Philosophy of religion, fictionalism, and religious diversity

Until recently philosophy of religion has been almost exclusively focused upon the analysis of western religious ideas. The central concern of the discipline has been the concept “God”, as that concept has been understood within Judaeo-Christianity. However, this narrow remit threatens to render philosophy of religion irrelevant today. To avoid this philosophy of religion should become a genuinely multicultural discipline. But how, if at all, can philosophy of religion rise to this challenge? The paper considers fictionalism about religious discourse as a possible methodological standpoint from which to practice a tradition-neutral form of philosophy of religion. However, after examining some of the problems incurred by fictionalism, the paper concludes that fictionalism and religious diversity are uneasy bedfellows; which implies that fictionalism is unlikely to be the best theory to shape the practice of philosophy of religion in a multicultural context.     

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.     

The truth of religion and religious truths

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

Muslim attitudes toward religion,religious orientation and empathy among Pakistanis

Pakistani university students responded to the Muslim Attitudes towards Religion Scale (MARS) along with the Intrinsic, Extrinsic, and Quest Religious Orientation Scales and with measures of adaptive and maladaptive empathy. The MARS most importantly predicted higher Intrinsic Scale scores, and MARS linkages with empathy were at least partially explained by an intrinsic religious orientation. The Extrinsic–Social motivation was lower than the Intrinsic orientation, which in turn was lower that the Extrinsic–Personal form of commitment. Quest reflected a more Extrinsic religious orientation. Numerous gender differences appeared. Comparison with previous British, Iranian, Pakistani and American data illustrated how a well-established research perspective can promote insights into an under-examined religious tradition and how the analysis of an under-examined religious tradition can clarify and qualify a well-established research perspective.     

Primitive religious thought and the evolution of religion

In an article in this journal about the ideas of Levy-Brühl, Don Wiebe reviewed ideas from anthropology to argue that there is indeed a primitive mentality, and that mythopoeic religious thought is an instance of this mentality. Wiebe ends by declaring religious thought generally to be mythopoeic. The anthropological literature does support well Wiebe's thesis that primitive thought is primitive, in particular those studies which use Piaget's theory of cognitive development as a guide for interpreting primitive and other thought styles. But Piaget's theory can be extended to interpret other stages of culture and thought. This aids in recognizing that religious thought develops in stages also, from primitive folktales to archaic complex myths, and then to classical rationalized theologies and most recently to symbolic theologies.     

Meaning-creation,selfhood, and religion: From religious metanarratives to spiritual self-narratives

Abstract

This paper attempts to support the idea that the psychology of religion might be developed as an applied branch of cultural psychology. The scope of the argument is both theoretical and empirical. On the one hand, it is argued that religion functions as the most powerful semiotic system which provides subjects with metaphors, narrative frameworks, rituals and other cultural resources for personalised meaning-construction and life-designing. On the other hand, it is illustrated with an exploratory qualitative study how a specific type of community, a Catholic Seminary, produces a particular set of religious symbols and how their members write their narrative identities in multiple and unstable ways through dialectical tensions and creative self-invention. Thus, the psychology of religion becomes a fruitful laboratory to further investigate the mutually generative interplay between culture and self in order to better understand the plastic process of continuous self-identity formation and transformation.     

Neo-positivism,religious language,and the problem of evil in Eberhard Herrmann's philosophy of religion

In Religion, Reality and a Good Life (2004) Eberhard Herrmann argues that “religious utterances” are not “statements.” I argue that this thesis, when properly unpacked, directly parallels the logical positivist thesis from the 1930s and 40s that “religious sentences” are not “cognitively meaningful.” I consider a number of indirect objections to Herrmann's thesis which target the verification criterion of meaning used to support the thesis, along with the more direct objection that the thesis is unable to make sense of the problem of evil. My conclusion is that Herrmann's neo-Positivism is deeply problematic.     

Exploring the meso-levels of religious mappings: European religion in regional, urban, and local contexts

This is an introductory essay to a special issue on Local and Regional Perspectives on Religion in Western Europe. The introduction seeks to contextualize this special issue in the study of religion in Europe. Based on the articles of the special issue, the article introduces two meso-levels of investigation: regional and local studies, bridging the gap between the national level (the hitherto preferred level of aggregation) and the study of single groups.     

Manic depression and religious experience: The use of religion in therapy

In the article, I explore the use of spiritual strategies in the treatment of manic depression in religiously oriented psychiatric inpatients. Manic depression, a disorder primarily of mood, is characterized by bouts of mania alternating with depression. Religious themes and mystical experiences pervade the language of manic depressive illness, e.g., sensing one is God, being given a divine mission, receiving divine messages, having ecstatic experiences, and so on. Debate exists concerning the effectiveness of spiritual interventions in manic patients. I suggest that a trained religious leader may be able to work therapeutically with such patients, provided that two goals are kept in mind: emphasizing beliefs that facilitate positive coping and challenging irrational religious beliefs (i.e., beliefs that lead to negative coping). When examined psychoanalytically, patients’ religious symbols and beliefs reveal deeply held beliefs about themselves. In particular, splitting and idealization and devaluation can be seen in their religious belief system. The role of culture in promoting maladaptive belief systems must not be overlooked. In employing spiritual interventions in patients diagnosed with manic depression, potential dangers are imposing one's values on patients and overstating the importance of spirituality.     

The erosion of sexual dimorphism: challenges to religion and religious ethics

Late modernity has been witnessing the erosion of the dimorphic sexual paradigm that, in both strong and weak forms, has characterized human history as we know it. Recent discoveries in biology and the social sciences have combined with altered patterns in human sexual behavior to raise critical new questions about the inherited paradigm. Religions of the West whose sacred texts, mythologies, and codes of behavior assume that maleness and femaleness are exclusive and complementary types of sexuality-each of which determines sexual identity, reproductive role, social role, and the sex of one's partner-increasingly must grapple with both theoretical evidence for and experiential evidence of polymorphous human sexuality. Inherited categories of dimorphic sexuality not only are challenged but become less and less intelligible.     

Transforming churches: the lived religion of religious organizations in a contemporary context

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes patterns of transformation in a specific majority religious institution, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Denmark (ELCD), through a case study of communicative actions related to new church practices. The argument is that the patterns most often identified in the study of the religion of late-modern individuals, which is an “ever-changing, multifaceted, often messy—even contradictory—amalgam of beliefs and practices” (McGuire 2008, 4), are also relevant when scholars describe changes at the level of religious organizations. Meredith McGuire’s concepts are supplemented with other discussions of the transformation of traditions in a contemporary context. Our research question is: what characterizes the communicative actions concerning the transformation of traditions within the ELCD today? The empirical material consists of communicative actions related to practices associated with Halloween and Valentine’s Day from two distinct contexts: 1) the public debate about the Church in the newspaper The Christian Daily and 2) public announcements in the official online Church calendar. This leads to a discussion of the creative agency of religious institutions as part of the complex pattern of contemporary religion. The article argues in favor of an increased focus on the development of new practices in churches as examples of lived religion at the level of institutional religion.     

The im-materiality of urban religion: towards an ethnography of urban religious aspirations

In recent years, scholars from a wide variety of disciplines have engaged in the study of urban religion. Taken together, these studies form a paradigm that intertwines (1) the politics of belonging, (2) regimes of space and territoriality, (3) materiality and sensorial power and (4) visibility. We argue that while scholars have conceptualised these aspects in very nuanced ways, there is a need to address in a more rigorous way immaterial dimensions of urban religion. We encapsulate these immaterial dimensions in the notion of ‘urban religious aspirations’, meaning the multiple ideational sources that underpin people’s religious investments in urban life. We illustrate the relevance of studying aspirations with an ethnographic example of two Hong Kong Christian women and their involvement in the Umbrella Movement. Exploring their narratives demonstrates the need to take immaterial aspects of religious life into account when researching urban religion, especially in contexts where the distinction between the religious and the secular is less clearly defined.     

From religious emotions to affects: historical and theoretical reflections on injury to feeling,self and religion

ABSTRACT

Images of angry Muslims have become a common sight in repeated controversies problematising the compatibility of Islam and freedom of speech. To explain such outrage, it is often put forward that Muslims reacted to the disrespect and violation of their ‘religious feelings’. In this paper, we challenge the trope of hurt religious feelings in the explanation of unrest. Referring to the writings of Schleiermacher, James and Taylor, the discussion traces how religion and feeling have become inextricably intertwined, located within the individual self and institutionalised as a dominant interpretation of religion. We introduce affect as a conceptual alternative to such understandings, which allows us to analyse the emphasis on Muslim emotionality as a relationship between Muslim and secular bodies, hence no longer reduced to the interiority of Muslim subjects. We will illustrate the potential of an affect-based approach discussing Muslim feelings’ vital role in the construction of European democracies.     

Mortality salience and religion: divergent effects on the defense of cultural worldviews for the religious and the non‐religious

Religious and non‐religious individuals differ in their core beliefs. The religious endorse a supernatural, divinely inspired view of the world, while the non‐religious hold largely secular worldviews. As a result they may respond differently to existential threats. Three studies confirmed this prediction. After a mortality salience (MS) or control prime, Canadian participants read, and responded to, an essay hostile to Western civilization, allegedly written by a radical Muslim student. Results indicated that the non‐religious reliably showed the conventional cultural worldview defense by devaluating the content of the message and decreasing support for the civil rights of anti‐Western individuals when death was salient. No such effect was found for the religious. Religious and non‐religious participants did not differ in self‐esteem levels or in death‐thought accessibility. These results suggest that a religious stance among believers plays a defensive role against the awareness of death. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mental health,religion and spirituality: Attitudes,experience and expertise among mental health professionals and religious leaders in Somerset

This article reviews the relationship between mental health and religion/spirituality over the last twenty years as a background to exploring the current attitudes, experience and expertise of mental heath professionals and religious leaders in Somerset. The results of two research questionnaires are compared, there is a literature review, and conclusions are drawn to help provide a fuller picture of the current religious and spiritual services available to users of the mental health services. These provide useful pointers to improve these services and to understand the professional and institutional barriers to such improvements.