Innerhalb all dieser Perspektiven beschreibt der Artikel die praktische Theologie als eine Form der engagierten Wissenschaft.

For many celebrities, organizing meet-and-greets with fans and followers has become a permanent feature of their public appearances. As yet little is known about the role and importance of such 'unmediated' encounters within the everyday constitution of celebrity culture. Why would fans be interested in the possibility of direct, personal contact with people they already know from the media? To find an answer to this question, this article presents ethnographic research into meet-andgreets with the Dutch artist Marco Borsato. Results show that these meet-and-greets constitute a meaningful experience for those involved: they validate and enhance emotional involvement, serve as status symbols within the fan hierarchy and, in some cases, can fulfil a vital role in personal life narratives of healing.

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The ‘turn to experience’ has been described as one of the most defining characteristics of contemporary religion. Research on religion, and in particular on spirituality, therefore increasingly concentrates on the description of its experiential dimensions. The turn to experience, however, asks for something more than just the observation that a particular dimension (experience) has become of greater value for practitioners of religion. Dimensions which have for a long time been central to the social-scientific study of religion, but are avoided in the practitioners’ discourse and, surprisingly, in the social-scientific discourse as well, such as authority and power, turn out to be of lasting significance in the mediation and construction of religious experience. In this contribution, the authors take the social construction of religious experience in contemporary spirituality as a starting point for a reflection and discussion on the methodological challenges of experiential religion for those engaged in the study of religion.

The once taken-for-granted notion of religion's inevitable decline in Northwestern Europe is increasingly contested. Instead of gradually disappearing, religion seems to become more subjective, personal and informed by private experience. This book addresses the merits of this influential understanding of religious changes, based on a qualitative in-depth study of evangelicalism among Dutch youngsters, one of the most popular renditions of Christianity in the Netherlands. Guiding the reader through the settings and communities in which evangelical youngsters nourish their faith, it critically discusses the ideological and moral repertoires that inform their religious lives, the ways their connection to the sacred is mediated and affirmed, and the implications of both of these for the discussions on the nature and fate of religion in Northwestern Europe. Johan Roeland (1977) obtained his masters degree in Theology. He worked as a PhD candidate at