Abstract
Since the enormous shift in the everyday semantic from “religion” to “spirituality” has also affected the terminology of the scientific study of religion, it appears necessary to explain the position taken in the Bielefeld-based Cross-cultural Study on “Spirituality” to the question: Should ‘spirituality’ be used as scientific concept? Attempts to substitute religion with spirituality are critically discussed in this chapter. To ground and inspire reflection and suggest a conceptual framework for the chapters of this book, we refer to classics in philosophy, psychology and sociology of religion such as Schleiermacher , James , Troeltsch , Tillich and Luckmann . Thus the conclusion of this chapter is twofold: first, we call into question the necessity of establishing ‘spirituality’ as scientific concept (etic term) in contrast to or as substitute for ‘religion’; instead, we argue that the concept of religion is sufficient, because spirituality can be understood as privatized, experience-oriented religion. Second, we strongly suggest taking the self-attribution as “spiritual” very seriously as emic term and thus open the perspective for the chapters to follow, which are committed to the thoroughgoing empirical study of “spirituality” as self-description of the persons who identify themselves by that term, whether in conjunction with religion or not.
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Notes
- 1.
Ironically, Troeltsch was popularized among North American scholars by H.R. Niebuhr , especially in his The Social Sources of Denominationalism (Niebuhr , 1929) which was first published in 1929 and thus antedating the English translation of Troeltsch ’s text by 2 years. Niebuhr however dropped Troeltsch ’s third type, mysticism, so that subsequent theorizing and empirical research on church-sect theory has largely ignored mysticism. The reasons for this are in dispute, but it is clear that neither Niebuhr nor Troeltsch thought fondly of mysticism and that neither saw it as characteristic of the North American religious landscape (Garrett, 1975; Steeman, 1975). Whatever the reason, as Garrett (1975, p. 205) has noted, mysticism has experienced “wholehearted neglect” at the hands of sociological investigators.
- 2.
Troeltsch ’s mystic of course is different from Weber ’s magician . The magician is characterized by Weber as practitioner of magic coercion, a “small independent entrepreneur hired by private individuals on an ad hoc basis and exercising his office outside any recognized institution, most often in clandestine manner”, as Bourdieu (1987, p. 134) summarizes Weber ’s perspective.
- 3.
Also Emmons (1999), in The Psychology of Ultimate Concerns, refers to Tillich ’s ultimate concern. The problem with Emmons’ proposal is that he made a plural for a concept that does not allow for a plural. Thus the contradiction is already in the title of the book—foreshadowing a problematic construction of measures and research design.
- 4.
Here we see one of the shortcomings of the conceptual model on which the Post-Critical Belief Scale (PCBS, Duriez, Fontaine, & Hutsebaut, 2000; Duriez, Soenens, & Hutsebaut, 2005; Fontaine, Duriez, Luyten, & Hutsebaut, 2003; Hutsebaut, 1996) is based. The PCBS is not responsive to horizontal transcendence , but is based on Wulff’s (1997, p. 635) problematic polarization between inclusion of transcendence and exclusion of transcendence. In this polarization it is presupposed as taken-for-granted what transcendence means—a kind of taken-for-granted normativity that stands also behind the distinction between belief and unbelief.
- 5.
Faivre (2010) characterizes esotericism as follows: “The four fundamental characteristics are as follows: 1. The idea of universal correspondences. Non-‘causal’ correspondences operate between all the levels of the universe […] 2. The idea of living Nature. The cosmos is not only a series of correspondences. Permeated with invisible but active forces, the whole of Nature, considered as a living organism, as a person, as a history, connected with that of the human being and of the divine world. […] 3. The role of mediations and of the imagination. These two notions are mutually complementary. […] 4. The experience of transmutation. […] It is the transformation of oneself, which can be a ‘second birth’; and as a corollary of a part of Nature (e.g., in a number of alchemical texts).” (p. 12)
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Streib, H., Hood, R.W. (2016). Understanding “Spirituality”—Conceptual Considerations. In: Streib, H., Hood, Jr., R. (eds) Semantics and Psychology of Spirituality. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21245-6_1
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