No abstract

The present paper addressed the different meanings attached to religion as cultural resource in the course of life. Indeed, abundant cultural research has confirmed that religion could be a powerful symbolic system that shapes people's beliefs and attitudes. Its significance may depend on contextual factors and may vary over time and place, thus showing different implications across cultures and group cohorts. To better investigate such assumption, this paper involved a group of elderly believers (convinced Catholic believers and converted to Buddhism believers) as to analyze the role played by religion in their life experience. Narrative interview, content, and diatextual analysis helped reconstructing different cultural interpretative repertoires of religion in late life: a source to answer to the essential questions about life, an anchor to face the present and the future, a sociocultural resource for well-being.

The context of deep uncertainty, fear, and “social distancing” characterizing the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a need for cultural anchorages and charismatic leaders who may conjointly and effectively support human beings, strengthen their identity, and empower social commitment. In this perspective, the charismatic leadership of Pope Francis, which is widely shared not only within the religious world, may play a crucial role in facing emergency with existential reasons and psychological resources. The general aim of this work is to shed light on the communicative features of the charismatic leadership of Pope Francis during the pandemic emergency; in order to better understand his effectiveness, we analyzed both the core issues and his multimodal body signals in the global TV event of the Universal Prayer with the Urbi et Orbi Blessing. The multimodal and discursive analyses of the homily enabled us to define the “humble” charisma of the Pope, which is based upon on authentic and informal presence, manifested emotional signals (and, in particular commotion) showing features of equity and familiarity. From a discursive point of view, the common and overarching affiliation is constructed through a multiple focus on the “we” pronoun, which is constructed through socio-epistemic rhetoric. The results show how this integrated methodological perspectives, which is multimodal and discursive, may offer meaningful pathways detection of effective and persuasive signals.

The present contribution focuses on the discursive perspective, which finds its roots in the several "turns" that animated the previous century. Besides the "discursive" and the "narrative" turns, the "contextual turn" has highlighted that meanings shape themselves in a context, which could be seen both as a "cotext" (the linguistic around) as well as an extralinguistic frame (Slama-Cazacu 1959/1961. Such perspective allows considering texts as diatexts (Mininni et al. 2008), namely as "efforts after meaning," aimed at manifesting their dialogical correspondence with a specific "context" (Slama-Cazacu 2007). The cognitive engagement and the affective involvement of the interlocutors during an interaction demand a constant monitoring activity on the need for attunement between intentions and situational bonds.

As the “Sacred Place”—meant as the new space for religions offered by the Internet—demands for continuous investigations on the encounter between traditional narratives and social practices, the rapid growth of Question and Answering websites asks for improving social research about the Authenticity of the religious feeling as well as their responsibility in the construction of a shared knowledge. In this background, the aim of this study is to investigate the role of Q&A websites as additional interpretative resources in accordance with different religious forms of life. About 800 extracts—composed by questions and answers—from the religious pages of Stack Exchange were analyzed, in accordance with social discursive psychology, through bottom-up and top-down pathways. In relation to the different emerging questioners’ profiles, the rhetoric of “closeness” and “openness” reveal a dialectic trend of these websites in offering both supplementary and extending religious experiences.