Introduction

Author(s):  
Douglas L. Winiarski

Darkness Falls on the Land of Light opens with the story of two families—the Coreys and Holbrooks—who once worshipped side by side in the Sturbridge, Massachusetts, Congregational church but by 1750 no longer experienced religion in commensurate ways as a result of their experiences during the combustive religious revivals of the Great Awakening. The introduction frames the larger argument of the study and defines the key terms of analysis, including the categories of religious experience and religious practices.

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (10) ◽  
pp. 791
Author(s):  
Lidia Rodríguez ◽  
Juan Luis de León ◽  
Luzio Uriarte ◽  
Iziar Basterretxea

A number of empirical studies have shown the continuous lack of adherence and the growing autonomy of the population regarding religious institutions. This article reflects on the kind of relationship between deinstitutionalisation and religious experience based on the following hypothesis: the evident decline in religious institutions does not necessarily lead to the disappearance or the weakening of religious experience; rather, it runs simultaneously with a process of individualisation. Our aim is to provide empirical evidence of such transformations; therefore, we do not get involved in speculations, but take into account the contributions of scholars concerning three key terms integrated in the conceptual framework of “religious experience’’: “experience of God”, “God image”, and “institutional belonging”. We analysed 39 in-depth interviews with a qualitative approach; interviews were conducted during the years 2016–2018 amongst Evangelical and Catholic populations in three Latin American cities (Córdoba, Montevideo, and Lima) and in the city of Bilbao (Spain). These interviews clearly indicate a growing autonomy from the religious institution, while evidencing a rich range of experiences of God and a great diversity of God representations. In both cases, they point to processes of individualisation of believers who elaborate their own religious experience in a personal and complex way.


2016 ◽  
pp. 6-10
Author(s):  
Yuri Boreyko

The article analyzes the structure and manifestations of everyday life as the sphere of the empirical life of the individual believer and the religious community. Patterns of everyday life are not confined to certain  universal conceptual or value systems, as there is no ready-made standards and rules of their formation. Everyday life is intersubjective space of social relations in which religious individuals, communities, institutions self-identified based on form of reproduction of sociality. Religious everyday life determined by ordinary consciousness, practices, social aspects of life in the religious community, which are constituted by communication. The main religious structures of everyday life is mental cut ordinary religious consciousness, religious practice, religious experience, religious communication, religious stereotypes. Everyday life is the sphere of interaction between the social and the transcendental worlds, in which religious practices are an integral social relationships and the objectification of religious experience through the prism of individual membership to a specific religion, a means of inclusion of transcendence in the context of everyday life. Religious practices reflect understanding of a religious individual objects of the supernatural world, which is achieved through social experience, intersubjective interaction, experience of transcendental reality. The everyday life of the believing personality is formed in the dynamics of tradition and innovation, the mechanism of interaction of which affects the space of social existence. It exists within the private and public space and time, differing openness within the life-world. Continuous modification of everyday life, change its fundamental structures is determined by the process of modern social and technical transformation of society


2009 ◽  
pp. 53-70
Author(s):  
Leonardo Allodi

- The aim of this essay is to examine the theory of secularisation process developed by Charles Taylor in his work, "A Secular Age". With this work an ambitious project is pursued: to offer a new point of view by which to construct a different image of secularisation. Taylor wants to understand the new socio-cultural conditions in which the moral and spiritual search of believers and non-believers develops. The process of modernisation of Western societies, in fact, has not only produced conceptions that are hostile to religion (jacobinism, marxism, anarchism) and conditions which have often made many of the old religious practices impossible, but have also led to creative adaptations of religious experience to the changed sociological conditions. The history of secularisation therefore demonstrates the "improbability" that autonomous religious aspiration has disappeared. Even in the framework of a secular society, religion represents an "anthropological universal". Taylor's theory of secularisation presents a notable affinity with all those theories which refute any form of sociological or biological reductionism, assuming the original nature of the religious phenomenon.Keywords: exclusive humanism, secularization, neutralization, religion, modernity


2021 ◽  
pp. 173-182
Author(s):  
Gustavo S.J. Morello

This chapter examines what we learn from the religious experience of these Latin American respondents of lower socioeconomic status: religion as a relationship, and Latin American modernity as a construction that leaves room for a religious, spiritual presence. The chapter presents what respondents’ religious practices tell us about religion in general, the idea of religion as a relation, and a portrait of the Latin American religious landscape as “enchanted modernity.”


2005 ◽  
Vol 12 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 349-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luther H. Martin

AbstractThe claim that religious experience is the basis for religious practices, ideas and institutions seems to be grounded more in theological (Protestant) bias than in historical evidence. From the example of the Graeco-Roman mystery religions, it would seem that it is religious practices, specifically, their rites of initiation that produced experiences that were interpreted by initiates as ‘religious.’ Nor was the production of such experiences considered to be an end in itself. Rather, they accomplished specific goals through an exploitation of tacit cognitive processes: (1) the promotion of group solidarity and transgenerational continuity, and (2) the triggering of a potential for cognitive development among individual members of the group.


Author(s):  
Abdul Hadi

Development of Sufism in the archipelago is one icon in view of the problems connected with the Sufi. Sufism is the diversity of colour patterns of thought of religious life, while religious practice to be a representation of the diversity of religious thought to be highly variable and often decorated with the interview "controversial" a very sharp. In the context of religious institutions belonging to the tarekat also have a variety of variants, so that a diverse group of tarekat scattered every where and have the characteristics of each in accordance with religious discourse and the "religious experience" developer congregation. In fact there are some "differences" between the executive tarekat in an area with other regions, although with the same tarekat. Sheikh Muhammad Arsyad Al-Banjary as a prolific writer in various fields of Islamic sciences, such as Tawheed, Fiqh and Sufism. Among his works is the Kanz al-patterned ma'rifah Sufism, but in some discussion related to religious practices and traditions of the congregation are very close, but the Sammaniyah tarekat who had been brought closer to the Al-Banjary Arsyad not so visible in Kanz al-Ma 'rifah but Syaziliyah tarekat who are more visible.


2002 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-116
Author(s):  
Douglas K. Adie ◽  

This essay re-examines Robert W, Fogel's thesis in The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianim, which sees America's religious revivals as pivotal in the transformation of culture through the political process, ultimately producing greater equality. Fogel's work thus provides the context for examining the impact of evangelical Christianity on American culture. Curiously, Fogel's approach brackets the underlying spiritual reality beneath the conversion experience, and assumes the primacy of social, economic, arid political processes in U.S. history. Yet, the Puritan Awakening the nature of overlapping historical cycles leading to greater equality, and the increasing secularization of American society-all beg the question of interpreting U.S. history, and leave open the prospect of spiritual renewal which would characterize America's Fourth Great Awakening. Hence, the essay tries to regraft some of the spiritual roots onto Fogel's secular interpretation of historical events and the dynamics of American culture.


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