John Grim

CULTURAL IDENTITY, AUTHENTICITY, AND COMMUNITY SURVIVAL: THE POLITICS OF RECOGNITION IN THE STUDY OF NATIVE AMERICAN RELIGIONS

which explores the structures of American imperialism and the ways in which structures of dominance have framed Native American ethnicity, race, gender, and religion.2 This paper proposes that specific issues raised in the politics of recognition, namely, cultural identity, authenticity, and community survival, provide critical approaches to the study of American Indian religions. These approaches are not simply political perspectives but ways of illuminating social forces and ritual practices in Native American communities.3 Native American identity has rarely been understood in its cultural and social setting in mainstream America. Individualism and stereotypes of heroic warrior personalities have been emphasized in a way that distorts the actual Native stress on individual identity in the context of cultural community. The academic study of Native American healers, shamans, or medicine men has at times over emphasized the personal biographical and visionary formation of these healers with little or no attention to the

An overview of teilhard's commitment to 'seeing' as expressed in his phenomenology, metaphysics, and mysticism

Using Teilhard’s emphasis on ‘seeing’ this article explores Teilhard de Chardin’s articulation of a vision of evolution as a dynamic process in which the psychic character of physical matter evolves into ever-greater complexity and consciousness. Teilhard proposed that evolutionary complexity- consciousness is especially evident in the appearance of humans. This work considers the significance of complexity-consciousness for Teilhard as an emergent property of a matter-spirit dialectic. This article investigates Teilhard’s commitment to seeing drawing on his phenomenology of an involution of matter, a metaphysics of union with spirit, and a mysticism of centration of person. Finally, there are brief considerations of the contributions and limits of Teilhard’s thought in light of contemporary issues.