Building Blocks of Sacralities: A New Basis for Comparison across Cultures and Religions (original) (raw)
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Journal of Cognition and Culture 15, 191-216, 2015
Researchers have not yet done an adequate job of reverse engineering the complex cultural concepts of religion and spirituality in a way that allows scientists to operationalize component parts and historians of religion to consider how the component parts have been synthesized into larger socio-cultural wholes. Doing so involves two steps: (1) distinguishing between (a) the generic elements that structure definitions and (b) the specific features used to characterize the generic elements as “religious” or “sacred” and (2) disaggregating these specific features into more basic cognitive processes that scientists can operationalize and that historians can analyze in situ. Three more basic processes that interact on multiple levels are proposed: perceiving salience, assessing significance, and imagining hypothetical, counterfactual content.
Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 2010
We can foster collaboration between the academic study of religion and the sciences, particularly the biological and psychological sciences, if we (1) construct a common object of study that can be positioned within an evolutionary paradigm, (2) adopt a building block approach to the study of religion that distinguishes between religions and the more elementary phenomena that comprise them, and (3) operationalize abstract concepts as behavioral interactions in order to gain a better understanding of the process whereby people construct religions and other complex things out of more elementary phenomena that they view as special.<xref ref-type="fn" rid="FN1">1</xref>
A review of recent research suggests that academic and popular distinctions between " religion " and " spirituality " are unfounded. Working from a meaning systems perspective , it is argued that recognizing that " religious " and " spiritual " are part of the same broad category does not go far enough. It is argued that a wider perspective that considers the interplay of many different cultural and social factors on both beliefs and practices is more useful. This broadening of the multi-level, interdisciplinary paradigm to examine all existential cultures, including the secular and non-religious, offers the potential to better understand the complexity and diversity of lived religion. Increased use of idiographic methodologies and a more reflective approach to the constructs used in nomothetic methodologies are advocated as a way to advance the field and better explore beliefs and practices in a more ecologically valid way.
Religious belief is one of the most pervasive and ubiquitous characteristics of human society. Religion has shadowed and illuminated human lives since the earliest times, shaping the worldviews of cultures from isolated tribes to vast empires. Starting from the premise that religion is a concept referring to human activities, which can be analysed and compared across time and cultures, What is Religion? brings the most up-to-date scholarship to bear on humankind's most enduring creation.
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In the contemporary study of religion there seems to be an exaggeration of the distinction between religion and spirituality, not only to the point of separation, but worse still, in terms of a superiority-inferiority hierarchy that gives rise to a value judgement between spirituality and religion. Could this be a sign of the persisting Western hegemony in the study of religion? This article suggests that the consideration of religion and spirituality as disparate entities may be necessary in some societies but not sufficient for a global perspective. Could there be an integrative model that would lend itself for an inclusive exchange in the study of religion and spirituality? Basing itself particularly within the literature of the psychological study of religion, this essay develops a multidimensional matrix of religion and/or spirituality that attempts to be, at the same time, parsimonious and comprehensive, which includes constructs like religious-spirituality. Religious-spiritua...
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In the contemporary study of religion there seems to be an exaggeration of the distinction between religion and spirituality, not only to the point of separation, but worse still, in terms of a superiority-inferiority hierarchy that gives rise to a value judgement between spirituality and religion. Could this be a sign of the persisting Western hegemony in the study of religion? This article suggests that the consideration of religion and spirituality as disparate entities may be necessary in some societies but not sufficient for a global perspective. Could there be an integrative model that would lend itself for an inclusive exchange in the study of religion and spirituality? Basing itself particularly within the literature of the psychological study of religion, this essay develops a multidimensional matrix of religion and/or spirituality that attempts to be, at the same time, parsimonious and comprehensive, which includes constructs like ‘religiousspirituality’. Religious-spiritu...
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In light of the framing of Asprem’s book in terms of Problemgeschichte, we can ask what is meant by a “problem.” Problems, as he uses it, are grounded in human experience, which means that for problems to be problems people have to perceive them as such. The problem of disenchantment thus entails both (1) the perception of the problem and (2) various responses to the problem. Asprem focuses primarily on the way people responded to the problem. But we can also ask how, when, and why people perceived the problem in the first place. If recognizing a problem can be construed in terms of “event perception” then we can view Problemgeschichte as involving the perception of problems at a whole range of levels from our perception of the historical past, our personal past, and what just happened, thus allowing for a fuller integration between sociology and psychology.
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Australian Religion Studies Review, 2002
One of the aims of social theory in religion has been to explore axiomatically and theoretically the social and cultural dimensions of the realm of the sacred. The work of Emile Durkheim has been pre-eminent in this task. Critical feminist theory has however detailed the ways in which Durkheimian accounts of religion have been heavily gendered, and the sacred masculinized. Feminist theories of religion have responded to this by positing a re-casting of the relationship between gender and divinity. One of the central problematics in this field of enquiry is whether to reclaim the profane as the site of resistance and biophillia and from which to center women's religious agency; or to re-claim the sacred as the primary site for the construction of an ethics of sexual difference and gendered identity. This essay is an initial consideration of this problematic with particular reference to the social conditions of religion in post-modernity.
Recent research has demonstrated that academic and popular distinctions between 'religion' and 'spirituality' are unfounded. Each concept can mean many different things, with considerable overlap between the two terms, and the distinctions that are made are primarily theological and/or political. Emic distinctions in this area can hinder etic understanding and obscure the complexity and diversity of phenomena. It is argued that recognising that 'religious' and 'spiritual' are part of the same broad category does not go far enough and that religious/spiritual worldviews are also not fundamentally different to other worldviews. They are socially-constructed 'Meaning Systems', which help practitioners create their own worlds and give purpose to their lives. These ‘Meaning Systems’ are constructed out of the cultural and social resources available to an individual. All humans use their experiences to create the best mental models of reality that they can. The same psychological and sociological processes are involved in the creation of 'nonreligious' belief systems as in the creation of 'religious' ones. Recognising that both 'religion' and 'nonreligion' are part of the same human efforts to understand ourselves and our world can enrich and assist the study of each.