{"title":"Development in Religious and Non-Religious Biographies from a Cross-Cultural Perspective","authors":"Ramona Bullik, S. Özışık, Anika Steppacher","doi":"10.1163/15709256-12341398","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\nHow do people perceive their own religious, spiritual or atheist biography? This is a question that our research team has been focusing on for nearly two decades. Our developmental perspective critically, but constructively relates to Fowler’s (1981) Faith Development Theory, as described in Streib’s (2001) approach of religious styles, paying tribute to the fact that development is not, in most cases, a linear upward process. By combining Fowler’s structural evaluation method with approaches to content analyses, this paper will show the merit of these qualitative methods when looking at (religious) development in different surroundings. For that purpose, we present case studies with different cultural backgrounds. Their different trajectories and possible commonalities will be shown on a structural as well as on a content level. This approach enables us to reconstruct movement within the religious field and will show how this is displayed on a subjective, biographical level.","PeriodicalId":42786,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Theology","volume":"33 1","pages":"65-82"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4000,"publicationDate":"2020-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/15709256-12341398","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Empirical Theology","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15709256-12341398","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"RELIGION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
How do people perceive their own religious, spiritual or atheist biography? This is a question that our research team has been focusing on for nearly two decades. Our developmental perspective critically, but constructively relates to Fowler’s (1981) Faith Development Theory, as described in Streib’s (2001) approach of religious styles, paying tribute to the fact that development is not, in most cases, a linear upward process. By combining Fowler’s structural evaluation method with approaches to content analyses, this paper will show the merit of these qualitative methods when looking at (religious) development in different surroundings. For that purpose, we present case studies with different cultural backgrounds. Their different trajectories and possible commonalities will be shown on a structural as well as on a content level. This approach enables us to reconstruct movement within the religious field and will show how this is displayed on a subjective, biographical level.