Categorizing People by Their Preference for Religious Styles

This article presents a typology that categorizes people according to their profile of religious styles, which concerns, among other things, the sources where they derive validity and stability, when confronted with religious and existential questions or inter-religious challenges. The modeling of this typology is an empirical complement to Streib’s model of religious styles, which, in turn, is a critical advancement of Fowler’s faith development theory. Data are religious style assignments to the answers on the 25 questions in the Faith Development Interview (FDI), which has been administered to 677 participants in the United States and Germany. We present results based on a theory-driven approach to determine a person’s religious type by incorporating frequencies of religious style assignments from the evaluation of their FDI. This conceptual approach has convergent validity with results from latent class analysis and a machine-learning algorithm. Results based on three samples converge on four religious types: Substantially Ethnocentric, Predominantly Conventional, Predominantly Individuative-Reflective, and Emerging Dialogical-Xenosophic types. We report the profiles of the four types with reference to group differences on religious schemata and openness to experience.

Development in Religious and Non-Religious Biographies from a Cross-Cultural Perspective

How do people perceive their own religious, spiritual or atheist biography? This is a question that our research team has been focusing on for nearly two decades. Our developmental perspective critically, but constructively relates to Fowler’s (1981) Faith Development Theory, as described in Streib’s (2001) approach of religious styles, paying tribute to the fact that development is not, in most cases, a linear upward process. By combining Fowler’s structural evaluation method with approaches to content analyses, this paper will show the merit of these qualitative methods when looking at (religious) development in different surroundings. For that purpose, we present case studies with different cultural backgrounds. Their different trajectories and possible commonalities will be shown on a structural as well as on a content level. This approach enables us to reconstruct movement within the religious field and will show how this is displayed on a subjective, biographical level.

Muslim Faith in Pakistan: A Faith-Development View on Fundamentalist to Mature Orientations

Faith development theory has evolved as a prominent theoretical perspective during the past three decades to explain different ways of relating to religious beliefs and worldviews. Recent revisions of the theory have elaborated on these characteristic ways as religious styles namely the fundamentalist, mutual, individuative-systemic, and dialogical. The present study developed an Urdu version of its principal measure, i.e., Faith Development Interview, to analyze twelve cases of Muslims of various religious affiliations within Islam in Pakistan. Four case studies representative of each faith style are presented in detail. The cases are compared to analyze Islamic faith in terms of faith development theory and to understand fundamentalism in a Muslim context. The findings support faith development theory as a comprehensive paradigm to address the varieties of faith orientations in Islam. Implications for future research with larger samples in highly religious and collectivistic cultures are discussed.

Personal encounters with children in an informal settlement: Exploring spirituality

This article explores the factors that contribute to the children living in Zama Zama informal settlement�s spiritual development. Postfoundational practical theology and the narrative approach function as paradigm and methodology. Themes and/or discourses like power, poverty, nutrition, health and school enrolment were identified. The faith development theory is discussed, as well as a reflection on children�s spirituality. The research shows that the faith community, cr�che and other partners play a crucial role in the spiritual development of the children.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: This study was performed in the field of practical theology. The article is interdisciplinary, covering the fields of religion, psychology, social work, sociology and health studies.