Faith in God plays an extraordinarily significant role in the life of handicapped persons and of their guardians. Most respondents treat faith as a support and a source of strength for resolving problems posed by everyday life. The more difficult the living situation caused by the level of the disability, the deeper the trust in God and giving oneself up to Him is. Every third subject of the study indicated that without faith he/she cannot imagine his/her life, and nearly every fifth respondent is convinced that owing to faith the miracle of healing and return to a complete ability may happen. The Holy Mass is a profound religious experience for most of the respondents, giving them consolidation in their difficult living situation. Only few treat the Holy Mass as a habit, a custom, or a thing that is necessary because of the pressure from the people around them. Also the fact that persons with a considerable disability declare experiencing the Holy Mass more profoundly than those whose physical status is decidedly better is an important observation.
This historiography makes a distinction between German and Polish Warmia. It is based on the old structure of the population, and, broadly speaking, traditions and customs. The most visible sign of these was the language used in the south, predominantly Polish, and in the north - German, although in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Prussian authorities sought to unify it, in favour of the latter. Polish saints, especially St. Stanislaus, bishop and martyr, and St. Florian were taken into account in the liturgical calendar. The cult of Our Lady of Czestochowa enjoyed great popularity from the eighteenth century, and from the revelations in 1877 of Our Lady Gietrzwaldzka. Polish traditions also strengthened 'Gazeta Olsztynska', which was first published in 1886. However, after incorporating Warmia into East Prussia, Polish culture and traditions suffered a setback. The cult of saints, especially Roch, Valentine, Michael, Mark, Barbara and Rosalie still played a special role. Losiery (Opfergaenge) pilgrimages and (kiermasy) church fairs took place. Warminskie Vespers are still cultivated today. A typical warminski custom was pouring water over each other, not on Easter Monday, but on Ash Wednesday. The custom of sharing wafers and preparing many dishes as in the Polish tradition were not known. At Easter, food was not celebrated. Only funerals, weddings and baptisms were of folk character. Specific to the Warmia religiosity was the cult of the Passion of Christ, dating back to the days of the Teutonic Knights. In the People's Republic of Poland Warminskie traditions, both German and Polish, but cultivated before 1945, began to rapidly decline. It was a natural process associated with the change of population structure in these areas. In place of autochnons, Poles from different parts of the Second Republic, mainly from Eastern Poland, began to arrive, mainly from the Eastern Borderlands. In many parishes a new cult has grown up - the cult of Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn - completely unknown before. People from Kurpiowszczyzna, and later Ukrainians, brought their own customs with them.
The author tries to find a possible basis for spiritual dialogue between the Church and today's Czech young people. In the first part he places the religiousness of the youth into a broader geographical and historical context. He focuses on the present reality in the Czech Republic and finds out that young people here are extremely atheistic in comparison with the youth in other European countries. At the same time, a lot of them admit that there exist some phenomena which are not possible to explain by scientific reasons. That is why the author pays special attention to the phenomenon of atheism among Czech youth. In the Czech setting we can also find the so called 'religious supermarket', in which anybody can choose from the wide offer of various forms of religion. Catholics prevail among those young people who regard themselves as believers, although a great part of them have some objections against the practice of the Catholic Church and against some parts of its doctrine. At the end the author proposes two possible typologies: according to the young people's attitudes to faith in God and according to their relationship to the Church.
Spirituality has changed and got a new meaning recently. In every person's life a demand for spirituality and rituals appears. The question is how people treat this phenomenon in everyday life. Because of the effects of secularization the previous dominance of religion declined and new waves of religious movements were established. The authoresses aim is to give an outline of what religion means for today's youth and what opportunities of religious behaviour they can choose. Furthermore, they would like to show how religiousness as a main field in the value system may provide security and guidelines in life; and the way how these may be connected to healthy adaptation in the family. The present study reports on secondary school students' religious denominations, their religiousness and religious attendance with attention put on socio-demographic and socio-economic background. The authoresses attempt to reveal the connection between respect of parental values, parental control and social support regarding religiousness.
Theoretical and empirical prerequisites suggest that cognitive structures, therein self-awareness, demonstrate connections with religiousness. The whole spectrum of statements, even among classical scholars of psychology, can be found in psychological analyses devoted to religiousness issues. They range from those stressing that the man reaches a complete self-awareness only in the transcendental act of contact with God, to those indicating that religious experience is caused merely by a well-developed self-awareness. The presented research touches upon issues concerning the cognitive correlates of religiousness. The subject of study were connections between types of relation to God and self-awareness, defined as a course of processing information about self and about relations with the environment. The study group comprises women who belong to monastic societies (N=110), aged between 22 and 31 years (M=26,43; SD=2,49), with 4- up to 9-year experience of living in the order. The Self-awareness Scale by Z. Zaborowski and the Scale of Relation to God by D. Hutsebaut were applied in the study. The empirical research verified the preliminarily formulated research hypothesis, indicating the presence of statistically significant connections between the self-awareness type and religiousness. External self-awareness demonstrates the strongest connection with religiousness, whereas personal self-awareness - the weakest.
The purpose of this article is to present a certain idea of religiousness. It could be called religiousness without God and without faith. I found its premises in the work of the Polish theatre reformer Jerzy Grotowski. He was neither a prophet nor the founder of the religion; primarily, he was a man of theatre. But for him, in the age of “God’s death” the theatre was a substitute of religion and religious experience. He understood his “poor theatre” as a search for sense of life, an authentic life and the world’s salvation. At various stages of his artistic way, which I present in the first unit of this article, he tried to reach to deeper dimensions of reality. In the end, he went far beyond the theatre. In the second unit, I show the features of religiousness without God and faith. In this religiousness, God exists and does not exists, he is a question, or doubtfulness. The Faith is a physical action, instead of seriousness, we have irony, grotesque, buffo.
Psychological theories of persuasion usually focus on the issue of a change of peoples' attitudes towards object of persuasion. Among other factors, they take into account the role of sender's attributes in the change of those attitudes. However, they omit the fact that persuasive actions also change the way of how the persuader is perceived. The results of two experiments are presented in the article. The changes in the impression of the sender's credibility impact receiver's attitude towards the object of persuasion. The improvement of the impression of the sender leads to decrease of difference between receiver's and sender's issue position. The deterioration of impression leads to higher attachment of the receiver to his/her initial issue position (experiment 1) and causes moving back from the position of the sender when he/she is taking clear position (experiment 2).
In the present article we first draw the reader’s attention to the state and differentiation of religious practices in the Polish society, and next to some factors securing the stability of these practices. We conclude this discussion with a cautious sociological prediction concerning the Catholics’ involvement in cult practices in the future. The indication to a variety of determinants of continuity of religious practices in the Polish society shows how erroneous are the theses propagated by those Western sociologists who connect the high intensity of religious practices in Poland with the specific role of the Catholic Church in our country. Religious practices, including participation in the Sunday Holy Mass, do not constitute a full picture of believers’ religiousness. Participation in them – as social behavior – can be subjected not only to religious influences and effects, but also it may be a behavior that is the result of social norms and conventions inclining one to perform acts of religious cult even with weak religious motivation.
The author analyses folk religiousness and the factors influencing it. Folk Mariology and Marian pilgrimages constitute a significant pillar of the folk religiousness. The author observes the transformations of folk religiousness and its direction and meaning through the platform of Marian pilgrimages in Slovakia. On the basis of her research and the study of literature by experts dealing with this issue, the author comes to the conclusion that folk religiousness and its traditional forms are changing, but Marian pilgrimages continue to enjoy great attention from believers of different ages.
Observation of traditional folk rites taking place in contemporary culture frequently show that today’s people are not able to break with tradition and, especially in Poland, with many rites related to the Church’s liturgical year. Since the Middle Ages the feast of Corpus Christi has been celebrated in Poland with ceremonious processions in which religious solemnity mixes with folk customs and the city life. We have recently witnessed an ever increasing number of new examples that show believers celebrating publicly in the city streets: All Saints’March with relics that is juxtaposed with Halloween, arrival of St. Martin on a horse, walking the Way of the Cross during Lent, Easter –time burning of the effigy of Judas in Skoczów and recently the Cortege of the Three Wise Men. These processions are turning into noisy street events – as the believers are going out of the churches into the city streets, the way they participate in the religious ‘mystery’ is changing: it becomes a peculiar cultural event. Features of folk theatre are clearly visible in religious ceremonies. Many of the religious ceremonies are perceived only as a social gathering or a “street show”, which testifies to a tectonic crack between the traditional society and a modern one. Strong presence of this kind of ritual spectacle in the media and participation of teachers, students, pre-schoolers, scouts and a vast audience aside from priests and believers, and also politicians, devils, angels and medieval knights in the Cortege of the Three Kings, make the folkloristic analyse this phenomenon in the category of a fair or fete, search for the limits of eccentric ideas that turn a ritual into a theatre, for trivialised signs of traditional folk rites and for folklorisation and hybridisation of contemporary culture, and thus the way of leaving the sphere of sacrum and entering the sphere of profanum.
This study focuses on the ethno-cultural situation in one of the regions of the Czech borderland, from where almost the entire population was displaced after the Second World War. Ethnographic, historical and geographical methods were used for the research. The studied region consists of the small town of Tachov and 12 surrounding municipalities, which include a total of 38 settlements. Before the Second World War, the Tachov area was inhabited almost exclusively with people of German ethnicity. After the war, most of these people were displaced to Germany under the Potsdam Agreements. The area was then inhabited by various groups of Slavic inhabitants from the Czechoslovak interior and other countries, including Czechs and Slovaks from the Czechoslovak interior who were looking for a chance for a new life across the border, and repatriates from the Czech or Slovak minorities in Volhynia, Hungary, Romania. The study shows how the seemingly ethnically homogeneous structure of the population is in fact culturally differentiated. It turns out that the data on the ethnic structure of the population do not reflect the real cultural diversity of the region. It is necessary to use other statistical data that describe the cultural structure indirectly. Above all, however, it is necessary to carry out ethnographic research which can both characterize the current state and contribute to its explanation using the historical method.
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