Changing a Mountain into a Mustard Seed: Spiritual Practices and Responses to Disaster among New York Brahma Kumaris

Abstract

Tamasin Ramsay*Tamasin Ramsay is an Endeavour Research Fellow 2008 and PhD Candidate at Monash University. She holds a graduate degree in Medical Anthropology and has recently co-authored a report to the Secretary General of the United Nations on the Impact of Climate Change., Lenore MandersonDr Lenore Manderson has, in association with an Australia Research Council Federation Fellowship, conducted research in Australia and Southeast Asia on gender, chronic illness, disability, social relationships, and well-being. A medical anthropologist and social historian, she is Research Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, and the Faculty of Arts, at Monash University. & Wendy SmithDr Wendy Smith, an anthropologist, teaches Management at Monash University. Her research interests include Islamic work ethics, workplace management of religious diversity, and organizational perspectives on NRMs. She was Guest Editor of the IIAS Newsletter 47 (2008) on New Religious Movements and published “Sukyo Mahikari in Australia and Southeast Asia” in Japanese Religions in and beyond the Japanese Diaspora, edited by R. Pereira and H. Matsuoka (2007). * E-mail: tamasin.ramsay@med.monash.edu.au The confusion that follows disaster can threaten identity and rapidly undo people's sense of who they are and where they belong. The destruction of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001 was one event that precipitated self-examination once the immediacy of the disaster had passed. We explore how members of the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University (BKWSU), based in centers in New York, apply spiritual knowledge to understand suffering. Drawing on primary BKWSU texts and ethnographic data from field research conducted in 2007, we illustrate how the spiritual knowledge and practices of its members (BKs) uniquely shape their perspective on catastrophic events.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 36 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.