Ambiguous Sacred: Between Religion and Spirituality

Description

The sociology of spirituality continues to highlight new socio-religious phenomena rooted in cultural revolutions in the modes of spiritual seeking (Wuthnow 1998), holistic milieux (Heelas and Woodhead 2005), and a ‘democratization of the sacred’ or restructuring of ways of legitimizing relating to the sacred (Giordan 2016). This ‘spiritual perspective’ brought new sociological insights into the analysis of the relationship with the sacred in two ways. First, it coupled the sacred to a subjective turn, locating the sacred in individual experiences in holistic milieux and radically proclaiming the sacralization of self-authority. Second, the theoretical focus on the spiritual turn and recent empirical studies on the religiosity/spirituality divide raised new questions for the sociological understanding of the sacred with elaborated theories of religious rituals, religious experience, or intrinsic religiosity (Durkheim 1960, Otto 1936, Simmel 1997), all needing inquiry into the...

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