This chapter accounts for Emerson’s complex, and sometimes seemingly contradictory, relationship to religion and religious experience. While Emerson definitively left the Christian ministry in the early 1830s – turning his back on eight generations of his forefathers who had all become ministers – he never abandoned a profound interest in broader forms of spirituality, including those outside the pale of Christendom. If reason and faith were to be found “in the woods” (and not the church), as his inaugural debut Nature (1836) provocatively claimed, some critics have read Emerson as a secularist (or at the very least a naturalist), epitomizing larger dynamics of nineteenth-century dis- and re-enchantment. This chapter aims for a more nuanced (and multi-hued) view, arguing that Emerson believed the “spiritual laws” of the cosmos could be explained by the twinned activities of science and poetics as forms of social praxis, a communal making of beauty and truth.

Contrary to the narrative of the Irish Catholic Church’s decline, there exists a range of evidence for a twenty-first-century religious revival. Some of the modern religious deviate from formal practice, engaging with Christianity away from the major churches, while other spiritual practices accord with twenty-first-century Ireland’s cultural diversity. Irish literature has challenged literature but, at times, idealised it. As the religious landscape of Ireland changes, Irish culture finds new ways to explore faith.

One might argue that Cohen expressed the world through sex – or vice versa. Some of his most memorable songs (“Marianne,” for example) use individual paramours as prisms that refract larger experience. His lyrics, while not explicit in the sense that some rock or rap songs are, often evoke the power and pleasure of sex. Both of his novels are more about sex than anything else, and his drawings feature female nudes. Cohen has asserted that he finds no tension between sex and spirituality, and songs like “Hallelujah” insist upon their deep imbrication with each other. He has been called, and called himself, a “ladies’ man,” but he also dismisses the assertion that he has been especially successful with women. In the era of #MeToo, one might think that Cohen would have come in for more condemnation, but his genuine interest in women and a lack of guilt about sex perhaps combined to forestall this. This chapter explores the uses and the meaning of sex and sexuality in Cohen’s work.

This chapter describes the significant role that spiritual support plays for both the ICU patient and their loved ones. A hospital stay is a stressful time, and an ICU experience is traumatic. The severity of illness and the uncertainty of healing can precipitate existential questioning and increase reliance on faith. Intervention by a trained non-denominational chaplain can be an asset to an ICU team, offering patients and loved one’s psycho-spiritual support to diverse kinds of needs. As a spiritual care specialist, a chaplain can distinguish between spirituality – an internal search for meaning – and religiosity, often rooted in a structured belief system. Tools like the FICA model are used by chaplains to assess spiritual distress, and chaplains can train the ICU staff as “spiritual care generalists,” who can then identify spiritual distress and reach out to a chaplain if needed. The chapter also addresses the need for spiritual support in patients with Post Intensive Care Syndrome (PICS) and Post Intensive Care Syndrome – Family (PICS-F). Chaplains can be beneficial for both diagnoses.

The ninth chapter adopts a somewhat different point of view and asks whether the Bhagavad-gītā can be a source of an educational doctrine. As opposed to the present book, which is mostly engaged with the metaphysics of the Gītā, its structure and the way it gradually leads toward liberation, this concluding chapter aims to look at the Gītā in humanistic terms. Applying our terminology, it looks at the Gītā in first storey terms, with the aim of highlighting some of its major educational elements, or stated differently, looking at elements out of which an educational doctrine could possibly be articulated. As such, this chapter looks into the following topics: spirituality, virtue ethics, conquering lust and anger, following dharma in every sphere of life, happiness, meditation, the divinity of nature and an ecological worldview and finally devotion.

Focusing on the often too easily neglected concept of piety, Job Getcha sheds light on the natural bond between liturgy and spirituality. It would be erroneous to see them simply as the objective or communal and subjective or individual sides of the same reality, since an argument can be set up that spirituality itself is as liturgical as the liturgy is spiritual.

Lack of compassion among health service staff has been identified as a concern around the world. High-profile scandals and inquiries in the United Kingdom have suggested that health systems and services ‘are struggling to provide safe, timely, and compassionate care’. In the United States, only half of patients and staff surveyed believed the health system provides compassionate care. Similarly, a recent study in Australia identified a gap between the intentions of organisational leadership to provide consistently high-quality care and the ability of staff to do so at point of care. Healthcare managers are looking for proven ways to support staff to recognise and provide compassionate care.

Two networks transformed the early modern world. The first was the Iberian network of discoverers and conquerors that helped usher in an age of European world domination and colonialism. The second was facilitated by a new technology, printing, which helped unleash the huge religious and political disruption we know as the Reformation. What Niall Ferguson describes as a “religious virus that came to be known as Protestantism” disrupted an ancient ecclesiastical hierarchy, fractured into many pieces Europe’s Catholic Christianity, and ushered in a long era of violent conflict. This chapter investigates religious networks within the Lutheran, Reformed, and Radical wings of the Reformation and highlights the formation, evolution, suppression, and ultimate survival of the Jesuit Order as a classic transnational network within Catholic Christianity.

This chapter posits that water’s repudiation of containment transforms this element into a space, place, and being that can usher in new directions for Latinx studies. Specifically, the chapter contends that when water overflows it “undoes” the work of borders, a move signaled by the Spanish word for this action, desbordar. Underscoring how water can generate theoretical frameworks that reach across geographic divides, the chapter provides a succinct analysis of this element in Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier, Myriam J. A. Chancy’s What Storm, What Thunder, and Daniel José Older’s Shadowshaper. The chapter also stresses the connections between environmentalism and spirituality by emphasizing readings of water informed by Afro-diasporic religions such as Haitian Vodou and Santería/Regla de Ocha. By highlighting water’s capacity to sustain conversations regarding such topics as violence, memory, and repair, the chapter offers water as an entryway into critical conversations in Latinx literature that do not disregard cultural and/or national specificity but remain provocatively untethered to these allegiances.