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This dissertation investigates extant literature on the contributions of spirituality within music education from perspectives of philosophical writers in the field. It introduces Integral Theory, which features a five element heuristic: a) four quadrants of human experience, specifically, subjective, objective, individual, and collective perspectives; b) levels (or stages) of human development; c) lines of human development; d) states of consciousness; and e) types or styles of being and acting in the world. Finally, this dissertation applies Integral Theory's multi-perspective approach to the dynamic elements that engage body, mind, and spirit as teacher and learner perform, listen to, compose, and improvise music. I use Integral Theory's four quadrants of human experience to summarize, categorize, analyze, and map aspects of presenters' papers and the final round table discussion at the Spirituality Symposium, Spirituality: More than just a concept?, during the International Society of Music Education Conference (ISME), July, 2008, in Bologna, Italy. I use Integral Theory's levels of human development to map Edward Sarath's Levels of Creative Awareness, as he applies it to trans-stylistic jazz improvisation pedagogy. Sarath's melding of jazz music practices, and music theory and analysis with personal and collective non-music influences, transpersonal elements, and meditation mirrors Integral Theory's second element. Results from this philosophical inquiry show that discussions and pedagogy focusing on spirituality in music education include (a) teacher and student levels of proficiency and excellence in music, (b) personal and collective transformation, (c) diverse descriptions and interpretations of transcendence as they pertain to music's effect on persons, (d) understanding self and other especially meaning, value, belief, and moral systems, (e) receiving and dealing with emotions and feelings in professional settings, (f) brain, biological, and physical aspects, (g) personal and collective imagination, creativity, mystery, wonder, intention, attention, awareness, mindfulness, playfulness, authenticity, flow, (h) identified stake-holding cultural collectives, (i) environmental, institutional, educational, religious, and ideological factors, and (j) curriculum and experiential practices and guidelines. A close reading of flow pedagogy in early childhood music teaching shows some similar methodologies. / Music Education

<p> This dissertation is a qualitative study in which I, the researcher and public school teacher, seek through writing the self in a narrative and evocative autoethnography to explore three emergent themes: My family&rsquo;s six year and six month circumnavigation, spirituality, and important literature that I have shared with other readers that direct our hearts toward God. Insomuch as the title posits living to remember God, my hope is to make the interior mind visible to my reader as I explore what embracing this position has meant to me; I hope in making myself vulnerable to speak to our human experience of love so that other educators may come to understand the need we have in our American public school classrooms to be guided by agape.</p>

There are certain texts and certain ways of writing which when we encounter, we feel we are touching the edge of mystery. What obtains in such texts is the revelation of spirit, the resonance of the holy. The creation of texts that capture and display this sense is an artistic capability. To read receptively in a manner that uncovers this sense of spirit is also an artistic capability. These two approaches to writing and reading form the background of this study. Together they describe what is identified in the study as textual spirituality. The foreground of the study is a consideration of the unique aspects of the textual approach to spirituality with a view to how it can be cultivated and recognized in the academy and so contribute to the clearer organizing of spirituality as a discipline. There are three parts to the study. Part One deals with the challenges of understanding and studying spirituality and spirituality texts in general. It then explores, specifically, the philosophical bases and rationale forwriting spirituality texts as a mode of communicating the sense of spirit. Part Two of the study is demonstrative. It displays an example of the writing of an original spirituality text using the frameworks of the poetic, the narrative and the intuitive. Part Three, following, is largely concerned with those approaches to reading that facilitate the garnering of the sense of spirit from written texts. It then revisits the question of the disciplinary identity of textual spirituality and how it may have a cogent contribution in the academy. Overall, the study is an argument for the possibility of the artistic inscription and transcription of spirit through the agency of written texts. / Religious Studies and Arabic / D. Litt. et Phil. (Religious Studies)

<p> The purpose of the grounded theory study was to understand and explain factors affecting the well-being of Korean MKs studying at universities in America. While various factors emerged from the data, three categories of factors dominated the three distinct stages of the MKs&rsquo; adjustment process: financial factors, social factors, and spiritual factors. Even though all three were present throughout the three stages, the factors manifested themselves differently in each of the stages. </p><p> In the early stage, a plethora of negative factors permeated the Korean MK&rsquo;s life. Negative factors outweighed positive factors all three main categories: financial, social, and spiritual. Additional negative factors also hindered Korean MKs&rsquo; adjustment in America. </p><p> In the middle stage, positive financial, social, and spiritual factors increased, and negative financial, social, and spiritual factors decreased. The financial, social, and spiritual factors interacted dynamically, resulting in a net gain in positive influences over negative ones. The major distinction at this stage was that social and spiritual factors have a greater impact on Korean MKs&rsquo; lives than did financial factors. </p><p> In the later stage, financial factors rarely affected Korean MKs deeply. Moreover, by this time they had cultivated continuous and mature social relationships, and their spirituality and faith continue to improve. Above all, most of the MKs testified that their relationship with God was the most important thing in their lives because it affected every part of their life (e.g., friendships, studies, physical and even mental health). Overall, most of the Korean MKs had entered a state of well-being.</p>

<p> This thesis combines alchemical hermeneutic and participatory phenomenological methods to study the synchronicity of spontaneous trauma healing through reparative heart-centered attachment, group, and psyche work. It seeks to identify the archetypal, shamanic, noetic, mythopoetic, and psychodynamic power of groups to transform traumatic wounds&mdash;in light of Donald Winnicott&rsquo;s &ldquo;good enough&rdquo; and somatic gestalt concepts&mdash;into altruistic, compassionate, mindful acceptance, and resiliency. It explores ideas of healing through examining the history of trauma, the effects of trauma on attachment and relational behaviors, neuroscience, universal ideas of compassion, mindful awareness, yoga, and meditation. The author immersed herself in different groups and self-healing practices and then processed her experiences through Jungian, psychoanalytic, somatic, depth, spiritual, meditation, and traditional lenses as described by Carl G. Jung, Donald Kalsched, Bessel van der Kolk, Peter Levine, Joseph Campbell, Andrew Solomon, and Mary Main.</p>

<p> My thesis work consists of oil paintings, hybridized through the use of mixed media, each one individually representing a <i>Sacred Conversation </i> involving family members and individuals that have passed from life to death, as well as the celebration of life in the present. I see my painting as spiritual work in which I interpret and map out the past, present and future of my life. My work is autobiographical. This is reflected through the attention to the pictorial embodiment of my own ancestor worship and the state of my own family history within the United States, my visions and communications with the past, deceased spirits, as well as the visualization of the future make-up my life. The relationship I have with the photograph is a dialogue that takes place within the gaze. My pictorial or mirror gazing concentrates on the spirit attached to the image inside the photograph, vision or in this case, <i>spirit window.</i> This act of gazing allows the spirit to speak and articulate what is necessary for the vision to evolve in what I am creating. The communication starts before I actually stretch the canvas. The spiritual intuition comes as a complete vision and then in the process of creation evolves through the spirits and my own formal decisions and intuition. The dialogue takes place within the studio; the medium is oil paint. The communication comes through the action of painting and listening to the faint voices of the spirits that guide me. </p><p> In the various branches of Vodun, one branch is Santeria, an African diaspora religion brought to the New World by African slaves, the ritual of ancestor worship occurs in the form of adoration, and in listening and watching for signs and miracles brought about by the ancestors who push us from behind, while the Orishas pull from the front, in order to guide us in our lives. My religious views stem from indigenous American and African spiritual beliefs. During slavery these beliefs and spiritual practices were concealed by a European cover or mask, to ensure their survival and continuation. My work appears on an array of different sized canvases and is both two dimensional to three dimensional. When I add three-dimensional elements, I use mixed media materials that may reference the composition. For instance, I may transform staples in the Santeria practice, such as tobacco, egg shells, seed beads or feathers by incorporating them into the painting, or may affix gold leaf in the tradition of Renaissance paintings, and these symbolic objects create a dialogue with spiritual dogma. I am a Hybrid of cultures and races and my work embodies that Hybridization.</p>

African art and spirituality are inseparable. Looking at it specifically from the visible, concrete, or tangible standpoint, the latter is nonexistent without the former, as the presence of the former validates the reality of the latter. The origin of this symbiotic relationship is in the Africans' ideology, in which they find it more convenient to establish communication with the transcendent or supernatural realm through visible devices that we label 'art'. Using the Ijumu Northeastern-Yoruba Egungun as a case study, this dissertation analyzes the place of art in African spirituality. Applying two conceptual frameworks--connective theory and linguistic approach, the dissertation first depicts this art as a reflection of African culture. Secondly, it reveals African art as essentially an assemblage or composite of diverse culturally defined and meaningful materials. Finally, it portrays art as a reliable form of historical and iconographical record of the African culture.In all, the dissertation comprises eight chapters. Chapter one introduces the reader to the research rationales, objectives, theory and methodology, and relevant previous studies. Chapter two concerns the place of art in Yoruba religious beliefs and practices within the larger context of African art and culture. Chapter three illustrates the inter-group relations in the Niger-Benue confluence region--the geographical location of the Ijumu Northeastern-Yoruba. Chapter four provides an overview of the cultural practices of the Ijumu people of the Ookun Yoruba-speaking groups. Chapter five focuses on the spirituality and performance contexts and the devotees' conceptualization of the Egungun as a religion.Chapter six is about iconographical interpretations of Egungun. Chapter seven illustrates the aesthetic implications with attention paid to the masquerade costumes as well as the performance contexts of the masquerades or masqueraders, drummers, singers, and more importantly, the aftermath of the ritual festival. Chapter eight is about critical perspectives on Ijumu-Yoruba Egungun within the larger context of the tradition among the entire Yoruba peoples. It highlights critical issues affecting the Egungun tradition today and the relevance of this dissertation to arresting their loss.

Intuition is a way of perceiving the world that is fast, automatic, associative, and emotionally driven. In its most extreme form intuition is psychic ability, a sixth sense. Intuitive persons prefer to use intuition across many situations and do so consistently over time. Prior research links intuition with spirituality, yet fails to define a causal pathway. This dissertation aims at determining a causal connection through Structural Equation Modeling that shows that intuition influences spiritual experience, then spiritual belief or religious belief, or religious belief through spiritual belief, and then finally religious fundamentalism. It also tests a causal connection from intuition to schizotypy (mild, non-clinical schizophrenia-like symtpoms).A first model shows how intuition leads to spiritual experience, then to spiritual belief, then to religiousness, and finally to religious fundamentalism. The relationship between intuition and schizotypy proved not significant, yet not trivial. A second model, developed to account for more of the data and to use more generally accepted statistical procedures that are not "data based", shows similar relationships (intuition leads to spiritual experience and spiritual experience leads to spiritual belief) with some minor variations and more detail about the mediating factors involved in these relationships. And it shows how a new factor, contemplative, mediates the relationship between intuition and spiritual experiences, intuition and religiousness, openness and religiousness, and openness and spiritual experiences. In this second model the path from intuition to schizotypy is significant. Intuition in both models, although defined by different constructs, leads to spiritual experience. The type of spiritual belief and experience determined by intuition is decidedly spiritual, not just unusual experiences which one could interpret as spiritual.We created a new intuition scale, the Attig Intuition Scale, for this research. It proved to be reliable and valid. Intuition in both models, although defined by different constructs, leads to spiritual experience. The type of spiritual belief and experience determined by intuition is decidedly spiritual, not just unusual experiences which one could interpret as spiritual.