Spirituality
This article imbeds the concept of spirituality within lived human experience, as a holistic rather than other-worldly phenomenon. It starts with a review of the history of the word “spiritual” that gave birth to a concept of “spirituality.” The developme
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Spirituality
Synonyms
Erik Mansager Webster University, Geneva, Switzerland
Inspiration; Integration; Mindfulness; Prayer; Self-transcendence; Self-transformation; Spirit; Spirituality; Striving; Ultimate value
Abstract
This article imbeds the concept of spirituality within lived human experience, as a holistic rather than other-worldly phenomenon. It starts with a review of the history of the word “spiritual” that gave birth to a concept of “spirituality.” The development of word and concept are traced within their specifically Christian context and then viewed to see how they were experienced and explored as independent of this original religious mooring. Spirituality is then seen as an aspect of the world religions before investigating the notion that it can be considered, in part, the substance of the human capacity for making meaning. As a result, it is described both as the transformative experience the word was originally intended to convey and as an academic discipline whose aim is to study such experiences. The examples of academic studies were selected to illuminate the variety of fundamental human activities which comprise spirituality as defined below.
Definition Definitions for spirituality proliferate among scholarly disciplines – religious and theological as well as sociological, anthropological, and psychological. What Allport (1950), for example, identified as “religious sentiment” includes the “spiritual activity” of seeking ultimate meaning or ultimate value – whether concerned with theism or not. This “search for the sacred” (Pargament 1999) addresses a rudimentary riddle of human existence. While spirituality shares with these other disciplines the universal search for knowledge and meaning, it is distinguished from them by the direction in which it poses its questions (e.g., about the sources of transformative experiences) and the area from which it anticipates its answers (e.g., which discipline will provide understanding, Küng 1987/1988; Ricoeur 1976).
Keywords
Spirituality · Tranformative experience · Meaning making · Self-transcendence © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 V. P. Glăveanu (ed.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98390-5_126-1
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Spirituality
Examination of the meaning-making creativity of such deep human inquiry has discerned four characteristics of an individual’s spiritual movement – each of which intertwines with facets of the possible: 1. The universal human activity of striving – a teleological movement that acknowledges “we live lives that are fundamentally oriented towards the future” (Glaveanu 2018, p. 524). 2. The effort made toward life integration – an interweaving of dimensions which “make sense of the past, present, and future, both individual and collective” (Glaveanu 2018, p. 523). 3. The pursuit of self-transcendence – which moves beyond integration “and, above all, transforms our experience of the actual” (Glaveanu 2018, p. 519). 4. The conceptualization of one’s ult
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