Cultivating Christians: North American family cultures and religious identity formation

North American Christian families face many challenges as they try to live faithfully in an intercultural, multi-religious, secularising world, particularly with regard to the formation of religious identity in children. Answering the question of how children become Christian is more complicated today than it was for previous generations because adults cannot assume that the Christian vestiges of a civil religion will be sufficient to help children embrace a robust sense of themselves as God’s beloved and called people in a divinely created world. Thus, this essay explores what social science research and theological reflection might offer religious leaders as frameworks and tools for encouraging family cultures that cultivate young Christians, focusing particularly on strategies for sharing religious language, communicating beliefs and values, modelling spiritual practices, encountering symbolic images, and participating in congregational life.     

Courage and Resistance: Spiritual formation and mentoring girls for religious leadership

In spite of the vast growth in literature over the past 10 years related to the gender-specific aspects of girls' development, very little has actually been written concerning their spirituality and spiritual development. This paper reviews available sources on girls' spiritual development and compares and contrasts the extant literature with the results of interviews with over 32 young women as part of a 'Girls and Religious Leadership' Project. How do girls develop spirituality? What are their spiritual questions? How do the relational concerns of girls connect with their spirituality? And how do the answers to these questions compare to the same as related to boys? Further, what sort of mentoring models relate most directly to the support of girls and their spiritual development. We are at a time in history when women are emerging as religious leaders. Though further work needs to be done, this paper makes initial suggestions about how knowledge of girls' spirituality and mentoring can contribute to the formation of future religious leaders.     

Creating charisma online: the role of digital presence in the formation of religious identity

This article investigates the construction and transmission of charisma through online channels and its role in the formation of religious identities. Mindful of Max Weber’s observation that charisma inhabits the relationship between a leader and his/her followers, I argue for a critical reappraisal of the theoretical model in the light of the ubiquity in the twenty-first century of new, virtual forms of social encounter. I focus my analysis on the Christian creationist movement in the United States and particularly on an influential leader called Ken Ham. Using digital ethnographic methods, I show how Ham constructs charisma online and how a virtual community forms itself around his charismatic claims. I illustrate how this virtual community intersects with offline worlds and suggest that the theme park attractions that Ham’s organisation runs (Creation Museum, Ark Encounter) are imbued with deflected charisma by virtue of their association with his online avatar.     

Violence and the return of the religious

Continental Philosophy Review - René Girard speaks of the return of the religious as a “return of the sacred… in the form of violence.” This violence was inherent in the...     

Rational-emotive therapy and the religious client

The religious client presents a particular challenge to the RET therapist in that the irrational beliefs responsible for the client's problems are often created or supported by distortions in the religious belief system. This paper will discuss the connections between religious distortions and the irrational ideas, ways to deal with them, and then present the most common religiously based irrational beliefs along with biblical disputations.Constance Lawrence, M.S., is Director of the Christian Counseling Center in Norwalk, CT, and also has a private practice in Weston, CT.     

American psychology and the religious imagination

In just three generations, American psychology grew from a fledgling science to a culturally authoritative discipline. Standard accounts of psychology's meteoric rise typically omit what most needs to be illuminated: the resonance between psychological theory and the symbolic universe underlying America's popular religious imagination. This article sketches a cultural history of American psychology by examining how many of its core concepts invoke a metaphysical horizon associated with the nation's heritage of unchurched spirituality.     

《道德经》与中国式宗教意识

一般认为中国没有统一的宗教信仰与发达的神学讨论,但是作为中国古代哲学经典之一的《道德经》,却成就了道教。这很     

Reflexive modernity and the religious body

There are a growing number of attempts to reconsider the nature and role of contemporary religion with reference to the issues of ‘postmodernity’ and ‘postmodernism’. Against these, it is suggested here that efforts to reconstruct the study of religion within the framework of an assumption that we are entering a postmodern social order would be fundamentally misconceived. While the emergence of features within the present social order are acknowledged, which undermine major components of the modern project, and are manifest as problematizations of the questions of reality and meaning which concern the postmodernists, it is not accepted here that this order itself is in a state of decay. Instead, that postmodernity is a fundamentally modern construct is argued, how the very idea of postmodernity becomes possible is explored, suggesting that it is, in part, the product of a process of ‘disembodiment’ which has gradually come to dominate Western cultures since the time of the Protestant Reformation. Postmodernism is characterized by a mentalism which ignores the anthropological in reality of what we term the religious body; the necessary implication of embodiment in the human construction of meaning and identity. It is proposed therefore, that the study of contemporary religion should be shaped not by postmodernism but by an awareness of both the reality‐threatening impulses of reflexive modernity and the continuing anthropological reality of the religious body.     

Lived religion and the religious field

ABSTRACT

In the study of lived religion, the focus on laypeople as religious agents can result in the simplistic juxtaposition of religion-as-practised by individuals and religion-as-prescribed by institutions. This perspective leads to analyses that over-emphasize agency and overlook the embeddedness of religious persons in intricate power relations that expand beyond the institution(s) closest to them. I propose that Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory, particularly as related to the religious field, offers tools for tackling this issue. While Bourdieu’s work has been criticized for relegating the laity to the status of passive consumers of religious goods, his theorizations can also be employed to produce nuanced micro-level accounts that prioritize laypeople’s practical knowledge of the field and the positions they take within it. Based on my case study of older Finnish women’s normative assessments related to religion, I demonstrate how scholars can investigate the role which their informants’ histories and investments within the religious field play in their religion-as-lived. The women in my study, lifelong members of Orthodox or Lutheran churches, defended their positions in the increasingly individualistic Finnish religious field through an emphasis on childhood socialization as the foundation of ‘proper’ religion.     

Drawing a line between the religious and the secular: the cases of religious education in Sweden and India

Abstract

Religion as a school subject – Religious Education (RE) – is handled differently in various national contexts. This article discusses two different systems of managing (or avoiding) RE: those used in non-denominational Swedish and Indian schools. The article focuses particularly on what is allowed in the classroom with regards to religion. Both countries are secular, but where is the line drawn between the secular and the religious? Allowing the two contexts to meet reveals the particularities of each. The impact of Protestant Christianity, specifically Lutheranism, is evident in Swedish RE: religion is to be defined through beliefs and words, and religious actions should be excluded from classrooms. The Swedish context highlights ‘knowledge of’ religions, but avoids religious action. In India, there is no explicit RE, but Indian education does include learning from religion as well as ‘doing religion.’ The Indian approach is very inclusive, to the point of emphasising, as teachers put it, a common core of all religions. Both systems of RE offer particular opportunities and face certain difficulties in dealing with the contemporary globalised world.     

Wittgenstein and religious dogma

It is well understood that Wittgenstein defends religious faith against positivistic criticisms on the grounds of its logical independence. But exactly how are we to understand the nature of that independence? Most scholars take Wittgenstein to equate language-games with belief-systems, and thus to assert that religions are logical schemes founded on their own basic beliefs and principles of inference. By contrast, I argue that on Wittgenstein’s view, to have religious faith is to hold fast to a certain picture of the world according to which one orients one’s actions and attitudes, possibly even in dogmatic defiance of contrary evidence. Commitment to such a picture is grounded in passion, not intellection, and systematic coherence is largely irrelevant.