20. November 2009 by admin.

Spiritual intelligence calls for multiple ways of knowing and for the integration of the inner life of mind and spirit with the outer life of work in the world. It can be cultivated through questing, inquiry, and practice. Spiritual experiences may also contribute to its development, depending on the context and means of integration. Spiritual maturity is expressed through wisdom and compassionate action in the world. Spiritual intelligence is necessary for discernment in making spiritual choices that contribute to psychological well-being and overall healthy spiritual development.

Spirituality exists in the hearts and minds of men and women everywhere, within religious traditions and independently of tradition. If we define spirituality as the domain of ultimate concern, then everyone is spiritual because everyone has ultimate concerns. However, the term ultimate concern can be interpreted in many different ways. Some people do not consider themselves or their concerns to be spiritual. Spirituality, like emotion, has varying degrees of depth and expression. It may be conscious or unconscious, developed or undeveloped, healthy or pathological, naive or sophisticated, beneficial or dangerously distorted.

Spirituality involves the highest levels of any of the developmental lines,for example, cognitive, moral, emotional and interpersonal; Spirituality is itself a separate developmental line; Spirituality is an attitude (such as openness to love) at any stage; and Spirituality involves peak experiences, not stages. An integral perspective includes all these different views, and others as well.

Spirituality may also be described in terms of ultimate belonging or connection to the transcendental ground of being. Some people define spirituality in terms of relationship to God, to fellow humans, or to the earth. Others define it in terms of devotion and commitment to a particular faith or form of practice. To understand how spirituality can contribute to the good life, defined in humanistic terms as living authentically the full possibilites of being human, it seems necessary to differentiate healthy spirituality from beliefs and practices that may be detrimental to well-being.

Because there is little agreement about definitions of spirituality, discussions of spiritual intelligence need to be exploratory rather than definitive. Asking questions of what is meant by spiritual intelligence hopefully will stimulate discussion of a topic which truly merits further investigation.

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10. November 2009 by admin.

If you think SpongBob puts junk in your kids’ heads, then you need to pay closer attention to the commercials.

A new study finds that about one-fifth of commercials kids are likely to see on late-afternoon and Saturday morning television are food-related, and of those, 70 percent advertise fast-food restaurants, sugary food, chips, crackers and sugar-added beverages.

Fruits, vegetables, and juices were advertised in only 1.7 percent of the commercials. Only one nutrition-related  public service announcement was found for every 63 food ads.

Highly processed foods are known to contribute to poor diets, obesity and a soaring diabetes problem  in the United States.

The study, announced Wednesday, examined 5,724 commercials on 12 networks, including all the usual suspects your kinds watch.

When compared to television for a general audience, children’s networks in this study exposed young viewers to 76 percent more food commercials per hour than did the other networks, with the Saturday morning 7-10 a.m. time slot being more saturated with food commercials, the researchers explained in a statement.

You can assume your kids see a food commercial every 8 minutes, sandwiched presumably between Bendaroos and, oddly, the Sham Wow guy.

It doesn’t get any better as the little tykes grow up. Eighty percent of MTV food commercials were for fast food restaurants, sugar-added beverages, and sweets.

The study, detailed in the November/December issue of the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, covered both English and Spanish-language networks and programs.

Study after study suggests greater awareness of the potential influence of industry may immunize young people from food advertising’s deleterious effects.

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2. November 2009 by admin.

The notion of political Islam may be a more complicated bargain than many realize, and Muslims who seek to shape the world according to their religious values often confront an obdurate reality.

The maxim Islam din wa-dawla (Islam is religion and state) is often said to describe a distinguishing mark of Islam — the suggestion being that Islam is a religion with a political mission at its core. Both those who repeat the mantra with approving fervor and those who worry about it assert its essential truth and suggest that all Muslims must make it a part of their worldview. Some go so far as to claim that this axiom calls for a particular form of state structure or political behavior.

And yet, of course, the statement is nothing more than a political slogan — an artifact of its time, its meaning contingent on the setting in which it is used, like any other rallying cry. This quality does not make the slogan any less meaningful for the Muslims who subscribe to it; what it does is highlight the fact that this saying reflects a preoccupation with state power in the modern world. The Muslims who adhere to it, no less than those who do not and no less than non-Muslims, are both the products and the makers of that world. This point is worth stating since much of the present debate about the role of Islam in world politics tends to downplay the political or, at least, display a one-dimensional understanding of what drives political ambition. The political behavior of Islamists, and sometimes that of all Muslims, is often treated as an exotic peculiarity that defies normal analysis and can only be explained as an extension of their faith.

Whatever one’s reference point, however, the sometimes sordid business of politics has a gravitational pull that brings lofty ideals and grand sentiments down to earth with a thump. To play the game of politics is to grapple with the practicalities of power. This requires making sense of why people act as they do and when they do: why they respond to certain calls to action — nationalist, Islamist, whatever — and why they think their political activities are appropriate, ethically as well as practically, to the ends they imagine worthy of achievement.

Investigating these questions may be an empirical or epistemological challenge, but it does not require singling out religious motivations, Islamic or otherwise. The same searching questions should be asked of the religiously motivated that are asked of liberals, conservatives, Marxists, fascists, nationalists, and any other group that tries to put into practice its imagined notion of the good life. One should not rely only on the players’ descriptions of themselves. Yet this is precisely what has happened to the effort to understand the role of religion in shaping the political lives of Muslims. Many members of the Western media, and even many Western academics, have pointed to the most extreme of Muslim political tracts and suggested that these are what Islamism, or even Islam, is really about.

In the often troubled relationship between worldly power and the spirituality of Islamic beliefs, Muslims, in their own way, who seek to reshape the world according to Islamic ideals and traditions, whatever they may define those to be, are confronted by the mundane need to bend an often obdurate reality to their will.

The exercise of power is bound by time and place, and it depends on the competence of political actors. These conditions determine the political impact of any Islamic ideals. It is worth contrasting, for example, the very different outcomes of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s calls for revolt in Iran in 1963 and in 1978: the first foundered; the second started a revolution. In some cases, the venality of political actors can trigger disillusionment and a reappraisal of Islamic obligations, leading some to turn their backs on an Islamic political program. (Iran might become such a case, after the unrest over the presidential election earlier this year.) A program that does not work — spectacularly, corrosively, or insidiously — loses credibility and purchase. It can no longer move people; it has no traction. This may be the result of various factors unrelated to religion or ideology, but these factors necessarily affect the ways in which people understand and act on calls to put their ideals into practice.

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