ABSTRACT"Spirituality" has often been framed in social science research as an alternative to organized "religion," implicitly or explicitly extending theoretical arguments about the privatization of religion. This article uses in-depth qualitative data from a religiously-diverse U.S. sample to argue that this either-or distinction not only fails to capture the empirical reality of American religion, but it does not do justice to the complexity of spirituality itself. An inductive discursive analysis reveals four primary cultural "packages," that is, ways in which the meaning of spirituality is constructed in conversation --a Theistic Package that ties spirituality to personal deities, an Extra-Theistic Package that locates spirituality in various naturalistic forms of transcendence, an Ethical Spirituality that focuses on everyday compassion, and a contested Belief and Belonging Spirituality tied to cultural notions of religiosity. Spirituality is, then, neither a diffuse individualized phenomenon nor a single cultural alternative to "religion."Analysis of the contested evaluations of Belief and Belonging Spirituality allows a window on the "moral boundary work" (Lamont 1992) being done by the cultural discourse of being "spiritual but not religious." The empirical boundary between spirituality and religion is far more porous than the moral and political one.
Over the last three decades, lived religion has emerged as a distinct field of study, with an identifiable "canon" of originating sources. With this body of work reaching maturity, a critical assessment is in order. This study analyzes sixty-four journal articles published in English, since 1997, which have used either "lived religion" or "everyday religion" in their titles, abstracts, or keywords. We find that the field has largely been defined by what it excludes. It includes attention to laity, not clergy or elites; to practices rather than beliefs; to practices outside religious institutions rather than inside; and to individual agency and autonomy rather than collectivities or traditions. Substantively, the focus on practice has encompassed dimensions of embodiment, discourse and materiality; and I argue here that these substantive foci can form the analytical structure for expanding the domain of lived religion to include the traditions and institutions that have so far largely been excluded from study. In doing so, lived religion's attention to gender, power, and previously-excluded voices must be maintained. But that task cannot be accomplished without continuing to expand the field beyond the still-limited geographic and religious terrain it has so far covered.Keywords: Lived religion; everyday religion; embodiment; gender; discourse; materiality 2 Over the last three decades, the study of religion has taken a cultural turn, giving attention to discourse and identity and ritual, but especially looking at the way religion is embedded in the practices of everyday life (Edgell 2012). The turn to lived religion in the 1990s marked a significant shift in the sociological study of religion, a shift that has been remarkably fruitful.In this paper, I will step back to observe what this move has enabled us to do, as well as what it may be leading us to miss. Such an assessment is important both to build on and to go beyond the advances that have been made.The turn to lived religion 1 arose out of a widespread recognition that our discipline had gotten itself mired in endless debates over whether the modern world was or was not secularizing, debates mostly relevant to the North Atlantic world that threatened to blind us to much of the very phenomenon we wanted to study, in that region and beyond (Warner 1993).At an opportune moment, new voices began to be heard in the field, inviting us to pay attention to the way religion is lived. Not surprisingly, those voices came from the margins where the existing debates made the least sense. 2 They came first from the women who were finding their place in the study of religion. In the US, they also came from scholars of color whose work began to gain more credence (e.g., Gilkes 1985). They came from immigrants, whose religious communities began to be noticed (e.g., Min 1992). As scholars from the postcolonial world became a more frequent presence -and we spent more time in their locales -another channel opened (e.g., N'Guessan 2015). And today all these voices are...
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