The Spiritual Path
The Inauguration of Spirituality through Repentance: Christian Metanoia as a Way to Encounter the Other
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session João Pedro Javera, Gilberto Safra
Christian theology provides some criteria for evaluating the authenticity of the inauguration of a spiritual path, and repentance seems to be the most valuable and unanimous of them among its various denominations. This is so because Christianity regards repentance (or metanoia, from the Greek) as an event of profound and potent transformation in the way by which an individual comes to direct and use his energies and potentialities, since it decentralizes and weakens the confidence he has in himself and in his natural and intellectual powers. Such distrust in self-sufficiency can disclose in the human being a wound, that can, eventually, be actualized as a request for help and a search for the encounter with the Other. The word repentance is commonly understood as the range of psychological phenomena produced by feelings of guilt and regret for mistakes made in the past. However, metanoia (literally "change of mentality"), saves greater and clearer meaning of the completeness of the phenomenon of repentance, since it is the transformation that takes place in the human consciousness after the individual has lost the confidence in itself (through suffering), setting himself in readiness for an intimate encounter with the Other (the only possibility for real constitution). Our present aim is, in dialogue with some great Christian contemporary theologians - Christos Yannaras, Sergey Horujy and John Zizioulas -, to understand the place repentance occupies in Christian theology and in its anthropology, investigating in which ways it inaugurates and sustains an individual in his spiritual path.
Comparing Biblical Writings with the Five-Factor Model of Personality
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David Rawlings
Psychologists who take a "dimensional" approach to personality description frequently argue for a Five-Factor Model (FFM) of personality. According to this view, five hierarchically arranged broad traits, factors or dimensions underlie non-intellectual individual differences between people within a population. The summary labels often given to the dimensions are Extraversion, Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Openness to Experience (or Intellect or Imagination). The proposed paper attempts to connect the five-factor model with the conceptual frameworks that appear in biblical writings. My starting point is the view of Duke University theologian Douglas Campbell, who understands the apostle Paul’s model of salvation to include the central concepts of life, death and sin, enslavement verses freedom, love, and the Spirit. I will show how these concepts are connected, respectively, to the processes underlying the FFM dimensions listed above. In addition to Campbell’s view, further evidence for the association will be provided using the writings of other contemporary biblical scholars, other biblical sources such as the gospels and the Hebrew writings, and (by way of contrast) the writings of Epicurus, an ancient scholar with ideas opposed to those of St Paul. Some possible interpretations and implications of the proposed relationship will be briefly discussed.
The Voice and the Voiceless: Startling Sacred and Sacred Starting
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Hermel Pama
The study explores voice as a paradigm of culturally-appropriated hierophanies, with its binary, the "voiceless" referring to silent manifestations employing visual and other experiential modes of communication. I posit that this is a common theme in the various religious phenomena in the Catholic cult of saints in the Philippines. Proceeding by way of exemplarity, the study devolves from a comparison of two most popular religious icons, that is, Nuestra Señora de Peñafrancia in the Bicol Region, and Our Lady of Manaoag in Manaoag, Pangasinan. The former attracts thousands of devotees in an annual fluvial procession in the Bicol River, where the sacred image has been fished out of, according to local religious myth. Our Lady of Manaoag gathers a daily influx of pilgrims from all over the country throughout the year. The shrine on top of a hill is the site where, according to local lore, the image appeared and called (manaoag), facilitating the natives’ conversion to the Catholicism. I argue that both revelatory models are found in the narratives of the sacred as Santong Boses (sacred voice), in the religious tradition surrounding Mount Banahaw in the Southern Tagalog region, which was a center of native resistance that eventually led to the Philippine Revolution of 1898, thereby highlighting a pre-colonial mediation in the present, and for the future. Throughout, the study explores voice as contested power, and as universal paradigm in God talk: as startling starts, and at the start/incipience of religion as a startling experience.
