The Denton Conferences on Implicit Religion
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The Denton Conferences on Implicit Religion | |
Edward Bailey in discussion with Guy Ménard
From Friday, the 8th to Sunday, the 10th of May 2009 the 32nd Conference on Implicit Religion and Contemporary Spirituality was held at Denton Hall in Yorkshire, United Kingdom.
The relationship between art and spirituality has been relatively under-examined within the context of CSIR – as in the recent study of art. The proposed paper sets out to begin to correct that neglect through a discussion which arises from the author’s personal experience as an artist.
An important point of orientation is provided by the celebrated essay by Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and at one level the paper is an extended critical reflection upon this essay. Two principal traditions of discussion emerge from Kandinsky’s work. The first of these approaches centres upon the spirituality of the specific content of the art object. The second concerns itself primarily with the act of artistic creation, and hence with the characteristics of the artist. Neither of these can be accepted as providing an adequate understanding of what it means to attribute “spirituality” to art.
A third approach is proposed, stimulated by the author’s own experience both as an artist, and formerly as a sociologist. It elaborates insights from John Dewey’s Art as Experience, and the more recent work of Lewis Hyde, The Gift. In this approach the spirituality of art is extended to encompass significantly the viewer of art, proposing a “relational” understanding of the nature of spirituality.
The proposed paper will include a brief consideration of some of the author’s own works, not because these should be regarded as having either exceptional artistic merit or unusually profound spiritual significance, but because it is possible, as the artist, to talk about them both from the inside and the outside (as their creator and as one who regards them as finished art objects) as well as in relation to their reception.
Bacon makes many anti-religious statements in his interviews which convey his nihilistic attitude to religion. However, in his artwork he is preoccupied with religious symbols, such as the crucifixion and the Pope. He also explores central questions about human existence: the role of suffering, the physicality of the body, questions about identity and purpose and the omnipresence of death. The role of the religious in Bacon’s work is a neglected area in Baconian scholarship. In this paper I present an a-theological reading of Bacon. He works, through his atheism, to desecrate religious symbols and to present humanity in a Godless world.
The process of privatisation is often seen as an alternative or even an explanation for the process of secularization. It is even possible to see it as a confirmation of it: when religion becomes a purely private matter, it automatically loses its social relevance.
This paper argues that it is not so much a process of privatisation that is taking place but rather processes of de- and re-institutionalization.
The kind of self-spirituality that is often mentioned as the most important specimen of today’s privatisation (Heelas and Woodhead, 2005) is in fact a re-institutionalisation of it. How does it relate to other processes and to implicit religion?
An analysis of some of Prof Leslie Francis’ findings about the psychological type of churchgoers and how these compare between gender, churchgoers and church ministers, and all groups with the general population, and what these findings may imply about those having or not having an explicit religion.
The current ubiquity and uses of the term ‘wellbeing’ provide a glimpse into a variety of deeper cultural movements that include ‘the subjective turn’, consumer culture based on personal interest, models for health, the growth in complementary and alternative therapies, a growing therapeutic educational ethos, increased interest in emotional and spiritual intelligences or literacies, and, perhaps, a new visibility for religion. This paper will examine the notion of wellbeing and some of its current uses in the UK. It will evaluate some of the contested notions that wellbeing culture represents, (in polemic form) as secular narcissism or spiritual practice, before focussing especially on healing and the therapeutic in contemporary alternative spiritualities. The core arguments of the paper are, first that the new visibility or re-emergence of religion requires an extended theoretical framework to include implicit practices of therapy and healing and concepts such as wellbeing, and second that practices of healing among alternative spiritualities provide evidence for the re-emergence of religiosity.
This paper is offered in two key sections. Firstly a theoretical evaluation of wellbeing culture and a mapping of the relationship between modern alternative spiritual practices with alternative health as religious practices of wellbeing. Secondly an examination of the physical and geographical contexts of religious practices of wellbeing and health in the field of New Age and Alternative spiritualities, which includes a typological analysis of alternative religious centres as venues for developing well-being and health. The paper will provide a range of examples that disclose the growing number of healing practices which link religiosity and models of wellbeing and health in a re-enchanted modern world.
The Eastern Cree, the first Nations people of northern Quebec, Canada consider that all aspects of life are spiritually interconnected and that their traditional lifestyle as hunter/gatherers is predicated on the presence of a superior being or power. Generations of people attest to an unwavering adherence to the acknowledgement that this superior being or power has been, is presently, and will always be in the encounter taking place either in the physical known or unknown space, or in the transition between the two. Religious expression is an integral component of the encounter between aspects of life. The character of both individuals and community are developed within this framework.
With the increasing advancement of globalization and technology the Eastern Cree maintain their spiritual connection to the land while at the same time have broadened their conception of the land to include diversity. Communal religious experience, already dichotomized between the inward spiritual encounter, and the outward visible manifestation has become problematic as the people are confronted with a secular society seeking to divest itself from corporate religious expression.
The way of defining the worldview largely depends on the theoretical assumptions within which this concept functions (Naugle D.K. 2002). In this paper some chosen modes of theoretical understanding of worldview will be presented, mainly following Thomas Luckmann’s thought. Next, working definition of the worldview will be given, which has already been used by me in two research projects relating to the manifestations of modern religiosity, especially within the biographical perspective. The first project concerned the vegetarians’ milieu, the second one – the members of three Christian denominations. On the basis of these researches it can be stated that the concept of worldview may be of great use while analyzing religiosity and implicit religion, which will be substantiated in the presentation. As the second project is still in progress, all suggestions and critical opinions will be welcomed.
An important aspect of the Pentecost narrative is the speech phenomenon exhibited by the one hundred and twenty or so disciples on this occasion. Such speech had widely been held as the beginning of the removal of the curse of separation recorded in the story of Babel where the confusion of languages occurred. It is the overall phenomenon of speech, language and hearing which provides this paper with its focal point. For it is seen that the ‘speaking in other tongues’ of Acts 2 cannot simply be abstracted from other speech events - ancient or modern, scriptural or otherwise. Given this: the past event of the first Christian Pentecost will be analysed in the fuller context of other historical scripts and more contemporary observations.
Theologians, scholars and other observers have consistently applied three terms to the overall phenomenon of speaking in tongues as recorded in the New Testament:-
Not infrequently each term has been used to describe ‘tongue’ events regardless of whether they occur in Acts 2 or elsewhere in the Canon of Scripture. As will be shown: there were very significant differences between what occurred at Pentecost and other manifestations involving ‘tongues’. The simplistic inter-changeability of the above three terms utilised by some commentators indicates a lack of rigour in both textual analysis and sociological recognition. The need, then, is to examine each term more closely in order to facilitate more accurate understandings.
This paper will examine the Christian (and other) origins, explanations and understandings of phenomena that have variously claimed to be valid expressions of the human and/or divine utterance. The aim of this endeavour is to move towards establishing the validity, or otherwise, of such claims and demonstrate that there is a universality of human experience that is capable of being recovered and understood. Necessarily this implies the possibility of renewing world order and moving beyond the limitations that presently inhibit advances. This will demonstrate that what is commonly seen as “religious experience” may be more properly seen as “human experience” and that such imposed categories are not oppositional but congruent.
This paper is about the emergence of order from chaos, and the re-establishment of the idea of a habitable, cosmological universe from the experience or social and personal disruption. This sense of ordering chaos is fundamentally religious, being the basis of religious systems, but it is not explicit - or rather it can be seen most clearly its absence. The Paper makes use of Irish funeral customs to demonstrate this.
From the 1950s, contemporary art has evolved through many stages and fashions. Amongst the labels attached to the various movements have been abstract impressionism, minimalism, conceptual art and installation art, with perhaps the most popularly recognised movement being the one labelled Young British. Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and others have produced work which has provoked wide public debate in Britain. Much contemporary art is underpinned by theory (structuralism, modernism and their ‘post’ versions) which is determinedly atheistic and dominated by the French Marxist intellectuals of the 1960s and 70s. This paper however suggests that many contemporary artists, and the ‘Young Brits’ in particular, ask questions which are implicitly religious. Damien Hirst called his notorious work of a preserved shark in a tank, ‘The physical impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’. Marcus Harvey posed questions about good and evil with his infamous portrait of Myra Hindley. Tracey Emin’s unmade bed explored issues of personal morality.
The idea of reincarnation is thought to be traditional in Japan, but it is theoretically incompatible with ancestor worship. I shall point that the recent interest in the past life is the sign of breakaway from the traditional ancestor worship. Contemporary idea of reincarnation is basically individualistic, growth-oriented, and in conformity with modernity.
Spirituality and funerals both feature in the study of contemporary societies in the western world. The changing shape of belief in late modernity is the focus of both academic study and popular comment and it is becoming apparent that seemingly secular practices may constitute new forms of religiosity and spirituality. The changing shape of funerals is being similarly charted. Holloway (2007) suggests that contemporary funerals divide into ‘traditional’, ‘alternative’ or ‘technological’. Yet there has been no systematic exploration of the coming together of these two trends despite observations of their impact on each other.
This paper will present early findings from a project funded by the AHRC. A multidisciplinary team from the University of Hull Centre for Spirituality Studies is exploring expressions of spirituality associated with the funeral through observations of pre-funeral meetings with funeral directors and celebrants, observations of the funeral, and post-funeral interviews with bereaved relatives. Bereaved people (as well as the professionals) appear to put considerable time and energy into planning the funeral and one striking theme from the post-funeral interviews is their reflection on whether or not they achieved what they had set out to do. This core satisfaction seems to be associated with meaning, but few can articulate this very well. The paper will explore some of the ways in which people today seek, ascribe and take meaning and the relationship of meaning-making with spirituality, in this central event marking a death.
The deep roots of economic science lie in religious and spiritual traditions of meditation and reflection on Creation as the handiwork of God. There are scriptural references aplenty on ‘good husbandry’ and ‘stewardship of providential resources’. The Desert Fathers, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther and Calvin all had much to say on the quotidian matters of making a living. Prophets and profits, God and Mammon, temple and trade jostle and bustle in the theological marketplace of ideas. Islam, Sikhism, Buddhism and Hinduism have common ground with Judeo-Christianity in many areas of concern with the practical economics of life, particularly where issues of social justice and deprivation, fair trade, just wages, ethical investment, environmental care etc are concerned.
Despite considerable lip service to the moral economics of Adam Smith, Ferguson and others, in the modern era, the scientization, professionalization and ‘technicalization’ of ‘positive’ economic science tended to lose touch with this older religio-spiritual heritage of economic theology. By Reason alone we moderns were inclined to solve the problems of need and greed. Palpably, we have failed to do so. The presentday crisis of global capitalism is just one more testimony in a long line of depressions, troughs, dips, kinks, sloughs, downturns and so forth that attest to the limitations of human hubris as far as the management, direction and care of economic welbeing is concerned.
What has the ancient wisdom of spiritual economics to teach us in the contemporarty crisis? Can we go beyond - or behind - economic science to get at the roots of recovery and renewal? This paper argues that ‘ethical economics’, albeit a step in the right direction, is insufficient to the task. But we can go deeper still and perhaps ought to if we are serious about resolving the dangerous predicament of global recession that confronts us. The framework of implicit religion may be a particularly useful one in this quest for a renewal of spiritual economics.
This paper relates part of a project which evaluated an i-pastoral care system based in the UK as part of an urban work-place mission. The base website was accessible by all, including users worldwide, who were invited to contact a chaplain by e-mail about pastoral problems. Because of confidentiality, actual identities of participants in the scheme were withheld, but it was possible to create religious profiles of the 18 users from text analysis of their e-mails. In addition, the nature of the enquiries/contacts was categorised. The results of these analyses are presented in this paper. Not surprisingly, given that the website is unapologetically Anglican, the majority of users confessed a Christian tradition although only a third of the participants attended church. The main areas of enquiry were about religion (50%), followed by marital problems (33%).
The pre-occupation with the Rapture and Armageddon is often assigned to American Fundamentalism and dismissed as a fringe interest. I aim to show that apocalypticism has a long pedigree, not least in Britain, and that it expresses deeply felt traits of Christian thought, and is also found in certain forms of humanist discourse.
In 2004 I embarked on the PhD project entitled ‘Implicit Religion and the Internet Hype’, which was partly funded by the CSIRCS. In this project my main assumption was that in predominantly secular Western societies religion often finds expression in the form of seemingly non-religious phenomena. The focus of the study lay on the implicitly religious dimensions of the public enthusiasm that followed the popularisation of Internet in the mid-1990s. This case study served as a means of coming to an understanding as to how implicit religion manifests itself, how it operates and which tasks it can fulfil in modern, highly technological societies.
In my talk I shall give an overview of the dissertation that was the product of this project: its main questions, theoretical framework, methodology and conclusions. I shall also highlight some of the methodological and theoretical hurdles I encountered in the course of this research project.
I have long believed that the emerging environmental movements display certain characteristics that might justify seeing them as a type of secular or implicit religion (back in 1989 I had an article published in what was then “The Modern Churchman” on parallels between New Social Movements and more radical aspects of Christian belief and practice). I now intend to develop this further with reference to a recent publication that is evidence of the sophistication and depth of what is being produced within certain areas of the environmental movement – i.e the Transition Towns Handbook written by Rob Hopkins and published in 2008.
I will take some of the frameworks that are in circulation within the Implicit Religion field to see to what extent they illuminate this thesis, along with some ideas of my own from recent publications, in order to establish both linkages and differences. Thus Edward Bailey’s typology which talks about:
Karen Lord’s typology which talks about:
And my own typology (from “Blurred Encounters” 2005) which talks about:
Which in turn led me to the ideas of pre-autonomy, autonomy, and post-autonomy, in the area of human subjectivity, and to suggestions for a reflexive spirituality.
I will examine the aforementioned text in terms of both structure and content to show the extent to which it displays recognisable features of a secular or implicit religion – for instance, it divides its material into 3 sections: “The Head”, “The Heart” and “The Hands”, within which it employs some complex ideas from a range of disciplines, both the natural and the human sciences, and then develops certain practical responses to the problems of Peak Oil and Climate Change, building upon this work. Does this provide a workable model for a Practical Theology? What is to be learnt from the concept of Resilience which is firmly established as the key response to the environmental problems being addressed? Are there differences between this handbook, and the developing theological response to these problems, and indeed to the current global financial crisis, which may well determine present and future environmental policies? So, for instance, the ideas about “going local” may be appropriate and suggestive at the micro level, but dangerous and in need of critique at the macro and global level. Such is the range of issues that will emerge from this encounter and my proposed paper to the conference.
The association between conventional religiosity and suicide inhibition has been well explored and documented since the pioneering work of Durkheim. Commentators like Heelas and Woodhead point to ways in which conventional religiosity is giving way in England and Wales to a range of alternative spiritualities, including renewed interest in paranormal phenomena. Taking a sample of 3,095 13-to 15-year-old adolescents, the present study examines the association between suicidal ideation and both conventional religiosity and personality (extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism). The data demonstrate that, while conventional religiosity is slightly associated with lower levels of suicidal ideation, paranomral beliefs are strongly associated with higher levels of suicidal ideation.
Accumulated research in the paradigm of Implicit Religion has done much to clarify the understanding of contemporary religiosity and spirituality. Theoretical models have been proposed and many examples of implicit religion or religiosity identified. Based on this knowledge, the study of IR should enter the next phase of research by investigating responsible modes of application.
The pervasiveness of implicit religiosity gives evidence of widely spread religious needs – and diverse modes of fulfilling them. Traditional institutions of religiosity as well as societal organizations might learn from phenomena of implicit religiosity and thus strengthen their members’ experience of belonging, commitment, and meaning.
Empirical findings based on the psychological theory of implicit religiosity (Schnell, 2001) suggest possible modi operandi. According to the theory, implicit religiosity is characterized by a) specific forms of religious expression, and b) the function of creating meaning. Universal forms of religious expression are myth, ritual, and experiences of transcending. As shown by empirical data, their realization is strongly related to the experience of meaning – independently of their content! More importantly, the three structures should be cogently interrelated to each other.
Thus, these specific forms of religious expression, performed by religious communities since thousands of years, have a ‘magic’ of their own: They have the potential to structure cognition, action, and emotion in a coherent and integrative way, while enabling self-transcendence and elevation from the profane.
The internal logic of the three forms of religious expression and their specific functions is described. Practice and neglect of these forms of expression in churches and other institutions are explored. Discussion of further applications of implicitly religious processes – based on the introduced theory as well as other approaches – is appreciated.
In the introduction to his classic text, Prayer: A Study in the History and Psychology of Religion, Friedrich Heiler argued that, ‘Religious people, students of religion, theologians of all creeds and tendencies, agree in thinking that prayer is the central phenomenon of religion’ (first published 1918 and translated into English in1932). This paper will raise questions about why a feature of religion about which it was possible to make such a claim (whether justified or not) currently receives little attention in the academic discipline of Religious Studies. With a small number of notable exceptions, there is little engagement with prayer as a critical category. The paper will also suggest that the content and nature of prayer and, in particular, the ways in which prayers change are informative about changes in religious practice and belief more generally. This has implications for the study of institutional religion, privatised religion and implicit religion.