Blackwell Reference Online

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In the early 1990s, I was invited, along with about eight other social scientists and theologians, to join a faculty discussion group at the University of California, Berkeley. For a span of about two years, we met monthly to discuss what might constitute spirituality from a social science perspective. The catalyst for the group came from Guy E. Swanson, a social-psychologist who headed Berkeley's Institute for Human Development. For decades, since the 1920s, the Institute has carefully tracked two cohorts of people, born in Berkeley and Oakland, throughout their childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, and so on. Swanson discovered, in the rich archival trove of interviews from that famous cohort study, that many of those interviewed at mid-life had re-engaged with religion or, alternately, had turned to a kind of newly found spiritual reflexivity outside of organized religion. Just how, Swanson wondered, could we go about conceptualizing spirituality in social science studies? How is it related to religiosity and how might it be conceived of as a semi-independent conceptual variable? If one begins - as the theologians present to the seminar all did - with a Catholic schema for spirituality (around key concepts and practices such as “grace,” the imitation of Christ, communal and personal discernment, spiritual direction by a mentor, ideals of a calling, meditation and lectio pia ... log in or subscribe to read full text