Psychology of Spirituality of V. Sukhomlynsky in Explicative Format

The important purpose of appealing to the texts of V. Sukhomlynsky is to identify and comprehend the spiritual reality, which is sometimes expressed clearly, but sometimes only implicitly. The issue of spiritual reality of V. Sukhomlynsky has undeniable theoretical and applied interest because it broadens our conceptions of inner life of personality. Relying on the explicative views on the creative achievements of a prominent educator gives reason to speak about a completely different semantic plane for solving essential problems of human spirituality.

Profiling Atheist World Views in Different Cultural Contexts: Developmental Trajectories and Accounts

In the current study, we look at atheist or secular identities in different religious landscapes: In the U.S.,the majority of the population indicates a belief in God. In West Germany, one third of the populationreports no religious affiliation and a quarter identifies as “not religious,” and in East Germany, most ofthe population explicitly identifies as atheist. Drawing on atheist worldview and identity literature frommultiple disciplines, and using quantitative and qualitative data obtained in the U.S. and Germany during the “Bielefeld-based Cross-Cultural Study on the Semantics and Psychology of Spirituality,” we examineself-identified atheists. First, self-identified atheist participants are portrayed quantitatively based onconstructs expected to highlight differences between atheists and other “nones” and religious or spiritualpersons: openness, a personality trait (NEO-FFI) documented to be higher in nonbelievers, positiverelations, a dimension of eudaimonic well-being as indicator of social integration, generativity, concernfor the welfare of future generations, and experiences of transcendence or “mysticism.” Second, four casestudies are presented that illustrate the wide range of distinct atheist beliefs, biographical experiences,and ideological positions by examining individuals’ subjective definitions of “religion” and “spirituality”and personal interviews. The semistructured Faith Development Interview (FDI; Fowler, 1981) examinesvertical and horizontal transcendence. By drawing on examples from our interviews, we show differentdescriptions of one’s atheist worldview or “faith” in autobiographical remembering and reasoning. Thus,we work from a nomothetic toward an idiographic comparative perspective.

Religion and Spirituality

An enormous change in the semantic field of religion has occurred, by which ‘spirituality’ has emerged as a serious competitor for ‘religion.’ This chapter presents selected results of a recently completed research project about the semantics and psychology of spirituality. Regarding the semantics of spirituality, this research has identified ten components of ‘spirituality’ that characterize a variety of rather contradictory meanings: While ‘spirituality’ can be associated with a theistic worldview for some, it is associated with a non-theistic worldview by others; some understand ‘spirituality’ as lived religion, while others associate it with opposition to religion. The chapter concludes with a discussion of whether spirituality should be a concept in the scientific study of religion. While spirituality should not be established as a scientific concept (to compete with or replace ‘religion’), spirituality as self-attribution of the people on the street needs to be studied.