Friendship and the Cultivation of Religious Sensibilities

Abstract

In recent years, some scholars have argued that our field’s focus on society, discourse, and bodily practice has been insufficiently attentive to the power that personal relationships exert on the shaping of religious selves. Inspired by their insights, this article argues for the importance of friendship in understanding the cultivation of religious sensibilities. I also offer a further elaboration of how we came to sideline realms of personal intimacy in our approaches to religion. I then trace the bonds of friendship in my own area of research—a renewal movement in twentieth-century French Catholicism, or the renouveau catholique. There, friendship was the key to generating religious experience. But to analyze friendship, we must situate it within broader structures of discursive power, and it must include not only face-to-face bonds, but bonds that existed across a wide range of human experiences, including memory, dreams, fantasy, and imagination. The result is an intermediary category between the individual and society, and a richer understanding of the cultivation of religious sensibilities.