"Secular Societies, Spiritual Selves brings together ethnographic research to address how the overlaps and differentiations between spirituality, secularity and religion are gendered. The book examines how 'spirituality' has emerged as a relatively 'silent' category with which people signal that they are looking for a way to navigate between the categories of the religious and the secular, and considers how this is related to, explicitly or implicitly, gendered ways of being and self-constitution. The contributors discuss the intersections between spirituality, religion and secularism in different geographical areas, ranging from the Netherlands, Portugal and Lithuania to Canada, the United States and Mexico. Exploring the spiritual experiences of women and their struggle for a more gender equal way of approaching the divine, the chapters also examine the experience of men and of those who challenge binary sexual identities advocating for a queer spirituality. This volume will be of interest to scholars of the anthropology and sociology of religion as well as religious studies and gender studies"--
Secular Societies, Spiritual Selves? is the first volume to address the gendered intersections of religion, spirituality and the secular through an ethnographic approach.
The book examines how spirituality has emerged as a relatively silent category with which people often signal that they are looking for a way to navigate between the categories of the religious and the secular, and considers how this is related to gendered ways of being and relating. Using a lived religion approach the contributors analyse the intersections between spirituality, religion and secularism in different geographical areas, ranging from the Netherlands, Portugal and Italy to Canada, the United States and Mexico. The chapters explore the spiritual experiences of women and their struggle for a more gender equal way of approaching the divine, as well as the experience of men and of those who challenge binary sexual identities advocating for a queer spirituality.
This volume will be of interest to anthropologists and sociologists as well as scholars in other disciplines who seek to understand the role of spirituality in creating the complex gendered dynamics of modern societies.
