrink)

Purpose. To turn to the diaries and journalistic works by Leo Tolstoy, to study the content and method of his religious and ethical search. To doubt the faithfulness of his interpretation of the evangelical message of Christ. Theoretical basis. The author proceeded from the necessity of a dialectical understanding of the concepts of nonviolence, mercy, justice and a cultural-historical focus on the possibilities of society in realizing the spirituality principles. Originality. The author focuses on the unilateral nature of the methodology (...) that Leo Tolstoy uses to deny violence, as well as on the ambiguous role of Tolstoy's ideology in the morality of society. Conclusions. The spiritual activities an individual person is able to do and that are instructive for society from the point of view of its moral influence may not be sufficient means for educating moral responsibility in a society as a whole. Tolstoy's methodological approach to justifying the absoluteness of nonviolence principle is one-sided and not productive for a true interpretation of the spiritual nature of the Christ’s message about love and mercy. (shrink)

Separating theory and practice creates problems for thinking about religion. Current neuropsychological research helps the religious person by returning theory to practice, opening new avenues of religious knowing and showing that reason is on the side of those who choose a religiously lived life.

John Smith (1618-1652), long known for the elegance of his prose and the breadth of his erudition, has been underappreciated as a philosophical theologian. This book redresses this by showing how the spiritual senses became an essential tool for responding to early modern developments in philosophy, science, and religion for Smith. Through a close reading of the Select Discourses (1660) it is shown how Smith’s theories of theological knowledge, method, and prophecy as well as his prescriptive account of (...) Christian piety rely on his spiritual aesthetics. Smith offers a coherent system with intellectual intuition informing natural theology and revelation supplemented by spiritual perception via the imagination too. The central uniting feature of Smith’s philosophical theology is thus ‘spiritual sensation’ broadly construed. The book closes with proposals for research on Smith’s influence on the accounts of the spiritual senses developed by significant later figures including Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) and John Wesley (1703-1791). (shrink)

We examined the hypothesis that a tendency to experience the world in terms of a sense of ‘special’ connection is responsible for the self-transcendent value dimension identified by multi-dimensional scaling and constitutes a common factor for different religious and non-religious interpretations of spirituality. Eight different groups were studied including: six different types of faith leaders in India and the UK, people who self-rated as spiritual but not religious, and those self-rating as neither spiritual nor religious. They completed a (...) questionnaire that assessed the strength of their spirituality irrespective of type and the experience of special connection to the following categories: people, nature, places and the universe, with and without using the term spiritual. For all eight samples the different types of connection were highly inter-correlated, and self-perceived spirituality correlated with the sum of connection items irrespective of whether items included the term spiritual or not. Variation between groups in the size of the latter correlation was consistent with different interpretations of spirituality in those groups. Although the meaning of spirituality is socially constructed, variability within faith leader groups suggests that its interpretation is also affected by personality. (shrink)

We examined the hypothesis that a tendency to experience the world in terms of a sense of ‘special’ connection is responsible for the self-transcendent value dimension identified by multi-dimensional scaling and constitutes a common factor for different religious and non-religious interpretations of spirituality. Eight different groups were studied including: six different types of faith leaders in India and the UK, people who self-rated as spiritual but not religious, and those self-rating as neither spiritual nor religious. They completed a (...) questionnaire that assessed the strength of their spirituality irrespective of type and the experience of special connection to the following categories: people, nature, places and the universe, with and without using the term spiritual. For all eight samples the different types of connection were highly inter-correlated, and self-perceived spirituality correlated with the sum of connection items irrespective of whether items included the term spiritual or not. Variation between groups in the size of the latter correlation was consistent with different interpretations of spirituality in those groups. Although the meaning of spirituality is socially constructed, variability within faith leader groups suggests that its interpretation is also affected by personality. (shrink)

John Smith (1618-1652), the 17th century Cambridge Platonist, employed the traditional language of the spiritual senses of the soul to develop an early modern theological aesthetic central to his religious epistemology and thus to his philosophy of religion and systematic theology. As a Christian Platonist, Smith advocated intellectual intuition of Divine Goodness as the key to theological knowledge and spiritual practice. Additionally, Smith’s theory of prophecy rests on the reception of sensible images in the imagination. Chapter one (...) lays out how Smith’s place in this tradition has been under-appreciated by scholars working on the Cambridge Platonists and the spiritual senses. Chapter two presents an interpretive summary of the spiritual senses tradition and proposes a functional typology that registers three uses of non-corporeal perception throughout the history of Christian theology: (1) accounts of the origin and methods of theological knowledge, (2) descriptions of spirituality, and (3) attempts to systematically present or defend Christian theology. Chapter three places Smith in his historical and intellectual context in early seventeenth century England noting especially how his education prepared him to contribute to the mystical tradition of the spiritual senses of the soul. Chapter four argues that Smith’s theories of theological knowledge, method, and prophecy rest on his development of the spiritual senses tradition, combining intellectual intuition and imaginative perception. Chapter five addresses the role of spiritual aesthetics in Smith’s prescriptive account of Christian piety. Here the spiritual senses are both means and reward in the spiritual life in the process of deification (theosis). Chapter six demonstrates how Smith’s theology forms a coherent system with intellectual intuition informing natural theology and revelation being supplemented by spiritual perception via the imagination. The central uniting feature therefore is the spiritual perception of theological truth. Chapter seven closes with a summary of Smith’s various uses of the spiritual senses and proposes future research on his influence upon later figures including Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, and prospective constructive work inspired by Smith’s combination of reason and experience in religion. (shrink)

Zygon®, Volume 56, Issue 4, Page 971-983, December 2021.

The paper seeks to argue that the feeling of being part of a larger whole, considered to be a major feature of spiritual experience in some traditions, amounts to a change in the way the self is pre-reflectively understood. Further, the paper argues that some recent developments in the study of cognition support the case for such a revision in self-conception, and this can be used to build up a secular understanding of spirituality. The paper proceeds by making use (...) of Abraham Maslow's account of peak experience along with some accounts of both ancient and contemporary forms of spirituality to argue that the feeling of being part of a larger whole amounts to a significant shift from the separative self-conception implicit in everyday behavior. Subsequently, it is argued that some extant theories on cognition point at the illusory nature of separative self-conception. (shrink)

In ordinary language a clear distinction is made between the world of matter and that of spirit. While dualism is typically thought to be incompatible with behaviorism, a behavioral analysis of self-awareness suggests that there are good reasons for dualistic talk. Reputed qualities of both the spiritual aspect of humans and of a metaphysical God seem to flow naturally from the analysis. The use of the spiritual facet of self in therapy is briefly discussed.

In this book Dr. Moody shares the groundbreaking results of four decades of research into the philosophy of nonsense, revealing new ways to understand and experience life, death, and spirituality.

A study of the philosophy and theology of the spiritual life that takes religious sensibility or the practice of religious life, rather simply creedal commitment, as a starting point.

Review of Mark Wynn's book, Renewing the Senses: A Study of the Philosophy and Theology of the Spiritual Life.

In his discussion of conversion experience, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James draws attention to a variety of experience which has not been much investigated in the philosophy of religion literature, but which seems to be of some importance religiously—namely, an experience which consists in a re-vivification of the sensory world as a whole. In this paper, I develop four accounts of the nature of this kind of experience, and I show how the experience can inform our conception (...) of the spiritual life, considered as a world-directed mode of experience and practice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Model for the Many Senses of ScriptureFrom the Literal to the Spiritual in Genesis 22 with Thomas AquinasChristopher S. Morrissey (bio)Introduction: Many Senses Require Many TranslationsOn the mountain the Lord appeared (NETS, Gen. 22:14b)On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided (RSV)1In the mount of the LORD it shall be seen (KJV)On the mountain the LORD will see (NAB)ἐν τῷ ὄρει κύριος ὤφθη (...) (LXX)in monte Dominus videtur (Nova Vulgata)in monte Dominus videbit (St. Jerome’s Vulgate)In his book Abraham’s Curse, Bruce Chilton argues that in Gen. 22:14b, “the Septuagint’s Greek renders the Hebrew text” correctly (i.e., “with Yahweh as the subject of the verb”), whereas English translations like the King James Version (KJV) prefer to imply that the ram is the verbal subject. Chilton contends that “This is a case of translators caring more about doctrine than wording, and attempting to legislate what the Bible can say.”2Chilton’s textual exegesis does have some value. He notes that “Contextually [End Page 231] as well as grammatically, God is the subject: Yahweh ‘was seen’ on Moriah, liberating Isaac by means of divine intervention.”3 But with his polemics against the KJV, he fails to affirm the rich polysemy of the passage. He replaces one literal reading with another and then argues as if the two are at odds. But Scripture has many senses, a truth famously expressed in the medieval distich of Augustine of Dacia, best known in the version of Nicholas of Lyra: “The literal sense teaches what happened; what you believe, the allegorical; the moral, what you should do; where you are going, the anagogical.”4 Therefore Chilton is wrong to impute bad motives to anyone who would attempt to unfold the spiritual sense of a passage (“caring more about doctrine”), or even to anyone who would note that a passage has more than one literal meaning.Chilton’s own insistence on uncovering the univocal original meaning of a passage (through his preferred historical method of “generative exegesis”)5 is excessively literal, as if recourse to grammar would allow one “to legislate what the Bible can say.” When Chilton says “Yahweh ‘was seen’ on Moriah,” he is not contending that God was seen directly, literally, but rather interpreting the metaphorical or parabolical sense of the phrase “Yahweh was seen” (in Gen. 22:14b), because he glosses the meaning of the metaphor as “liberating Isaac by means of divine intervention”;6 that is, God is seen indirectly, cognitively, rather than literally with the eyes. Because literally seeing a ram is not opposed to cognitively understanding God’s action, the KJV, pace Chilton, can be defended contextually. To my mind, the Revised Standard Version (RSV), echoing the KJV, does the best job of rendering the Hebrew text literally, with “On the mount of the lord it shall be provided,” because this leaves open the many senses of the third person singular “it,” to be unfolded by exegesis. Thus more than one translation is required in order to appreciate all the significations being deployed in the treatment of “seeing” in Gen. 22:8 and 22:14. “It shall be provided”: More than one univocal sense of the “it” has to be uncovered by exegesis in this Scripture, in order to see what “it” is all about.To justify my opinion that the RSV most felicitously translates the Hebrew, I would like to prepare the way to a conclusion in which I compare the Septuagint’s translation (which follows Chilton’s preferred rendering of the context) with the Vulgate Latin translations. The path toward this conclusion will show that Chilton’s polemics, indicative of an exegetical attitude that is hostile to an appreciation of the many senses of Scripture, fail to see how the RSV translation is also defensible as keeping the reader’s mind open to the many senses of the Scriptural passage. But first things first. With the help of St. Thomas Aquinas, let me distinguish the various senses of Scripture and then point out how they are all exemplified here, all being signified by the text. [End Page 232] Click for larger view View... (shrink)

Is it possible to be spiritual and yet not believe in the supernatural? Can a person be spiritual without belonging to a religious group or organization? In Spirituality for the Skeptic, philosopher Robert Solomon explores what it means to be spiritual in today's pluralistic world. Based on Solomon's own struggles to reconcile philosophy with religion, this book offers a model of a vibrant, fulfilling spirituality that embraces the complexities of human existence and acknowledges the joys and tragedies (...) of life. Solomon has forged an enlightened new path that synthesizes spirituality with emotions, intellect, science, and common sense. His new paradigm, "naturalized" spirituality, establishes as its cornerstone the "thoughtful love of life"--a passionate concern for the here-and-now, and not the by-and-by. Being spiritual doesn't mean being holed up as a recluse, spending hours in meditation and contemplation, Solomon argues. It demands involvement and emotional engagement with others in the struggle to find meaning in our lives. As such, this modern-day spirituality encompasses a passionate enthusiasm for the world, the transformation of self, cosmic trust and rationality, coming to terms with fate, and viewing life as a gift, all of which are explored in depth throughout this book. Spirituality for the Skeptic answers the need for a non-institutional, non-dogmatic spirituality that leads to personal fulfillment and satisfaction. By examining the ideas of great thinkers from Socrates and Nietzsche to Buddha to Kafka, Solomon arrives at a practical vision of spirituality that should appeal to many seekers looking to make sense of the human condition. (shrink)

Spiritual experiences are characterized by a sense of vitality, connectedness, and meaning. Although often experienced within a religious context, spirituality is not dependent on a religious belief system or other ideology. The psychological mechanisms that help mediate spiritual experiences are analyzed, and the relation of spirituality to anxiety and depression is examined. Spirituality, it is often claimed, is a way of knowing as well as a way of feeling; that claim is rejected. However, spirituality is related to creativity (...) and hence to science and the acquisition of knowledge. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

The inclusion of morally binding values such as religious—or in a broader sense, spiritual—values fundamentally alter organizational decision-making and ethical behavior. Family firms, being a particularly value-driven type of organization, provide ample room for religious beliefs to affect family, business, and individual decisions. The influence that the owning family is able to exert on value formation and preservation in the family business makes religious family firms an incubator for value-driven and faith-led decision-making and behavior. They represent a particularly rich (...) and relevant context to re-assess the relationship between ethical beliefs, decision-making processes and behaviors in business organizations at the interface between family and professional logics. This Special Issue is dedicated to deepening our understanding of the role religious values and spirituality play in the formation of organizational ethical practices in faith-led family firms and resulting organizational and family-related outcomes. In this editorial, we introduce the 10 papers included in this Special Issue, which investigate the relationship between religion or spirituality and family firm ethical behavior in various geographical, cultural and religious contexts, using a multitude of qualitative and quantitative methodologies. By focusing on the effects of religious or spiritual orientations on both the business and the family, as well as on the values, norms and goals present in the family business system, further research can gain a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between religious and spiritual believes, and sustainable ethical behavior in family firms. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to review spirituality at work literature and to explore how spirituality improves employees' performances and organizational effectiveness. The article reviews about 140 articles on workplace spirituality to review their findings on how spirituality supports organizational performance. Three different perspectives are introduced on how spirituality benefits employees and supports organizational performance based on the extant literature: (a) Spirituality enhances employee well-being and quality of life; (b) Spirituality provides employees a sense of purpose and meaning at (...) work; (c) Spirituality provides employees a sense of interconnectedness and community. The article introduces potential benefits and caveats of bringing spirituality into the workplace; providing recommendations and suggestions for practitioners to incorporate spirituality positively in organizations. (shrink)

In the journey of faith almost everyone experiences times of spiritual desolation when our sense of God's presence is stripped away and our certainty about his faithfulness is deeply eroded. Times like this are intensely disorienting as they leave us grasping for answers, but even more importantly searching for a way forward. The literature of the Bible provides us with both experiential companionship and language to guide our journey through the desolate places of spiritual experience. The prayer language (...) of exile offers us a paradigm for engaging with God in the midst of our experience of his absence. In particular the biblical book of Lamentations and a number of Psalms provide language that helped Israel express the depths of their suffering in the face of their exilic experience. The prayer language of exile is the language of God's absence. Through the language of exilic prayer we encounter the bold movements of lament, remembrance, reorientation, and hope. These acts of prayerful speech form the core of a spirituality of exile that sustained the ancient community and can offer nourishment to contemporary journeys of desolation as well. (shrink)

There is a great deal of interest among business ethicists of today on the topic of spirituality of work. The connection between spirituality and business ethics has been acknowledged in scholarly literature, but this connection is expressed in different ways. Nonetheless, there is a growing consensus that spirituality and corporate profitability are not mutually exclusive. This essay presents a spirituality of work from the perspective of Hindu religion. Hinduism is one of the major religions in the world comprising 15% of (...) the world population. In its origin, Hinduism is somewhat a geographical term. It encompasses the various beliefs, spiritual practices, and rituals of people who originally inhabited the Indus Valley. Hinduism is not a single religion, in the sense that the term religion is understood in the Western context. Treating it as one tradition without considering its diverse and pluralistic character as well as the historical and textual factors that influence its development and complexities is highly problematic. This study explores a Hindu spirituality of work using Bhagavadgita as its primary source – one of the most important texts in Hinduism. (shrink)

Spiritual education concerns the quality of our thinking about ourselves, our relationships, our sense of worth and identity, and our sense of well-being. All curriculum subjects can contribute to this search for meaning. Religious education and the act of worship can contribute but are in practice very problematic if dogma inhibits open reflection. No one tradition of spirituality should be promoted since spirituality is a process. The world faiths provide starting points, but life provides more. The human spirit may (...) be finite or eternal; but we are concerned with the here and now and education should promote open qualitative questioning. * First published in 2003 in Prospero: A Journal of New Thinking for Education vol 9, no 1, pp.12-18. This version has been revised. (shrink)

Healthcare in South Africa is in a crisis. Problems with infrastructure, management, human resources and the supply of essential medicines are at a critical level. This is compounded by a high burden of disease and disparity in levels of service delivery, particularly between public and private healthcare. The government has put ambitious plans in place, which are part of the National Development Plan to ward 2030. In the midst of this we find the individual person and their family and community (...) staggering under the suffering caused by disease, poverty, crime and violence. There is a more than 70% chance that this person and their family and community are trying to make sense of this within a spiritual framework and that they belong to a faith-based community. This article explores the valuable contribution of spirituality, spiritual and pastoral work, the faith-based community and faith-based organisations to holistic people-centred healthcare in South Africa. (shrink)

The spiritual experience is, somehow, closer to what is proper to the contemporary scientific experiment: both are ways of tryout. A follower of such path needs to meet the requirements comparable with those of scientific experiment : rules and criteria of verification. Yet the result of this spiritual quest is on another level, because it grants access to a reality beyond our common-sense perception. To express the contents of this experience is extremely difficult, and the normal usage of (...) words is inadequate. And, with any generation in history, expressing the specificity of this experience becomes always a question of novelty. This is due to a different cultural and social background, of a different “field of experience”. I consider that nowadays we can better understand the rigor of a spiritual path as well as its concreteness, tracking the significance of spiritual practice for a more complex understanding of reality. But at the same time, new spiritual experiences, made in the actual contexts, can offer new solutions and new answers to the contemporary social and cultural challenges. Spirituality, understood as a practice following a particular religious tradition and aiming personal and community’s betterment, has the ability to provide empathy for the other, because somebody having a spiritual practice can recognize a similar need of any other human. “To reconcile” can have many meanings, from reconciling individuals to reconciling neighborhoods, communities, entire countries, to which the reconciliation with self gathers. (shrink)

Spirituality, in the broad sense, provides a deeper foundation for principles of international business ethics than legalistic, command-based ethics programs. Spiritual-based principles and values are presupposed and endorsed by established legal and ethical principles for international business. Identifying such spiritual-based principles and values requires the exercise of moral imagination and an openness to values embraced by the world's religions. Once identified, a new realm of moral freedom is attained for multinational corporations which may help them move beyond an (...) "ethics for sale" orientation. (shrink)

Throughout the twentieth century, German writers, philosophers, theologians, and historians turned to Gnosticism to make sense of the modern condition. While some saw this ancient Christian heresy as a way to rethink modernity, most German intellectuals questioned Gnosticism's return in a contemporary setting. In No Spiritual Investment in the World, Willem Styfhals explores the Gnostic worldview's enigmatic place in these discourses on modernity, presenting a comprehensive intellectual history of Gnosticism's role in postwar German thought. Establishing the German-Jewish philosopher Jacob (...) Taubes at the nexus of the debate, Styfhals traces how such figures as Hans Blumenberg, Hans Jonas, Eric Voegelin, Odo Marquard, and Gershom Scholem contended with Gnosticism and its tenets on evil and divine absence as metaphorical detours to address issues of cultural crisis, nihilism, and the legitimacy of the modern world. These concerns, he argues, centered on the difficulty of spiritual engagement in a world from which the divine has withdrawn. Reading Gnosticism against the backdrop of postwar German debates about secularization, political theology, and post-secularism, No Spiritual Investment in the World sheds new light on the historical contours of postwar German philosophy. (shrink)

Nowadays, it seems easy to regard some of the values and purposes that have led us to the society we live in today as dysfunctional. However, searching for a villain that justifies all our pain and confusion in recent years is a vain undertaking. It is imperative to protect the good in our society and to discover what we need to improve and accomplish. In this sense, spirituality is our unresolved issue. The purpose of this article is to survey the (...) different deliberations about capital as a measurable value of companies and to explore whether spiritual capital can be a new one, or even more importantly, an important one. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:An Episcopal priest reflects on the spiritual practices and perspectives that guide her work to mobilize a Spirit-filled, faithful response to climate crisis. After considering how Buddhist meditation informs the author's understanding of Christianity, the essay acknowledges that versions of Christianity have inflicted, and continue to inflict, enormous harm on human beings, the land, and the other creatures with whom we share this planet. Yet Christianity, like other religious traditions, can sift through its teachings, practices, and rituals to locate (...) the gold, the elements of deep ecological wisdom that the human community so desperately needs. Every religious tradition must ask itself: How does this unprecedented moment in human history challenge us to evolve so that we truly serve the common good? Our need to "think outside the box" is illustrated by the puzzle of nine dots that can only be connected by four lines if the lines extend beyond the borders of the box. Similarly, four lines of thought or four arrows of prayerful intention disclose an underlying, sacred reality: the love that created all things, connects all things, and sustains all things. The four arrows: (i) We cultivate an interior relationship of love, learning contemplative practices that quiet our minds and deepen our inner stability; (ii) We awaken to the expansive love that dissolves our tightly gripped sense of self and asserts moral values quite different from those of late-stage capitalism—in particular, intersectional justice and reverence for the natural world; (iii) We practice both sorrow and joy, making room for expressive, visceral forms of prayer, lament, and emotional release; and (iv) We take bold action for healing. Love's four arrows pull us out of the box of ordinary consciousness, the box of business as usual, and into a larger, more connected space: a space of healing and transformation. (shrink)

In this paper, I seek to examine Deleuze’s fascination with “spiritual automata” as a counterpoint to his more famous notion, the “body without organs”. I shall argue that both are grounded in a deep reflection, on Deleuze’s part, on the problems and issues generated by Spinoza’s notion of parallel attributes. Ultimately, I argue, the development of the two notions is motivated by identical metaphysical worries regarding the tenability of transformation, persistence, and affective interrelations between individuals. The answer, for both (...) thinkers, is the insertion of a “third” relational term, which virtually interfaces with each without violation of their parallel development. For Spinoza, such term is the absolutely infinite substance; for Deleuze, it is instead the notion of sense and the faculty of sense-making. (shrink)

The author briefs that spirituality has something to do with religion and humanism does not. She then says that to be a humanist means that one cannot be spiritual. The underlying thought here is pejorative and indicative that humanists have no heart. The author sets out to redress such a view. She reviews that while humanists certainly reject belief in God, religion, and the supernatural, and some might claim that ‘spirituality’ does not exist, other humanists are prepared to accept (...) it as a facet of human life in a secular sense and such acceptance. The Oxford English Dictionary links the word spiritual with ecclesiastical persons, revenue, or property, with what is sacred and holy, and also with that old dualism of spirit and matter, suggesting that it is concerned with the spirit as opposed to material or worldly interests. (shrink)

Narratives structure and inform how we understand our experiences and identity, especially in instances of suffering. Suffering in mental disorder (e.g. bipolar disorder) is often uniquely distressing as it impacts capacities central to our ability to make sense of ourselves and the world—and the role of narratives in explaining and addressing these effects is well-known. For many with a mental disorder, spiritual/religious narratives shape how they understand and experience it. For most, this is because they are spiritual and/or (...) religious. For others, spiritual/religious narratives still often influence secular approaches to mental disorder, more than approaches to other disabilities (e.g. intellectual, physical) or causes of suffering (e.g. physical disease). Such narratives are often harmful, especially insofar as they ‘over-spiritualize’ mental disorder; and undercut ‘spiritual meaning-making’. Here I address the impact of spiritual/religious narratives that helpfully avoid over-spiritualizing mental disorder while enabling spiritual meaning-making about it. First, I address the role of narratives in meaning-making more generally; then, I present results from my recent empirical study testing the impact of such narratives on participants’ meaning-making about their mental disorder. I conclude by addressing implications and potential worries. (shrink)

In the last decade the term spirituality has become popular in common discourse, as well as in psychological studies of religion. To many, it partly replaces the concept of religion, subsuming the aspects most important to psychology, while narrowing religion down to the formal, the institutional and the outer. At the same time spirituality, in contrast to religion, obtained a number of positive connotations. These changes seem to be sufficiently substantiated neither by new discoveries nor by radically new insights in (...) our field.Pargament offered a theoretical solution according to which spirituality is conceived as the key and unique function of religion, namely, the search for the sacred. This solution saves the concept of religion from losing its breadth and vitality while assigning the concept of spirituality a useful function in the psychology of religion. To support this solution, the author gives reasons for using the concept of spirituality, in scientific discourse, in the sense given to it by Pargament. When popularizing the psychology of religion and for facilitating communication with workers in other fields, the now usual, very broad and rather vague meaning of the term serves well. A brief review of questionnaires of spirituality is given. Their cursory content analysis confirms the author's conclusions. (shrink)

Individuals’ beliefs, as well as their spiritual orientations (SOs), can affect the quality of their work life cycle. Given that a large portion of people’s lives are spent in organisations, it is crucial to consider the factors affecting quality of work life (QWL) among employees. Against this background, the present study investigated the effects of the Islam-based SOs on the QWL in Muslim employees working for Iraqi municipalities in 2022. For this purpose, an applied research design was adopted, using (...) field studies of the correlational type for data collection. In total, 1345 staff of Iraqi municipalities were selected by simple random sampling in 2022, and two standardised questionnaires were utilised to collect the data. The content validity method was further recruited to determine the validity of the questionnaires, and the Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was used to measure the reliability. To analyse the data, descriptive tests, including frequency, mean and standard deviation (SD), along with inferential statistics, namely one-sample t-test, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and independent-samples t-test, were implemented using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software package. The correlation coefficients accordingly showed a rising trend in the QWL among these employees following the growth in their SOs. Moreover, there was a significant relationship between the components of SOs, namely spiritual beliefs, sense of spirituality, spiritual self-actualisation and spiritual practices, and the QWL of the Muslim employees.Contribution: This study revealed that the increase in the Islam-based SOs and its components led to an increase in the QWL of Iraqi Muslim employees. (shrink)