Religious/spiritual (RS) struggles are a common feature of life. However, their link to subsequent changes in God representations-the mental representations underlying how people experientially relate to and doctrinally view God-is understudied. Toward that end, in this 1-year longitudinal study of undergraduates at a Christian college in the United States (N ϭ 329; 193 women, 127 men, 9 did not report), we explored whether RS struggles predict subsequent negative (i.e., less benevolent, more authoritarian) experiences of God (God images) and whether such shifts in God images predict further negative shifts in doctrinal views of God (God concepts). Results revealed that RS struggles, particularly surrounding doubt, led to more negative experiences of God at 6 months, and these more negative experiences of God were associated with more negative doctrinal views of God at 1 year. This research highlights the link between RS struggles and subsequent shifts in how people experientially relate to and doctrinally view God.

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This article investigates a corpus of herbalist pamphlets -fairly common, everyday texts found in (South) African cities -which promote the services of traditional healers and promise solutions to a plethora of ailments and life problems. The article's multi-pronged approach brings feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA), corpus linguistics (CS) and multimodal critical discourse studies (MCDS) into dialogue with each other. Encompassing both quantitative and qualitative components, this eclectic framework illustrates the ways in which dominant gendered discourses reproduce a patriarchal and heteronormative order by positioning men and women differently. This dominant form of gendered representation, however, co-exists with more resistant discourses which positively thematise same-sex desire. Essentially, the article demonstrates that herbalist pamphlets are key sites of 'entanglement' (Nuttall 2009) where complex identity nexuses of gender, sexuality, race, age and culture intersect and compete with each other within the larger regime of representation in South Africa.