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Is Mindfulness Secular or Religious, and Does It Matter?

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Practitioner's Guide to Ethics and Mindfulness-Based Interventions

Part of the book series: Mindfulness in Behavioral Health ((MIBH))

Abstract

This chapter will describe how many of the ethical judgments about the appropriate application of mindfulness rest on various assumptions and value judgments about what it means for something to be “religious” or “secular,” and so on. It will discuss how the framing of concepts such as the religious and the secular have evolved through the modern period to the postmodern period, and how this has a bearing on the contemporary mindfulness debates. It will be argued that the contemporary mindfulness debates are most fruitfully understood in postmodern, postsecular terms, and that doing so opens the door to mutually beneficial dialogue between narratives and disciplines.

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Correspondence to Jane F. Compson PhD .

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Compson, J.F. (2017). Is Mindfulness Secular or Religious, and Does It Matter?. In: Monteiro, L., Compson, J., Musten, F. (eds) Practitioner's Guide to Ethics and Mindfulness-Based Interventions . Mindfulness in Behavioral Health. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64924-5_2

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