Terhi Utriainen

Descriptions of euthanasia as social representations: comparing the views of Finnish physicians and religious professionals

In many western societies health professionals play a powerful role in peoples experiences of dying. Religious professionals, such as pastors, are also confronted with the issues surrounding death and dying in their work. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the ways in which death-related topics, such as euthanasia, are constructed in a given culture are affected by the views of these professionals. This qualitative study addresses the ways in which Finnish physicians and religious professionals perceive and describe euthanasia and conceptualises these descriptions and views as social representations. Almost all the physicians interviewed saw that euthanasia does not fit the role of a physician and anchored it to different kinds of risks such as the slippery slope. Most of the religious and world-view professionals also rejected euthanasia. In this group, euthanasia was rejected on the basis of a religious moral code that forbids killing. Only one of the religious professionals - the freethinker with an atheist world-view - accepted euthanasia and described it as a personal choice, as did the one physician interviewed who accepted it. The article shows how the social representations of euthanasia are used to protect professional identities and to justify their expert knowledge of death and dying.

Naked and dressed: metaphorical perspective to the imaginary and ethical background of the deathbed scene

Using my ethnographical and textual research material, I hope to show that the metaphors of nakedness and dress, as well as those of undressing and dressing, are central expressions of the existentially ultimate situation of dying when assisting at the deathbed of the other, in the context of Finnish hospice care. The article explores how the metaphors of nakedness and dress are constructed in intertextual relationships with the religious and cultural imagination, and how they refer to fundamental human concerns of the embodied identity and its boundaries, as well as of suffering and various ways of intersubjective and moral sharing. The epilogue makes a tentative attempt to discuss further ethical implications of the metaphorical perspective of nakedness and dress with the help of Emmanuel Levinas.

Agents of De-differentiation: Women Care-givers for the Dying in Finland

Women have traditionally been important ritual agents with regard to death and dying and they still form the majority of care-givers for the dying in modern Western societies such as Finland. The article asks how womens ritual role and position has changed within modernity. While the first phase of modernity was very much based on the division of labour between doctor and chaplain, in the latter phase, new responsibilities have been delegated to women carers and nurses in the spiritual care of the dying. This process of change is analysed as an important example of de-differentiation (a concept borrowed from Grace Davie), whereby contemporary female agents are taking a critical position towards some key features of modernity. This change bears many complex religious and social political implications for women in a society like Finland.

Angels, Agency, and Emotions

Today, angels are everywhere. From Christian imagery they have flown into art, popular culture, the Internet, film, commerce, and Western people’s imaginations and practices. Angel culture and angel spirituality are a visible form of globalized religion that is closely connected with commercial and popular culture.1 Well-known international angel “gurus” who travel between countries and continents and sell various kinds of angel practices (such as meditations and therapies) and items (books, oracle cards, jewelry, etc.) include charismatic women like Doreen Virtue (USA), Diane Cooper (UK), Lorna Byrne (Ireland), and Maria Zavou (Greece).2 Also included among their numbers is the Princess of Norway, Marta-Louise, who opened her own angel healing school and has prompted a sizable public discussion on angels and the boundaries of “proper” Lutheran religion in her country.3

Introduction: Is secularism bad for women?: La laïcité nuit-elle aux femmes?:

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Desire for Enchanted Bodies: The Case of Women Engaging in Angel Spirituality

Many popular practices that are increasingly attractive to “ordinary” women are not born out of outspoken feminist imagination and are not always even easily justified by feminist thinking. Yet they may have significant impact on the female body and how it is represented and lived in present-day secular society. This chapter takes a closer look at this issue through a practice that is increasingly popular among women today around the western world, namely, angel spirituality. I argue that in a relatively secularized society like Finland, the angel women, by engaging in enchanted practices not only in their private lives but also to some extent publicly, may call into question the modern ideal of the individual and the autonomous embodied subject and agent, both secular and conventionally religious.

Introduction: Critical and Creative Turns

Research on religion and gender (and in practice, often, religion and women) has, by now, a history that is several decades long. The central approaches within this field of inquiry are feminist theology, secularist-critical feminist study, and analytic descriptions of gendered religious beliefs and practices in different times and places. Over the years, this research field has opened up various new thematic and methodological routes and taken several critical and creative turns.1

Finnish Women Sacralizing Nature

One hundred years ago, the sociologist George Simmel suggested that life itself may become sacred in new ways in the future.1 This meant that people would become more aware than before of the fragility of life’s sometimes too self-evident realities.2 We propose that nature has, for some people, become precious and sacred in this manner. The focus on nature, as a fragile reality on the one hand and as the locus of the sacred on the other hand, can be found not only in particular nature religions but also within the wider spectrum of both traditional and modern religions and world views.

Constructing the Moral Community: Women’s Use of Dream Narratives in a Russian-Orthodox Karelian Village

In the wake of the collapse of Communism, religious and ethnic revivalism have emerged as major elements of social change in the former Soviet Union, playing themselves out on national, regional and community levels. This chapter focuses on community, and examines the dialectic between (i) religious values and (ii) the construction of a ‘moral community’, which is in turn a basis for ethnic identity. The construction of a moral community does not necessarily imply an ethnic consciousness in all members, but can be used in discourse to promote arguments concerning ethnic differences and ethnic rights. Questions examined include: What is this ‘moral community’ based on? What are the processes, often hidden from public view, behind its construction? If, as anthropologists suggest, a sense of community is constructed in part through ritual action, how do people identify with this ritual action and how do they decide what ritual action means for individuals and groups? How is ritual meaning utilised in the construction of community at the micro-level in small villages whose inhabitants have different linguistic historical and religious backgrounds?