Papers by Sharday Mosurinjohn
Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, Sep 1, 2019
Method & Theory in The Study of Religion, Mar 9, 2021
This article surveys the range of positions from which religious studies scholars have generally ... more This article surveys the range of positions from which religious studies scholars have generally responded to the spiritual turn. We classify these as: the sociology of religion approach, the critical religion approach, and the practical study for spirituality by professional fields like business, education, and healthcare. In light of recent cultural sociological and historical scholarship on the emic folk category “spirituality” we argue that, given their foundational assumptions, each of these approaches is inadequate for achieving an accurate empirical account of the spiritual turn. We argue that for sociology of religion and critical religion to adequately respond to the professional study for spirituality, they must begin to reckon with the minority consensus developed by cultural sociologists about the spiritual turn. The minority consensus holds that the spiritual turn comprises two components: first, a semantic shift from “religion” to “spirituality,” and second, the crystallization and spread of a shared cultural structure. Coming to terms with this approach will require scholars of religion to reconsider both their assumptions about the category “religion” as well as the limits of their discipline.
Bloomsbury Religion in North America, 2022
Frontiers in Psychiatry
Contemporary research on serotonergic psychedelic compounds has been rife with references to so-c... more Contemporary research on serotonergic psychedelic compounds has been rife with references to so-called ‘mystical’ subjective effects. Several psychometric assessments have been used to assess such effects, and clinical studies have found quantitative associations between ‘mystical experiences’ and positive mental health outcomes. The nascent study of psychedelic-induced mystical experiences, however, has only minimally intersected with relevant contemporary scholarship from disciplines within the social sciences and humanities, such as religious studies and anthropology. Viewed from the perspective of these disciplines—which feature rich historical and cultural literatures on mysticism, religion, and related topics—‘mysticism’ as used in psychedelic research is fraught with limitations and intrinsic biases that are seldom acknowledged. Most notably, existing operationalizations of mystical experiences in psychedelic science fail to historicize the concept and therefore fail to ackno...
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
According to some of the most vocal proponents of Critical Religion (CR), taking CR seriously ent... more According to some of the most vocal proponents of Critical Religion (CR), taking CR seriously entails accepting that religion as an analytic category leads to reification and naturalization and is unduly normative, thus critical scholars of religion should abandon it and restrict ourselves to studying discursive battles over the uses of religion. In this article, we build on the case for alternative critical proposals by offering an immanent critique of the work of proponents of CR. In doing so, we identify and outline CR’s major analytical flaws, which we name as follows: inconsistent historicization, crypto-normativity, and arbitrary abandonment. We conclude that CR scholarship cannot but fail to live up to its own ideals, and moreover that much would be lost were we to limit the critical study of religion to CR.
Religions
This paper uses a Tavesian model of religious experience to make a modest theorization about the ... more This paper uses a Tavesian model of religious experience to make a modest theorization about the role of “fabulation”, an embodied and affective process, to understand how some contemporary AI and robotics designers and users consider encounters with these technologies to be spiritually “authorizing”. By “fabulation”, we mean the Bergsonian concept of an evolved capacity that allows humans to see the potentialities of complex action within another object—in other words, an interior agential image, or “soul”; and by “authorizing”, we mean “deemed as having some claim to arbitration, persuasion, and legitimacy” such that the user might make choices that affect their life or others in accordance with the AI or might have their spiritual needs met. We considered two case studies where this agency took on a spiritual or religious valence when contextualized as such for the user: a robotic Buddhist priest known as Mindar, and a chatbot called The Spirituality Chatbot. We show how understa...
In 2015, artist Brendan Fernandes was invited to interpret ‘African collections’ from the Agnes E... more In 2015, artist Brendan Fernandes was invited to interpret ‘African collections’ from the Agnes Etherington Art Centre and the Textile Museum of Canada. The result, Lost Bodies, critiques racist ideologies that justified presenting objects from colonised African peoples as evidence of ‘superstition’ or ‘witchcraft’ in early European museums. Fernandes redirects the deferential gestures of ballet, professionalised in Louis XIV’s court at the same moment of the objects’ collection, to reanimate and apologise to them. Considering Lost Bodies, I explore how it is possible to nuance Western museums’ public development narratives by engaging such artefacts without either ignoring their history or rejecting museums on account of their own.
Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, 2020
TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2019
Journal for the Study of Spirituality, 2017
ABSTRACT The movement under study, Free the Children (FtC), is a youth empowerment organization t... more ABSTRACT The movement under study, Free the Children (FtC), is a youth empowerment organization that was founded in 1995 by a Canadian teenager, who, twenty years on, remains its leader today. Though it does not define itself as either a religion or an alternative to religion, it frequently uses the language of ‘spirituality’. Moreover, it meets all five criteria proposed by Lorne Dawson [2006. “New Religious Movements.” In The Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion, edited by Robert A. Segal, 269–284. Malden: Blackwell, 374] to define a new religious movement (NRM). It likewise demonstrates a valuation of certain principles (belonging, community, compassion, and caring) as set apart and inviolable: what Kim Knott [2013. “The Secular Sacred: In-between or Both/And?” In Social Identities between the Sacred and the Secular, edited by Abby Day, Giselle Vincett and Christopher R. Cotter, 145–160. Farnham: Ashgate] characterizes as ‘the secular sacred’. Trying to situate FtC in the post-war ‘seeking culture’ in which so many NRMs and ‘alternative spiritualities’ arose [Clarke, Peter B. 2006. New Religions in Global Perspective: A Study of Religious Change in the Modern World. New York: Routledge] reveals a major conceptual problem: ‘spirituality’, ‘the sacred’, and ‘NRMs’ have been operationally defined in many pieces of religious studies literature in relation to ‘religion’ and other terms, but never systematically in relation to each other. This is what our project proposes to do, provisionally offering the term ‘new secular spiritual movement’ (NSSM) as a heuristic.
Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, 2016
separation, to take one of his examples, might mean that in the USA a person would feel they had ... more separation, to take one of his examples, might mean that in the USA a person would feel they had to choose between belief in God or accepting biological evolution. Laying his own cards on the table, Gingerich explains that as a person of faith he finds the supports for the notion of ‘‘fine-tuning’’ to be remarkable. Namely, these foundations are the multiple instances in which (against often astronomical odds) extremely complex variables come together to allow for the existence of carbon based and intelligent life in this universe. Further, for Gingerich, the supports for fine-tuning are also evidence of cosmological purpose and hence, for him, foundations for belief in a Creator. A tension with God’s Planet’s presentation of this argument is that the links between scientific evidence and religious theism are often assumed rather than explicitly developed. Extrapolating from Gingerich’s personal comments, theistic belief’s role in this formulation comes off as a rather individualistic filter through which to explain scientific evidence and transition to final causes. However, that point is not approached with intentionality. Further, God’s Planet does not explain its choice of title. The reader is thus left wondering, among other possibilities, whether the title is meant to invoke one of Gingerich’s previous monographs (God’s Universe), a mere marketing choice, or a cached reinforcement of the view he cites that multiverse theory’s possibility of a near infinite number of universes offers a poor but last possible refuge for atheistic scientists seeking an empirical explanation in the face of evidence subsumed under the category of fine-tuning. The Hermann Lectures upon which the present monograph is based were entitled the ‘‘Nature of Science.’’ That naming is relatively more appropriate. For those unable to access nor to afford God’s Planet or, perhaps, preferring a different format, all three lectures are available on YouTube. These videos can also be accessed free of charge through the Gordon College website and largely represent the content of the present monograph. Nonetheless, those origins and its lucid writing also mean that God’s Planet is easily read over three sessions. There is a richness to the material Gingerich presents, either as a survey for those starting out in the area of Western Christianity and Science, or for the initiated seeking a review that will reignite insights from their previous study of significant debates. Furthermore, his case studies are surveyed in a manner that accords well with a Western History of Science rendering, while remaining religiously literate. As such, from a religious studies perspective, God’s Planet is well worth the time it takes to read.
Ritual, Emotion, and Materiality in the Early Christian World
Teaching Theology and Religion, 2021
Method & Theory in the Study of Religion
This article surveys the range of positions from which religious studies scholars have generally ... more This article surveys the range of positions from which religious studies scholars have generally responded to the spiritual turn. We classify these as: the sociology of religion approach, the critical religion approach, and the practical study for spirituality by professional fields like business, education, and healthcare. In light of recent cultural sociological and historical scholarship on the emic folk category “spirituality” we argue that, given their foundational assumptions, each of these approaches is inadequate for achieving an accurate empirical account of the spiritual turn. We argue that for sociology of religion and critical religion to adequately respond to the professional study for spirituality, they must begin to reckon with the minority consensus developed by cultural sociologists about the spiritual turn. The minority consensus holds that the spiritual turn comprises two components: first, a semantic shift from “religion” to “spirituality,” and second, the crysta...
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses
This article analyzes the growing youth social justice initiative Free the Children/ME to WE as a... more This article analyzes the growing youth social justice initiative Free the Children/ME to WE as a kind of “spiritual movement” by demonstrating how the discourses utilized by participants and authorities resemble both the discourse of self-spirituality, as found among actual millennials, and the discourse of youth spirituality found in the developmental sciences literature. Building on previous research in which we characterized this family of organizations as a “new secular spiritual movement,” (Mosurinjohn and Funnell-Kononuk, 2017). we situate the phenomenological experience of its distinctive “WE spirituality” in the landscape of contemporary Western spirituality. Following on arguments that the politics of self-spirituality are more social change-oriented than previously acknowledged, we illuminate the logics of a spiritual movement that develops the “me” of the individual self into a part of the “we” of an imagined global community, by making spirituality coextensive with soci...
The International Journal of the Image, 2014
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Papers by Sharday Mosurinjohn