Engaged Spirituality: Social Change and American Religion

by Gregory C. Stanczak

Overview

In Engaged Spirituality, Gregory C. Stanczak challenges this assumption, arguing that spirituality plays an important social role as well. Based on more than one hundred interviews with individuals of diverse faith traditions, the book shows how prayer, meditation, and ritual provide foundations for activism. Among the stories, a Buddhist monk in Los Angeles intimately describes the physical sensations of strength and compassion that sweep her body when she recites the Buddha’s name in times of selfless service, and a Protestant reverend explains how the calm serenity that she feels during retreats allows her to direct her multi-service agency in San Francisco to creative successes that were previously unimaginable.

In an age when Madonna studies Kabbalah and the internet is bringing Buddhism to the white middle-class, it is clear that formal religious affiliations are no longer enough. Stanczak’s critical examination of spirituality provides us with a way of discussing the factors that impel individuals into social activism and forces us to rethink the question of how “religion” and “spirituality” might be defined.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813538365
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	06/08/2006
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Gregory C. Stanczak was a visiting assistant professor of sociology at Williams College from 2004–2006 and is a research fellow at the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California.

Table of Contents

Bridging the gap: the split between spirituality and society
Biography, behavior, and belief: the sources of spirituality
Acting on faith: social roles in expressing spirituality
Keeping the faith in action: cultivating spiritual practice
Experience and emotion: the influence of spiritual feelings
Degrees of social integration: toward a theory of engaged spirituality
Lived spirituality and the gamut of social action