In his PhD project Jonas aims to bring the critical research about the religion-secularism binary in dialogue with the research on ‘being spiritual but not religious’. He asks the question whether the dominant contemporary view of religion should be approached as a religion-secularism-spirituality ternary rather than a religion-secularism binary and if so what its discursive function and social impact might be. Does ‘spirituality’ truly allow us to bridge the gap between the religious and the secular? Or is it in fact yet another type of ‘othering’ in disguise?
The religion versus secularism binary plays an important role in various strands of philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and theology as a seemingly evident descriptive and explanatory frame to analyze particular aspects of human societies. However, in the last few decades, this binary has increasingly been called into question. A growing body of research suggests that the conceptual divide between the religious and the secular is far more complicated than is commonly accepted.
Interestingly enough however, those critical approaches of the religion-secularism binary have seldom been related to another contemporary shift in the discourses about religion: a heightened emphasis on spirituality as a sort of ‘in between’ category, a concept that allows to be both neither of the two and a bit of both at the same time. The expression “I’m spiritual but not religious” has become a commonplace example thereof. As a result, we have also witnessed an increased academic interest in this growing usage of being ‘spiritual but not religious’ as an identity marker.
In his PhD project Jonas aims to bring the critical research about the religion-secularism binary in dialogue with the research on ‘being spiritual but not religious’. He asks the question whether the dominant contemporary view of religion should be approached as a religion-secularism-spirituality ternary rather than a religion-secularism binary and if so what its discursive function and social impact might be. Does ‘spirituality’ truly allow us to bridge the gap between the religious and the secular? Or is it in fact yet another type of ‘othering’ in disguise?