Situating Spirituality

It is by now well-established in religious studies that the field’s central concept—religion—is contingent, contested, and controversial. There is so little agreement over how (and whether) to define or delimit it that the study of religion can seem a scholarly world without coherence or common ground. Yet, compared with the study of spirituality, the study of religion nearly resembles a case of Kuhnian normal science. Indeed, so lacking in consensus is the study of spirituality that entering into its fray can feel a bit like entering unchartered wilderness; whereas scholars of religion may fight over the distinction between maps and territory, scholars of spirituality are busy wandering around map-less. This makes Situating Spirituality an especially welcome volume, as it brings much-needed context and conceptual clarification to a field that sorely lacks both. Featuring contributions by both eminent and emerging scholars, the book offers a series of (largely) social scientific contributions to the debates that swirl around talk of “spirituality.” Although tensions exist across and within the 17 chapters (to which I will return), the main through-line is that spirituality, whatever it is, is “eminently social.” This Durkheimian insight is fleshed out in the introductory chapter, where the editors—three leading scholars of spirituality—present a historiography of the field. In their reading, scholarship on spirituality has gone through two waves: in the first-wave scholarship of the 1990s, the focus was on drawing attention to the societal-wide discursive shift from religion to spirituality and then offering new classification concepts to track this change. In second-wave scholarship, which the editors see their own work as typifying, the focus is said to move from classification to context, practice, and power. So, no longer are scholars of spirituality chiefly interested in offering abstract accounts of spiritual discourse, but instead, the concern is with demonstrating the ways in which particular conceptions and uses of the category of spirituality are contingent, pragmatic, embodied, and politically consequential.

Context (archaeology) · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Field (mathematics) · Historiography · Political science · Power (physics) · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Spirituality · History · Law · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices