Spiritual Narratives in Everyday Life

A variety of new developments in the social sciences make this an opportune moment to re-think the relationship between religion and modern society. Research over the last decade has already begun to undermine many of the old assumptions about the secularizing processes that were thought to erode religion's power, and a "new paradigm" has suggested that we de-center the European experience that dominated our thinking. Three key shifts in social science have prepared the way for this study. First, we have recognized that all institutional boundaries are porous. While it is certainly the case that modern societies are complex, with relatively specialized and distinct spheres of activity, individuals carry frameworks and expectations from one part of life to another. Even the notion of "public" as distinct from "private" life has been widely challenged. No less than other kinds of activity, religious action is not confined to a tightly-bounded religious sphere. Second, what people carry with them across those boundaries are practices and narratives. The beliefs embodied in those narratives are not tightly argued philosophical systems, but expectations about how spiritual realities intersect with life. Ideas about the nature of God and of the world are most often carried in stories and rituals. By looking for religion in practices and narratives rather than solely in official ideas and institutions, we can gain new perspectives. Third, renewed attention to religion has made clear just how diverse human spiritual life is, precipitating expanded definitions of what counts as "religious" in the first place. People have, in fact, probably always been religious in many ways that would have made their official religious leaders uncomfortable. Belief and belonging are still very important, but they do not fit a neat list of official doctrines or survey questions. This project, then, is designed to elicit stories of everyday life in which we can look for the conditions under which spiritual frameworks and sensibilities do and do not infuse activity and relationships. In what ways do human beings experience and invoke transcendence and how does that occur distinctively in the many different social spheres of their lives? Do they, for instance, experience overt (or implicit) sanctions against religious action in some places but not in others? On the other hand, what kinds of situations call forth spiritual resources, and what effect do those spiritual resources have? By systematically exploring the stories individuals tell about their everyday lives, we hope to begin to trace the patterns of presence and absence. We are also interested in the interaction between individual experience and religious organizations. We want to situate individual stories in their multiple institutional contexts, but we are paying direct attention to the organizational contexts that are the primary religious homes for our respondents. To what extent do those religious settings provide relationships, practices, and ways of thinking that show up in the stories our subjects tell us? We are also paying attention to the larger culture in which everyday narratives are shaped. While we cannot take in every possible variation in culture, we will gain some purchase on the relative role of the surrounding context by looking at stories produced by people in both Boston and Atlanta. Within each site, we selected a quota sample designed to include a distribution across key Christian and Jewish traditions, as well as people who are "seculars" and