Spiritual Turn Research Articles

“Your crisis is our crisis; we take those on!” Exploring the profound role of spiritual diversity in social work

ABSTRACT Spiritual Diversity (SD) is transformative when integrated into the epistemic context and practice. SD’s transformative potential can significantly enhance clients’ quality of life when harnessed. The profound lived experiences of social workers must be unearthed to embrace spiritual diversity as a holistic resource fully. Therefore, this study aimed to delve into the lived experiences of social workers, explore the profound role of spiritual diversity, and uncover diverse perspectives in different social work contexts. Seven in-depth, semi-structured Zoom interviews with spiritually informed social workers were conducted. Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), the exploratory comments and observations of the participants were drawn. The study generated 122 codes from the data and developed fourteen emergent themes. These themes were then clustered into four major themes: 1. Spiritual turn among social workers, 2. Spirituality as a strength-based mechanism, 3. Creating access to spiritual resources, and 4. Increased vitality in the healing process. Demonstrating the seamless integration of the spiritual diversity approach and critical discourse on social work practices, this study adds to the growing body of research that underscores the benefits of a spiritual diversity approach in social work settings.

The Spiritual Turn and “Feminization”: Turning a Gender Lens on Spirituality

Abstract Although women and men identify as “spiritual” in similar numbers, far more women participate in the holistic milieu. We seek to solve this “gender puzzle” by fleshing out the gender scripts the holistic milieu fosters, and their varying relationships to the wider gender order. Surveying existing scholarship, we show that, for women, participation serves to naturalize a script of postfeminist femininity that combines gender essentialism with politically liberal commitments, is consonant with “difference” feminism, and holds an accommodationist relationship to the wider gender order. By contrast, for men, participation in the holistic milieu naturalizes a script of feminine masculinity (or male femininity) that, while also shaped by postfeminist culture, is comparatively counter-hegemonic, embodying a more radical challenge to the current gender order. This theoretical perspective enables us to explain not only why more women than men participate in the holistic milieu, but also why some women opt out, while some men opt in. Furthermore, it illuminates the pivotal place of gender in ongoing trends in the religious, and increasingly spiritual, landscape.

Book Review: Galen Watts, The Spiritual Turn: The Religion of the Heart and the Making of the Romantic Liberal Modernity

Book Review: Galen Watts, <i>The Spiritual Turn: The Religion of the Heart and the Making of the Romantic Liberal Modernity</i>

Qualitative Research in Theology. A Spiritual Turn?

Qualitative Research in Theology. A Spiritual Turn?

The Spiritual Turn: The Religion of the Heart and the Making of Romantic Liberal Modernity, By Galen Watts

The Spiritual Turn: The Religion of the Heart and the Making of Romantic Liberal Modernity, By Galen Watts

Rethinking Faith and Reason through the Spiritual Turn

Rethinking Faith and Reason through the Spiritual Turn

‘Lotus and the Dagger’: A Reading of Vedantic Nationalism of Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo’s ideas of nationalism are eclectic, deriving their tradition from Hindu spiritualism, the vision of perfection in man as an entity, and intense esoteric realisation in the mystical philosophy of supramental consciousness of the being, as expounded in the Vedas and the Upanishads. Sri Aurobindo’s writings on political philosophy are a continuum, ranging from the utopian socialist ideas in Bande Mataram, a newspaper he edited to present the ideas of social, political, and judicial boycott to counter the British, to the writings of post-1910, when his life took a spiritual turn after years of spiritual realisations and yogic sadhana, where he mixes the power of the proletariat with the power of Vedantic mysticism. Sri Aurobindo’s ‘political vedantism’ is an attempt to restructure the political and social life of a colonised nation so that an indigenous idea of a nation can be constructed in concurrence with the Vedantic concept of society as a manifestation of a collective supremacy in man. Sri Aurobindo accepts spiritual determinism as the central principle of a nation, but at the same time, it is not a static concept to him but a constant movement of progressive self-evolution towards a perfection of the collective consciousness, manifested through the entity called the ‘nation’. This paper proposes to look at the ideas of spiritual nationalism of Sri Aurobindo and establish a dialogue with a nationalism that is neither socialist nor rightist.

The Spiritual Turn: The Religion of the Heart and the Making of Romantic Liberal Modernity, by GALEN WATTS

The Spiritual Turn: The Religion of the Heart and the Making of Romantic Liberal Modernity, by GALEN WATTS

Book Reviews / Compte rendus: The Spiritual Turn: The Religion of the Heart and the Making of Romantic Liberal Modernity

Book Reviews / Compte rendus: The Spiritual Turn: The Religion of the Heart and the Making of Romantic Liberal Modernity

A Spiritual Turn: Toward Desire-Based Research and Indigenous Futurity in Mathematics Education

The practice of futurity within Indigenous communities has existed since time immemorial, with past, present, and future intertwined and with a focus on (re)membering and healing. As futurity becomes more popular in mainstream venues, it raises questions about how it will affect mathematics education (research). This Commentary makes an argument for desire-based research frameworks and Indigenous futurity praxis as key components of a spiritual turn, somewhat distinct from the sociopolitical turn our field took about a decade ago. I analyze some of the equity issues that arose in the March 2022 issue of JRME, raise three important questions to consider in our research, and offer suggestions so that we may embrace a spiritual turn.

The spiritual turn and the disenchantment of the world: Max Weber, Peter Berger and the religion–science conflict

There is little question that organized religion as embodied in the Christian churches has not fared well in recent decades. Yet, precisely the period when the decline of organized religion hit its stride – the 1960s and 1970s – also witnessed the rise of what Ernst Troeltsch referred to as ‘mystic religion’, only now it goes by ‘spirituality’. Indeed, recent empirical studies suggest that, in addition to secularization, we are also witnessing a veritable spiritual turn. How do we explain this? We pursue this puzzle in a somewhat peculiar fashion: by turning the sociological gaze toward the lives and oeuvres of the two sociologists who have arguably played the largest roles in the development of classical secularization theory: Max Weber and Peter Berger. Addressing their theoretical contributions in tandem with their personal stances vis-à-vis religion, we argue that the standard account of secularization rests on an extremely one-sided interpretation of their legacy: it leaves out their steadfast romanticism, their deep commitments to the value of individual freedom, and, most importantly, the particular religious paths they charted. Furthermore, we contend that each of them exemplifies a way of reconciling a rationalist commitment to disenchanting science with a romantic longing for ultimate meaning, which sheds significant light on why mystical religion (or ‘spirituality’) has come to flourish in late modernity.

Psychonauts and Seekers: West German Entanglements in the Spiritual Turn of the Global 1960s and 1970s

This essay focuses on West Germany as exemplary global-local intersection of the spiritual turn in the long 1960s. It shows how spirituality as practices and beliefs seeking a closer connection with the divine within or outside religious groups experienced a multifaceted renaissance in the countercultures of the long 1960s. In this spiritual quest contemporary explorations in the expansion of consciousness and the increasing interest in meditation were pivotal practices. The essay reflects the international exchange of knowledge about body-mind practices from Amazonia and Mexico to the United States, India and West Germany, showing how actors were influenced by international and national connections. Practitioners found the practices of spirituality neither in Christian contemplative traditions nor in Jewish versions, but in various forms of what seekers received and practised as Hinduism or Buddhism, etc., that gave contemporary followers and seekers a means of connecting to higher truths – to God – without God.

Marie's Lais and the Movement from Romantic to Religious Space

Marie's Lais and the Movement from Romantic to Religious Space E. L. Risden The focused, confined narrative form of Marie de France's late-twelfth century Lais allows for interesting concentration on a limited number of spaces. We might expect a medieval author to direct attention pretty clearly to a thematic purpose and to use spatiality to enhance that purpose; Marie did exactly that. Each lai/story uses space, especially a comparison of open and confined spaces, to enhance a moral purpose, and the collection as a whole exploits space to take a specifically spiritual turn at its conclusion. The medieval context of spatiality is interesting in itself. The imaginary Middle Ages often relies on dungeons and castles as common motifs, but the most significant "spaces" historically may instead be cathedrals, architectural marvels and normally centers of their community. Frederick Artz notes in The Mind of the Middle Ages that "[t]o support the vaulting above, the [Romanesque] walls had to be heavy . . . and the isles had to be narrow" yielding "dark interiors . . . pierced only with small windows."1 Artz adds that the "great churches" had attached monasteries that were "great centers of learning and craftsmanship" and "exchanged with other monastic centers": enclosed spaces in themselves, they opened connections in the larger world. The Gothic approach that followed, however, finding more means for expansiveness and the introduction of light to the interior, modified "the whole structure and feeling of [a] church."2 The movement from the darker and more enclosed Romanesque architecture to the brighter, more airy and expansive Gothic style echoes the time's growing cosmology. While Dante used an earth-centered universe, the Commedia at least has a global earth with an expansive Empyrean (though of course it focuses on God); Dante's world offered growing opportunities for individuals to travel imaginatively and in fact beyond the environs of their own birthplace. [End Page 65] Medieval literature kept also an interest in small places—see for instance Julian of Norwich's Showings and the Ancrene Wisse (or Ancrene Riwle), accounts of or for anchoresses, where the hermetic cell represents an ideal of detachment from the world and absorption in prayer and devotion. In such cases the spatial limitation comes from a religious choice, not from someone else's imposition, with a goal of reaching the ultimate spiritual expansion in Salvation. We can contrast hermetic works with Margery Kempe's religious pilgrimages—at once worldly and sacred—and the spiritual expansiveness of The Cloud of Unknowing, but also with The Travels of Sir John Mandeville—in the latter case, while the story is expansive, the author or compiler probably wasn't John Mandeville, and he probably didn't undertake any of the travels elaborated in the collection. John Mandeville, Englishman from St. Albans, was perhaps a Frenchman or a Fleming, deriving his sense of places and spaces from books rather than actual travels. The stories provide alternatives—pretty spectacular ones—to spiritual enclosure, choices for or descriptions of an active rather than enclosed life. Consideration of how medieval authors use spatiality requires yielding to allegorical as well as literal readings: broader application of narrative layering comprises an essential part of their narrative landscape and its expansiveness. Marie's spatial context entered the medieval world long before Dante's and Chaucer's. While all three at one time or another used courtly love, the Lais centralize it, turning secular or profane space toward spiritual space.3 The temporary ascending spiral of Dante's Purgatory with its periods of waiting modulates the permanent spirals of Inferno (descending) and Paradise (ascending), and movement through space brings attention to memorable—from terrifying to illuminating—individual places. Chaucer's social space contracts within the Tabard Inn, expands along the road to Canterbury, and contracts repeatedly around the individual pilgrims for their storytelling. The Old English "Wanderer" and "Seafarer" poems open up the world to the nearly endless space of loss and exile, while riddling poems such as "The Wife's Lament" and "Wulf and Eadwacer" seem to contract it around enclosures. Christine de Pizan metaphorizes her "City of Ladies" as the book in which the accounts of the ladies appear: the book encloses...

Building on the shoulders of Bhaskar and Matthews: a critical realist criminology

ABSTRACT Building on the insights of the late Roy Bhaskar and the late Roger Matthews, as well as some recent developments in ultra-realist criminology, this article introduces and delineates some core intellectual contours of a Critical Realist Criminology (CRC) based on the principles of: The ‘emergent,’ stratified ontology of crime and of the offender; the full critical realist account of the dialectics of being and becoming, including the spiritual turn in critical realism, applied to processes of criminal justice and reform; maximal inclusion of diverse theoretical research positions and the primacy of ontology in methodological selection; a ‘serious’ critical relationship of criminologists with professionals, institutions and policy-makers of criminal justice. These principles are directed at developing a criminology that ‘underlabours’ the recovery of human flourishing for the victims and perpetrators of crime and for society at large, including in-depth inquiry into what counts as crime and the purposes of incarceration.

Debating ethical nominalism in Early Enlightenment thought on China

AbstractThis article discusses debates about the normative implications of nominalism by considering significant Enlightenment assessments of China’s society and politics. Enlightenment universalism has been criticized as an insufficient bulwark against nominalist tendencies towards cultural or subjective relativism, and (in its Anglo‐French formulations) as responsible for the ills of modernity which need to be overcome by a ‘spiritual turn’ in Critical Realism. Yet in response to the nominalist aspects of the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (1588‐1679), the early Enlightenment thinkers Pierre Bayle (1647‐1706), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646‐1716), and the Baron de Montesquieu (1689‐1755) countered the nominalist denial of the reality of universal concepts while conceding the validity of multiple cultural perspectives on the social and political world. Each thinker attempted to reconcile certain universal ethical standards with the fact of cultural and epistemic diversity as demonstrated by China, with differing levels of success. Indeed, their considerations on Hobbesian nominalism and views on China are tied to conceptions of the social as a sphere in many ways independent of the political order—a general development in western social and political theory in the late seventeenth to eighteenth centuries. Thus, the links between their responses to ethical nominalism and conceptions of the Chinese social and political order shed crucial light on debates internal to Enlightenment thought relative to non‐European cultures, and in turn on the development of classical social theory. Furthermore, their anti‐nominalist universalist theories which nevertheless accounted for particular and often incommensurable cultural frameworks can be seen as early modern precursors to ongoing efforts to navigate between extreme versions of universalism and relativism, and as constituting ‘philosophical under‐labour’ for contemporary social theory.

Religious Studies and the Spiritual Turn

Abstract This article surveys the range of positions from which religious studies scholars have generally responded to the spiritual turn. We classify these as: the sociology of religion approach, the critical religion approach, and the practical study for spirituality by professional fields like business, education, and healthcare. In light of recent cultural sociological and historical scholarship on the emic folk category “spirituality” we argue that, given their foundational assumptions, each of these approaches is inadequate for achieving an accurate empirical account of the spiritual turn. We argue that for sociology of religion and critical religion to adequately respond to the professional study for spirituality, they must begin to reckon with the minority consensus developed by cultural sociologists about the spiritual turn. The minority consensus holds that the spiritual turn comprises two components: first, a semantic shift from “religion” to “spirituality,” and second, the crystallization and spread of a shared cultural structure. Coming to terms with this approach will require scholars of religion to reconsider both their assumptions about the category “religion” as well as the limits of their discipline.

Religious complexity: theorizing multiple religious trends

ABSTRACT This article contributes to the debate on secularization and the return of religion by using the social science complexity frame of reference. A trend in many Western countries is the decline in individual religiosity, increase in ‘nones’, growth of non-Christian religions, changes in religion itself, and the visibility of religion in the public sphere. Many sociologists of religion have analyzed the situation by discrediting the theory of secularization and adopting the newer theories of the spiritual turn, desecularization, and post-secularity, while others have maintained that secularization theory is still valid. The complexity frame of reference offers a toolkit that can be useful in resolving this theoretical dilemma. This article contributes to the theorizing of multiple religious trends at various analytical levels. It criticizes the current approaches before it introduces the concept of religious complexity. Finally, it explores the implications of religious complexity for analyses of multiple and varied religious trends.

Mitshimbilo (“Wanderlust Disease”): Africa’s Future in Zakes Mda’s Sculptors of Mapungubwe and Two of Ben Okri’s Novels

Summary This article extends a deliberation on the centrality of the shaman to the spiritual turn in African literatures, where it was argued that Ben Okri and Zakes Mda’s respective models of shamanism in Sculptors of Mapungubwe and Dangerous Love are bound inward and outward. This argument is rephrased; this time, postulating that, in both authors’ work, shamanism surfaces in heterogeneous and interlocking voices – all keyed into the motif of travel such as is central to the Orphic quest. It continues that what distinguishes Mda is the fact that he captures these perspectives in mitshimbilo (“wanderlust disease”) – which is a Tshivenda concept that Mda uses to critique the East African slave trade. By contrast, Okri anchors heteroglossia in a subjectivity which the article associates with Black Atlantic polyglot, underpinning its essence of reclamation with his adaptation of the West African narrative of the Spirit Child, or Abiku. A proposition is also made that these contrasting sets of assorted voices foreground corresponding dispositions of an expanded sense of consciousness. The analysis develops in two phases. First, presenting synopses of the primary texts, the examination draws attention to how, in its allusions to everyday culture, mitshimbilo foregrounds shamanism in contrasting postcolonial lenses and non-realisms that have yet to be appreciated. The final section closely reads how the identified insinuations in Sculptors of Mapungubwe distinguish its shamanism from Okri’s.

Ecospiritualità. Il “reincanto” della natura nella società contemporanea

The aim of this paper is to analyze the sociological reasons behind the success of 'ecospirituality' (Chone 2017) in Western society. To do this I tried to detect the peculiar characteristics that distinguish the social ground on which this phenomenon has grown. For this purpose it was first necessary to highlight the main features of the 'spiritual turn' (Giordan 2004 e 2016; Houtman e Aupers 2007) a part of the wider process of desecularization of the world. After this step it was possible to investigate the phenomenon of ecospirituality intended as a process of ‘reenchantment’ of nature. This process, in my opinion, represents a reaction to the ‘fallout’ of modernization, seen as a carrier of corruption and alienation. Ecospirituality is a narrative capable of enriching the meaning of contemporary experience, fostering new scenarios of 'fullness' and 'authenticity' (Taylor 2002) through a 'sacralization of nature' (Cardano 1997)

“THE SPIRITUAL TURN”

This article discusses the philosophical dimension of post-modern societies. It examines the champion of rationalities of modern human beings and contends its contemporary limits. It argues that the modern rational philosophies that over-simplify the meaning “being” in metaphysical form has led to the civilizational crisis. In religious dimension, modern human has been sacrificing their inner spiritual dimension of humanity. As a response to this crisis, modernity has initiated the birth of “spiritual turn” that modern human tries to reinvent their spirituality, mainly through Islamic Sufism. This article further examines the significance of Sufi concepts of the 14th century Sufi master Ibn Atha`illah (1259-1310). Examining his Sufi concepts from the lights of post-modern philosophy as panacea for modern diseases, this article found that the concept of spiritual knowledge (ma’rifat) is an essential concept as transcending the limits of rationality and materiality of modern philosophy