ITP Professor Arthur Hastings Publishes Articles on Bereavement and Belief
Articles by ITP Professor Arthur Hastings appear in the most recent issues of two professional journals. Dr. Hastings is lead author of an article appearing in the latest issue of OMEGA: Journal of Death and Dying (An Official Journal of the Association for Death Education and Counseling). In this article, Dr. Hastings and his colleagues describe their blended quantitative and qualitative research on the Psychomanteum Process (a form of prepared mirror-gazing); they report the experiences of participants in the process and its striking impacts on bereavement.
The research was conducted, and the report prepared, by a team of ITP faculty and doctoral students. In a Guest Editorial entitled "The Resistance to Belief"--appearing in the most recent (Winter, 2002) issue of the Journal of Near-Death Studies--Dr. Hastings uses William James' essay, "The Will to Believe" as a springboard for presenting his views on nonrational influences that might contribute to resistance to belief in unusual phenomena in areas of paranormal and exceptional human experience research, even in the face of impressive evidence for such phenomena. The paper has important implications for psychology, transpersonal studies, philosophy of science, and epistemology.
