No / Jürgen Habermas's discourse ethics ¿ and within this framework, particularly the idea of 'moral discourses', which focuses on 'what is good for all' and is intended as a means of addressing situations where a shared substantive 'background consensus' does not exist or has broken down ¿ is premised on the assumption that participants attempt to engage with and persuade each other through reasoned argumentation. Where does this leave (potential) participants with strong religious convictions? In several recent publications, Habermas himself has started to reflect on this question. His reflections are motivated not least by (responses to) 11 September 2001. In this context, Habermas has suggested that those with secular commitments engage in a process of self-reflection about the meaning of secularisation, the losses involved in the questioning of religious world views, and the question of how we might respond to these losses. Yet while these reflections are interesting and suggestive, Habermas's framework, as it stands, cannot easily accommodate his own recognition of the need to overcome what he has called 'the rift of speechlessness' that threatens to divide religious and secular discourses. Against this background, I consider elements of William E. Connolly's recent reflections on Neuropolitics as one example of a body of work that suggests possible alternative responses to the challenges Habermas identifies ¿ and as a contribution that deserves to be taken seriously by those interested in the further development of discourse ethics and/or deliberative democracy.

Submitted by Renata Lopes (renatasil82@gmail.com) on 2016-05-23T13:05:34Z No. of bitstreams: 1 dilainesoaressampaiodefranca.pdf: 1572591 bytes, checksum: 192adfba321cd3fadaf6e3f1618beb4c (MD5) / Rejected by Adriana Oliveira (adriana.oliveira@ufjf.edu.br), reason: Primeira letra de cada palavra chave em maiúsculo, a não ser que seja nome próprio on 2016-07-02T11:34:51Z (GMT) / Submitted by Renata Lopes (renatasil82@gmail.com) on 2016-07-04T10:40:46Z No. of bitstreams: 1 dilainesoaressampaiodefranca.pdf: 1572591 bytes, checksum: 192adfba321cd3fadaf6e3f1618beb4c (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Adriana Oliveira (adriana.oliveira@ufjf.edu.br) on 2016-07-13T16:19:50Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 dilainesoaressampaiodefranca.pdf: 1572591 bytes, checksum: 192adfba321cd3fadaf6e3f1618beb4c (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-07-13T16:19:50Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 dilainesoaressampaiodefranca.pdf: 1572591 bytes, checksum: 192adfba321cd3fadaf6e3f1618beb4c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-03-02 / FAPEMIG - Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais / Esta tese tem como objetivo analisar a complexidade que envolve o debate, num sentido amplo, entre discursos católicos e do candomblé no contexto posterior ao Vaticano II. Primeiramente, pretendo compreender como se construíram discursos católicos sobre as religiões afro-brasileiras no período posterior ao Concílio Vaticano II, percebendo suas distinções com relação ao período imediatamente anterior (anos 40 aos anos 60). Em seguida, analisarei alguns discursos exemplares de representantes de dois conhecidos terreiros baianos – o Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá e o Ilê Axé Iyá Nassô Oká – este último mais conhecido como Terreiro da Casa Branca. Ao final pretendo demonstrar, principalmente, que há possibilidades significativas de resposta aos discursos católicos sobre as religiões afro-brasileiras no âmbito do candomblé, mobilizadas especialmente pelas controvérsias em torno do sincretismo. / This study intends to analyze the complexity which involves the debate, in its wider sense, between the Catholic and Candomblé discourses within the Post-Vatican II context. Firstly, I intend to comprehend how the Catholic discourses about the Afro-Brazilian religions were built in the time period that follows the II Vatican Council, noticing their differences when contrasted with the immediately previous period (from the 40’s to the 60’s). Sencondly, I analyze some sample discourses of two well-known sacred spaces in Bahia, Brazil - the Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá and the Ilê Axé Iyá Nassô Oká - (the latter also known as Terreiro da Casa Branca). Finally, I intend to mainly demonstrate that there are significant possibilities for answers to the Catholic discourse about the Afro-Brazilian religions within the Candomblé scope, which were driven specially by the controversies around the syncretism.

This project explores how literary authors used religious discourses in the sociointellectual climates of late nineteenth-century Catholic cultures. It takes its premise from a tacit paradox of Western European modernization: unlike other Western European nations, nations such as France and Spain modernized without adopting Protestantism or doctrines of anti-Catholicism or anticlericalism--and, thus, without a strict break into national secular discourses. Addressing how various religious discourses were used in modernizing France and Spain (respectively, from 1848 and from 1868 to the early twentieth century), I take a cultural-historical approach to representative religiously themed novels and short fiction of the periods. I contend that non-institutionalized traditional Catholic culture (a culture's “religious imaginary” or “Catholic imaginary”) offered authors a plural and, thus, strategic source for making cultural critiques. These critiques would have resonated widely with contemporaneous readerships, and often without overt confrontations (as anticlericalism has historically done). I point to the presence of such critiques specifically in canonical authors’ religious works--works often considered to be aberrational or “too Catholic” to be valued as modern vis-à-vis the landmarks of Western literature. Taking as my key example a novel by the “father of the modern Spanish novel,” Benito Pérez Galdós’s Misericordia or Compassion (1897), I unfold progressive readings of this text based on discourses borrowing historical, thematic, and stylistic elements from the archives of a Catholic imaginary. Thereafter, I broaden my argument by considering how comparable, but distinct, discourses inform social-critical readings of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables or The Underclass (1862), Gustave Flaubert’s “Un Coeur simple” or “A Simple Heart” (1877), and Emilia Pardo Bazán’s “Un destripador de antaño” or “The Heart Lover” (1900). Overall, the project challenges a critical status quo that has chosen to identify canonical literature in reference to a secular aesthetic program, without allowing for the possibility that cultural-religious discourses might also carry weight for cultures that were modernizing. Additionally, it re-characterizes the modernizing intellectual, seen typically as spiritually cynical or atheist, as one acknowledging the populist force of the religious imaginary freed from church limits. / text

The study describes the counselling journey undertaken with 270 patients at the Family Medicine Clinic at Kalafong Hospital in Atteridgeville, Tshwane, between June 2000 and December 2003. Of these patients 75% were women, 74% were black and 97% Christian, with half of them belonging to born-again churches. A majority of the patients (52%) were unemployed and the others employed in minimum salary jobs. A third of the patients had attemped suicide at least once before, and a third had lost at least one close family member. With these patients a narrative pastoral counselling practice was established. Narrative counselling was practised as a MEET process in which the patients' problem-saturated stories were mapped and their problems externalised; they were empowered through the deconstruction of religious problem discourses, and their alternative stories were thickened by means of religious practices. This was a pastoral practice with a focus on religious discourses as problem discourses, and on the deconstruction of these discourses towards alternatives stories of faith. The first aim of the study was to describe the faces of religious problem discourses. They are (1) power discourses that hold patients captive in divinely sanctions hierarchies of gender and class, (2) body discourses that alienated patients from their bodies, (3) identity discourses that placed the religious identities of patients in conflict with their other identities, and (4) otherness discourses that created barriers between patients and God. The second aim of the study was to describe the externalised faces of the problems ruining the patients' lives. Here Losses, Loneliness and Lack of money were described as problems causing amongst patients feelings of worthlessness, depression, paralysis, body aches and many more. The third aim of the study was to describe the characteristics of the narrative pastoral counselling practice that has been established. This practice (1) negotiates healing between binaries such as Western/African, culture and dogma/lived experience; patient passivity/patient agency; (2) respects the indigenous knowledge of patients as it is embodied in township spiritualities; and (3) aims at introducing patients to a community of care as well as a new community of discourse where they can experience spiritual healing. / Practical Theology / D. Th. (Practical Theology)

The study describes the counselling journey undertaken with 270 patients at the Family Medicine Clinic at Kalafong Hospital in Atteridgeville, Tshwane, between June 2000 and December 2003. Of these patients 75% were women, 74% were black and 97% Christian, with half of them belonging to born-again churches. A majority of the patients (52%) were unemployed and the others employed in minimum salary jobs. A third of the patients had attemped suicide at least once before, and a third had lost at least one close family member. With these patients a narrative pastoral counselling practice was established. Narrative counselling was practised as a MEET process in which the patients' problem-saturated stories were mapped and their problems externalised; they were empowered through the deconstruction of religious problem discourses, and their alternative stories were thickened by means of religious practices. This was a pastoral practice with a focus on religious discourses as problem discourses, and on the deconstruction of these discourses towards alternatives stories of faith. The first aim of the study was to describe the faces of religious problem discourses. They are (1) power discourses that hold patients captive in divinely sanctions hierarchies of gender and class, (2) body discourses that alienated patients from their bodies, (3) identity discourses that placed the religious identities of patients in conflict with their other identities, and (4) otherness discourses that created barriers between patients and God. The second aim of the study was to describe the externalised faces of the problems ruining the patients' lives. Here Losses, Loneliness and Lack of money were described as problems causing amongst patients feelings of worthlessness, depression, paralysis, body aches and many more. The third aim of the study was to describe the characteristics of the narrative pastoral counselling practice that has been established. This practice (1) negotiates healing between binaries such as Western/African, culture and dogma/lived experience; patient passivity/patient agency; (2) respects the indigenous knowledge of patients as it is embodied in township spiritualities; and (3) aims at introducing patients to a community of care as well as a new community of discourse where they can experience spiritual healing. / Philosophy, Practical and Systematic Theology / D. Th. (Practical Theology)