Modeling the Religious Field: Religion, Spirituality, Mysticism and Related World Views (original) (raw)

The Emerging Meanings of Religiousness and Spirituality: Problems and Prospects

Journal of Personality, 1999

This article examines traditional and modern psychological characterizations of religiousness and spirituality. Three ways in which religiousness and spirituality are polarized by contemporary theorists are examined: organized religion versus personal spirituality; substantive religion versus functional spirituality; and negative religiousness versus positive spirituality. An alternative approach to understanding religiousness and spirituality is presented that integrates rather than polarizes these constructs, and sets boundaries to the discipline while acknowledging the diversity of religious and spiritual expressions. Directions for future investigations of these two constructs are presented.

Public religious embodiment: A contemporary discussion

Verbum et Ecclesia

Spiritualism is an inseparable part of human existence. The reduction of this dimension (spiritualism) will negatively affect human existence. This causes the emergence of new phenomenon, or even culture, in the life of modern society. The phenomenon is the increase of their interest in spiritualism. Even though spiritualism in this context is not always identical with religion, this phenomenon cannot be separated from capitalism. This article explores how the intersection of religion, religiosity and public segment is more likely to manifest in our everyday life. Humans are considered indisputably religious from ancestry; therefore, they are regarded as homo-religious. As technology and society progress, some scholars argue that in no time distant religion is going to give way to secularisation. However, it remains a vital and prominent role for humans despite the rate of secularisation in European and other Western societies. This sociological research utilises the transversal and...

Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion

Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion, 2012

No matter how you wish to define it, prayer is a valuable focus for understanding how people interpret themselves, others and the worldthis world and higher worlds-in which they live. It is a phenomenon which seems to be characteristic not only of participants in every religion, but also men and women who do not identify with traditional religions. It can be practised even by those who do not believe either in a God or transcendent force. In this sense, therefore, we may assert that the prayer is a typically human activity that has accompanied the development of different civilizations over the course of the centuries (Meslin 2003). The constant presence of such activity in human history inevitably raises many questions: why do people feel the need to pray? What are the reasons that lead people to persist in praying? In what ways do people pray? And what about the efficacy of praying: is it possible to demonstrate that it achieves its goals? Is prayer really able to change reality? Following the famous approach of Marcel Mauss (1968[1909]), according to whom prayer joins ritual and belief together and always has a social as well as personal dimension, we can argue that one of the primary things prayer does is to put people in touch with the symbolic universe that sustains the believer in a life of faith. It depends upon and reinforces representations of God, and at the same time opens up a way for an individual to understand his or her own existential conditions, life style, needs and aspirations. Both the material issues of concrete daily life as well as more symbolic elements expressed through words, gestures, body positions, and community celebration are brought together in the act of praying. To understand prayer we also have to understand the horizon within which it must be placed. The peculiarity of such human activity is the relationship between those who pray and the being(s) to whom prayer is addressed. Prayer implies the existence of an "otherness", that is powerful and meaningful. It may be personal or impersonal, but there is often a sense that it can receive and even understand and address the tasks and issues addressed to it. Such "higher power" is not necessarily a personal God: it may coincide with a universal, cosmic order, to which the References

Towards Religious-Spirituality: A Multidimensional Matrix of Religion and Spirituality

Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies

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-spirit...

Critical Reflections on the Category of Religion in Contemporary Sociological Discourse

Nordic Journal of Religion and Society (2015), 28 (1): 21–36, 2015

For some decades, the academic concept of religion has been examined critically by a number of scholars. There have been some sociological responses to these criticisms against ‘religion’. This article argues that these sociological responses have missed important implications of these criticisms, which can be constructively incorporated into sociological discourse about religion. What can be meaningfully studied is the practice of classification carried out with the term ‘religion’ and norms and imperatives which govern and naturalise a specific discursive configuration of the religious-secular dichotomy. This approach indicates the vacuum in the sociological discourse of religion, which needs to be filled with empirical research, in order to map and theorize the ways in which people utilize the term ‘religion’ in a specific social context.

Reconstructing " Religion " from the Bottom Up (2016)

This article claims to uncover the core problematics that have made the debate on defining and conceptualizing " religion " so difficult and argues that this makes it possible to move beyond radical deconstruction towards reconstructing the concept for scholarly purposes. The argument has four main steps. Step 1 consists of establishing the nature of the entity " religion " as a reified imaginative formation. Step 2 consists of identifying the basic dilemma with which scholars have been struggling: the fact that, on the one hand, definitions and conceptualizations do not seem to work unless they stay sufficiently close to commonly held prototypes, while yet, on the other hand, those prototypes are grounded in monotheistic, more specifically Christian, even more specifically Protestant, theological biases about " true " religion. The first line of argument leads to crypto-theological definitions and conceptualizations, the second to a radical deconstruction of the very concept of " religion. " Step 3 resolves the dilemma by identifying an unexamined assumption, or problematic " blind spot, " that the two lines of argument have in common: they both think that " religion " stands against " the secular. " However, the historical record shows that these two defined themselves not just against one another but, simultaneously, against a third domain (referred to by such terms as " magic " or " superstition "). The structure is therefore not dualistic but triadic. Step 4 consists of replacing common assumptions about how " religion " emerged in the early modern period by an interpretation that explains not just its emergence but its logical necessity, at that time, for dealing with the crisis of comparison caused by

Sociology of Religion (BA-II) 2018 Syllabus Leiden University

This course gives an overview of the most important themes in the sociology of religion. The course falls in three parts: The first part of the course is concerned with theorising religion sociologically. We raise sociological questions at the level of the individual (e.g., why are people religious in the first place?; why are women more religious than men?), at the level of the nation-state (e.g., why are some countries more religious than others?; how and why do state-religion relations differ cross-culturally?), and at the level of religious communities (e.g., how are religious communities maintained socially?) The second part of the course is concerned with the profound changes that have taken place in the religious field across the world during the 20 th and 21 st centuries. We explore the secularisation thesis, i.e. the idea that religion (necessarily) loses power, prestige, and plausibility as a result of modernisation, and evaluate alternatives to this master narrative (e.g., the subjectivisation thesis and the return-of-religion thesis). We compare the religious field in Europe (ongoing secularisation) with the United States (continued high levels of religion) and China (religious revival despite Communist oppression) and try to explain the differences between these cases. We also explore the rise of new, late modern 'religiosity styles', such as fundamentalism and new age spirituality. The third part of the course looks at the relation between religion and other aspects of civil society. In particular, we will discuss religion education and religion in popular culture.