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A review of the literature on spirituality and religion in information research – 1990 to 2022
Abstract
Purpose
More than eight in ten people worldwide identify with a religious group. In addition, people often engage with spiritual and religious content despite having no formal beliefs or affiliations. Spirituality remains a prominent feature of Western and Westernised information-based societies and cultures; however, people’s everyday interactions with spiritual and religious information have received disproportionate attention in information and library science research. Accordingly, this paper aims to understand how scholars have explored religion and spirituality in information research and identify current and emerging trends in the literature.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper analyses 115 peer-reviewed articles, 44 book chapters, 24 theses and 17 unrefereed papers published between 1990 and 2022 to present a narrative review of how scholars have explored spirituality and religion in information research. The reviewed literature is first organised into spirituality-related and religion-related articles and thereafter analysed in Internet studies, information behaviour studies and galleries, libraries, archives and museums-related research groups.
Findings
Our analysis indicates scholars in Internet studies have researched both established and alternative religious interactions, and emerging research agendas seek to explore intersections between traditional religious authority and modern Internet-facilitated engagements. Information behaviour scholars have examined interactions in Christianity and Islam, focused primarily on Western contexts and conventional interactions, with emerging research aiming to explore diverse contextual and methodological combinations. Finally, GLAM researchers have investigated the practicality, suitability, and appropriateness of spirituality and religion-related service provisions; however, a clear research agenda is currently lacking in spirituality and religion information research more broadly.
Originality/value
This paper is the first review of the spirituality and religion-related information research spanning Internet studies, information behaviour studies and galleries, libraries, archives and museums research domains.
... Moreover, such traits result in loving and caring attitude towards family members and other people. Muslims, Sikhs and to some extend by Christian participants mentioned that such traits are found in spiritual people (Nangia & Ruthven, 2025;Amrai et al., 2011). Also, these personality traits predict healthy mental and physical heath (Wilt, Grubbs, Exline & Pargament, 2016). ...
This study aims to develop a comparative analysis of the understanding of spirituality among followers of different faiths, including Islam, Christianity, Sikhism, and Atheism. For this purpose, five participants from each belief system were selected, including Muslims, Christians, and Atheists, and four participants were selected from Sikhs. Therefore, a total of 19 participants were selected for the structured interview. Structured interview questions were made from general spirituality literature. Moreover, only participants with reasonable knowledge of spirituality in their religion or atheist school of thought were paid attention. After selection, interviews were conducted through interview guides from the participants from different belief systems. After that, the interviews were transcribed, and five superordinate themes were generated from the data, such as the definition of spirituality, spirituality and religion, spirituality and nature, spirituality and lifestyle, and spirituality and well-being. It was found that Muslims and Sikhs differ in their concept of religion and spirituality from Christians and Atheists. In contrast, all the religions and, to a great extent, atheist's data resemble the theme of spirituality and nature. At the same time, Mixed responses were observed to other superordinate themes of spirituality.
Some Victorian evolutionary thinkers, such as James Frazer, theorised that humanity’s mental stages are characterised by magic, followed by religion, culminating in science. Put another way, the notion of humanity’s encounter with the sacred in society will eventually retreat, giving way to secular conditions, and that science and rationality would triumph as a more persuasive means of satisfying human needs. In this first foray in explorations on spirituality and religion, this article asks what the fundamental differences between religion and spirituality are, and will examine the aspects of spirituality that are freely accessible and freely chosen and that are uneasy with religion, by looking at some of the constructed borders that result in religion becoming narrow, rigid, prescriptive and less attractive. The article then examines how the phenomenon of spirituality is creating new paradigms of consciousness. It draws on the literature on religion, spirituality, sociology and anthropology, and concludes that religion will not go away despite the efforts of secularisation.
In this article, we explore three understandings of religious reading to illustrate the diversity of information use in religious contexts. “Informative” refers to information acquisition; “formative” concerns the learning of practical behaviors; while “transformative” points to spiritual growth, rich identity formation, and deep self-understanding. We provide instantiations of these notions among recent converts to various branches of Christianity and Islam and explore similarities between these traditions through analysis of published conversion narratives in Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical Christianity and of select data gathered through interviews with Muslim converts in the Toronto area. Our discussion builds upon Buckland's notion of theological information and engages with Kari's understanding of informational uses of spiritual information. We assume a hermeneutic concept of reading, according to which religious texts propose models of humanity, which readers are invited to assess and possibly assimilate. Our research contributes to existing Information and Communication Studies scholarship on the normative or prescriptive aspects of religious reading practices, congregational belief formation, and knowledge production and control in the wake of new media.
It has been over a decade since Cameron and Gatewood (2000, 2003; Gatewood & Cameron, 2004) conducted their immensely intriguing research on numinous experiences in museums. Inspired by this pioneering work, the current study was undertaken to investigate more deeply these kinds of experiences with museum objects. The essence of this encounter, as revealed by a phenomenological investigation, is comprised of a holistic uniting of intellect and affect, with a direct link to the tangible and symbolic nature of the object, a feeling of being transported, and intensely profound connections with the past, self, and spirit. These experiences are interpreted as document-centered flow experiences that fall more into the category of mystical experience than traditional learning experience. Further understanding of numinous encounters in museums can help museum practitioners make intentional choices about objects, design, and format that can serve to stimulate, connect, and inspire our museum audiences.
The purpose of this paper is to describe a methodology that is derived from philosophic meta-theoretic principles and designed for its capabilities for studying communication relevant to any context (e.g. -- intra-personal, inter=personal, small group, mediated, organizational, societal) with any focus. The core idea of this approach -- Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology (SMM) -- rests on a metaphor of human movement through a time-space that is discontinuous always at least in part; and how humans make and unmake sense as they journey through these movements. SMM has been used for numerous research, design, educational, and practice applications for 35 years. A robust number of these applications have involved attention to human sense-making (and sense-unmaking) of religion, faith, spirituality, and spirit (variously termed depending on user and focus). This paper: a) describes the methodology and how it has been applied in ways relevant to attentions to spirituality theory, praxis, pedagogy, and research; and b) provides five case examples. The examples include:
* Kathleen D. Clark's use of SMM as a tool for studying and constructing interactions that involve attentions to spirituality -- intra-personally, inter-personally, and in group settings;
* Angela Coco's use of SMM to guide her study of Catholic meaning-making in critical situations;
* Lois Foreman-Wernet's & Brenda Dervin's use of SMM to study how both elite and popular cultural exposures can lead to sense-makings of a spiritual kind;
* Christlin P. Rajendram's use of SMM as continuing praxis for his involvements in spiritual counseling as teacher, mediator, and priest;
* CarrieLynn D. Reinhard's & Brenda Dervin's use of SMM in their study of attentions to the spiritual and religious -- both struggles and sources of help -- in everyday situation-facing
This article examines the motivation behind bounded groups’ creation of digital enclaves online. Through in-depth interviews with 19 webmasters and staff of selected Israeli Orthodox websites three critical areas of negotiation are explored: (1) social control; (2) sources of authority; and (3) community boundaries. Examining these tensions illuminates a detailed process of self-evaluation which leads religious stakeholders and internet entrepreneurs to form these digital enclaves in order to negotiate the core beliefs and constraints of their offline communities online. These offer spaces of safety for members within the risk-laden tracts of the internet. Examining the tensions accompanying the emergence of these religious websites elucidates community affordances as well as the challenges to the authority that integration of new media poses to closed groups and societies.
The New Age Movement can be seen as one response to the decline of traditional religion in the West. It conforms to the spiritual pluralism that Bryan Wilson understands as a consequence of secularization. From a New Age perspective, the world's various spiritual traditions are now public property and no longer the private preserve of the parochial groups or religious élites that they once were. Since in this open availability process, the sacred becomes commodified, the general argument allows that it can be bought and sold and thus consumed according to basic free-market principles. The paper explores both the New Age rationale for spiritual commercialization and some of the clashes this engenders with the traditions from which it appropriates.
Mapping Three Waves of Research“First-Wave” Research on Religion and the Internet“Second-Wave” Studies of Religion Online“Third-Wave” ResearchFuture of Research on Religion OnlineReferences
It is often argued that the internet poses a threat to traditional forms of authority. Within studies of religion online claims have also been made that the internet is affecting religious authority online, but little substantive work has backed up these claims. This paper argues for an approach to authority within online studies which looks separately at authority: roles, structures, beliefs/ideologies and texts. This approach is applied to a thematic analysis of 100 religious blogs and demonstrates that religious bloggers use their blogs to frame authority in ways that may more often affirm than challenge traditional sources of authority.
This paper introduces the concept of religious information poverty in Australian state schools from an information science perspective. Information scientists have been theorising about the global information society for some time, along with its increased provision of vital information for the good of the world. Australian state schools see themselves as preparing children for effective participation in the information society, yet Australian children are currently suffering a religious illiteracy that undermines this goal. Some reasons and theories are offered to explain the existence of religious information poverty in state schools, and suggestions for professional stakeholders are offered for its alleviation.
Purpose
Discussions in contemporary spirituality frequently highlight a phenomenon of spiritual seeking; moreover, people often describe their spiritual journeys in terms of a search. This paper takes a closer look at this metaphor by presenting a study that analysed spiritual seeking and its informational features in contemporary non-institutionalised settings.
Design/methodology/approach
In this study, the authors conducted semi-structured interviews with thirteen spiritual teachers and speakers who were asked questions about spiritual seeking in contemporary non-institutionalised spirituality.
Findings
The authors' participants explained that contemporary spiritual seekers sought spiritual information as a result of affective, developmental and metaphysical concerns. Moreover, their analysis indicated that spiritual information-seeking behaviour incorporated practices such as prayer, yoga and meditation, and contemporary spiritual information interactions were facilitated through spiritual retreats, meditation classes, yoga classes and online social platforms.
Research limitations/implications
Since the authors focused on spiritual seeking in contemporary non-institutionalised settings, their findings cannot exhaustively represent all spiritual pursuits in contemporary society. Their study (1) identifies the informational features of contemporary spiritual seeking, (2) explains spiritual seeking as an activity that may theoretically reside within a broader framework of profound information interactions and (3) helps theorise the concept of qualitative profundity in information science research.
Originality/value
This study provides an intuitive contextual approach for undertaking information research in under-explored domains such as contemplation and spirituality.
This study aimed to understand the role of information in the domains of contemplation, spirituality, and meaning and purpose. These domains can be a significant aspect of people’s lives and rich in information phenomena. We used narrative analysis, specifically the analysis of online videos in which people were interviewed about their lives after taking residence at a contemplative spiritual retreat centre. We interpreted the interviews through a lens of meaning-making and used a context-centric model to identify the information phenomena at a contemplative spiritual retreat. The findings: (1) Support prior research, which has identified that people engage with spiritual information as a result of a change in worldview, significant events, mystical glimpses, and to gain spiritual knowledge; (2) Deliver an account of the sources and kinds of spiritual information at a contemplative spiritual retreat centre; (3) Provide insights into how people interact with spiritual information during a contemplative spiritual retreat; (4) Suggest that residents at a contemplative spiritual retreat centre seek spiritual information primarily for affective outcomes. We demonstrated meaning-making as a helpful lens to interpret information interactions in the domains of contemplation, spirituality, meaning and purpose, and value in life.
Introduction. This study aimed to highlight the perceptions of spiritual needs in modern librarianship through a survey administered amongst practising librarians primarily in the USA and UK. In addition, this study contributes to the conceptualisation of the spiritual in library settings and discussions on service provision within Western libraries. Methods. We used a mixed-methods approach which collected quantitative and qualitative data through one survey. Analysis. We analysed the responses through descriptive statistics and thematic coding. Results. Librarians connected spiritual needs with humanness, emotions, wellbeing, religion and culture. Spiritual needs associated with love/belonging/respect and positivity/gratitude/hope/peace were perceived more often than those associated with resolution/death and the divine. The need to perform religious/ spiritual rituals and participate in religious/spiritual services was regarded as the least important to consider in modern librarianship. Conclusions. Our findings 1) Support prior research that conceptualises modern libraries as spaces for contemplation and spirituality; 2) Provide an account of how librarians understand the concept of spiritual needs; 3) Indicate librarians’ perceptions of the prevalence of spiritual needs amongst library patrons; 4) Highlight the perceived importance of considering spiritual needs in modern libraries.
Purpose
Trends in information technology and contemplative practices compel us to consider the intersections of information and contemplation. The purpose of this paper is to consider these intersections at the level of institutions.
Design/methodology/approach
First, the notion of institution is defined and discussed, along with information institutions and contemplative institutions. Next, sanctuary is proposed and explored as a vision for institutions in the digital age.
Findings
Sanctuary is a primordial human institution that has especial urgency in the digital age. This paper develops an info-contemplative framework for sanctuaries, including the elements: stability, silence, refuge, privacy and reform.
Research limitations/implications
This is a conceptual paper that, though guided by prior empirical and theoretical work, would benefit from application, validation and critique. This paper is meant as a starting point for discussions of institutions for the digital age.
Practical implications
As much as this paper is meant to prompt further research, it also provides guidance and inspiration for professionals to infuse their work with aspects of sanctuary and be attentive to the tensions inherent in sanctuary.
Originality/value
This paper builds on discourse at the intersection of information studies and contemplative studies, also connecting this with recent work on information institutions.
Purpose
Americans increasingly feel a sense of wonder at the universe; meditation and yoga are on the rise; and a field known as Contemplative Studies has emerged. These indicators, among others, suggest a groundswell of interest in contemplative practice and contemplative experience and raise intriguing questions for information and Information Studies. Against this backdrop, this paper asks: How might Information Studies contribute to these developments? What is the relationship between information and contemplation? What can be explored on this research frontier?
Design/methodology/approach
This conceptual paper is based upon a synthesis of recent writings from the field of Contemplative Studies as well as conceptual analysis of selected papers and themes in Information Studies. It draws from discussion that occurred at a Session for Interaction and Engagement at the 2018 iConference, entitled “Contemplating Information in the Pleasurable and the Profound” (Latham et al., 2018). The authors' creative thinking and personal contemplative practices also infuse and fortify the work.
Findings
Popular and academic contemplative movements are afoot, and Information Studies has an opportunity to participate or be left behind. The field of Contemplative Studies has established the foundational concepts that can serve as contextual material for information research into contemplation. Upon closer inspection, Information Studies has already broached the topic of contemplation at various points in its history, theory, institutional practices, and information behavior research. The conceptual points of departure for a research frontier are articulated.
Originality/value
Beyond data, information, and knowledge are deeper and more profound aims, such as wisdom, which is related to contemplation. This paper supplies a rationale, scholarly community, conceptual resources, historical precedents, and guiding questions for bridging information and contemplation.
This article argues for the concept of public library as contemplative space. Public libraries, beyond their information access and public sphere functions, have an important role to play in cultivating the inner lives of their patrons. This situation is even more acute given the psychosocial maladies of our information age. This focus on contemplation is related to the growing interest in mindfulness both in LIS and wider society. However, contemplation is a wider and more effective term to use, as it can refer to a wide range of practices focused on enhancing interiority and promoting a deepened sense of meaning and purpose. Public libraries have an important role to play in providing more affordable, equitable, and inclusive access to contemplative practices through programming and other activities. The article also discusses specific examples of public library as contemplative space. These examples chart a course and vision for a deeper and potentially transformative understanding of how libraries can be effective contemplative spaces for society. In this vision, the health, well-being, and inner lives of patrons are front and centre.
Reports of college students using the library for spiritual practices, including prayer and meditation, consist mainly of anecdotal observations, news stories, or press releases about the creation of such spaces within academic libraries. Driven by their own experiences with students using library spaces for prayer, the authors examined how prevalent this was across US academic institutions. Using a large-scale national survey, this study found library professionals observe a wide range of student prayer behavior in a variety of library spaces, regardless of institutional or campus demographics. The results provide academic libraries with evidence to support accommodating students’ spiritual needs in library spaces.
Have you stumbled across a student using a tucked-away space in your library to pray? Maybe library staff have seen students using a study carrel, a stairway, or even the stacks. Perhaps students requested a space within the library to use for prayer or meditation, and now you provide a permanent space.At the Penn State-Harrisburg and Abington Libraries, we’ve witnessed students practicing their spirituality with whatever space is available or convenient. Through conversations with librarians at other Penn State campuses and at libraries across the United States, we discovered that our experiences were more common than we anticipated, regardless of the religious or secular status of the school. A number of academic libraries have transformed library spaces into areas for various spiritual practices to create a welcoming environment for all students, embarking into new user-centered territory.
This article works to extend two emerging areas in information scholarship: religious practice and embodiment. By reporting on completed research about information practices among Muslim converts in the Toronto, Ontario, Canada area (Guzik 2017), this article reveals how information is shared in the context of religious transitions that take place within a contentious political landscape. Research was guided by ethnography and involved participant observation, semistructured interviews, and timeline drawings (Bagnoli 2009; Sheridan, Chamberlain, and Dupuis 2011). While additional themes related to navigation and authority were identified through the use of constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz 2006), this article focuses specifically on how research participants express and exchange information through nonwritten sources such as clothing items, spoken words, and creative products. The article considers the visibility of information when it is carried on the body as religious symbols, and the implications that this visibility has for accessing expertise, places of worship, and secular public spaces. It also highlights how creative pursuits allow Muslim converts to become information producers and publishers, rather than mere consumers. These roles of production may involve written documents (e.g. sacred texts, scholarly articles, blog posts), but they are primarily expressed through physical actions and spoken words.
This article presents a segment of the results gathered in a doctoral study that investigated information needs and behavior of Catholic priests in Croatia. The study focused on parish priests in particular and their information needs and behavior in the liturgy and care-giving role. The research was conducted with the help of quantitative and qualitative methodology. Print questionnaires were filled out by 327 respondents, while in the follow-up interviews 20 respondents took part. Research results show that respondents, in the care-giving role and liturgy, require information about theology, general culture, psychology, and pedagogy. More than half of respondents find information for liturgy on religious websites and in their personal parish libraries. However, in their care-giving role they seek information most often from their parishers, members in parish pastoral and economic boards, and from colleagues at their regular meetings organized by the (arch)diocese. Both in liturgy and care-giving role, respondents use religious publications to a much larger degree than secular books, magazines, or newspapers. The respondents explained that in liturgy they consult colleagues and parishers in order to exchange advices and ideas, while in the care-giving role some respondents also prefer to seek an advice from an expert in specific field. The results of this study can help Catholic Church and theological faculties when preparing the information literacy courses for future parish priests.
Approximately 10% of Roman Catholic women seriously discern a vocation to religious life during their lifetime. Spiritual discernment is often characterized by prayer and spiritual direction, but also the acquisition of knowledge and information about religious life. No study to date has sought to understand how women seek out and retrieve information about religious life. Therefore, the current study sought to answer the following research question: “what is the information-seeking behavior (ISB) of Catholic women discerning a vocation to religious life?” using Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology. A survey was administered online and yielded responses from 124 participants. Findings indicated that digital and print resources were heavily utilized. However, participants indicated that connecting with a person face-to-face and visiting religious sisters produced a kind of knowledge and information that could not be acquired online, suggesting that their ISB was an integration of digital and print resources and human connection. This study contributes to the literature by intersecting the disciplines of information science and religion to equip practitioners who seek to develop resources for them. The study introduces the concept of limited Internet effectiveness in order to understand the integration of digital versus in-person resources in spiritual religious processes.
In this paper, we investigate religious information behavior by laypeople related to Christian religious belief, through a content analysis of questions posted to the social media Q&A site Yahoo! Answers. The emergent taxonomy of questions is similar to that developed to characterize Yahoo! Answers posts focusing on eating disorders—indicating commonalities of motivation and in the socio-emotional aspects of participation in Yahoo! Answers across topic boundaries. Regarding religious information seeking, the questions are particularly interesting in that they provide insight into non-factual information needs: for example, they illuminate the desire to understand another person’s understanding of religion (rather than to hear an authoritative statement of the tenets of a faith), and to communicate with others to develop an understanding of one’s own religious beliefs.
This study uses interpretative phenomenological analysis, a qualitative interview methodology, to examine the information experience of Catholic readers of the Bible. It presents a detailed, individual-focused account of how Catholics experience the Bible, in its diverse oral, print, and digital manifestations, as a source of religious information. Participants in this study were found to experience the Bible as God's Word, with which they interface in three thematic ways: Connections, Journey, and Practice. These themes are, in turn, linked by the processes of sharing, repetition, and interpretation. This work extends previous research on the religious reading of believers and numinous document experience, and it contributes to a budding conceptualization of reading as an example of document work rather than a merely cognitive activity.
The basic idea of this chapter is to utilize spiritual information in empirically exploring how its purported source beings view the impacts of such information upon various phenomena. This chapter aims at discovering and describing the most central effect dimensions in this context and, by so doing, at building theoretical constructs. The empirical work was done during 2005–2009 in Finland. Because of the relative novelty of the research topic, an inductive approach was applied. The research data were composed of a representative sample of 62 spiritual texts (printed books and articles, as well as Web and e-mail articles). The chapter examines the discovered categories and their subcategories, shows the most salient connections between them and discusses the findings in the context of previous research. The investigation explored two dimensions: the targets and actuality of the impacts of spiritual information. The impact targets were classified as organisms (human individuals, human communities, extraterrestrials, spirits), things (parts of beings, objects, information, situations), processes (events, practices, life) and spaces (areas, Earth, universe). The actuality of the impacts of spiritual information fell under these categories: desired (implicitly desired, intended, explicitly desired, requisitioned) impacts, real (possible, believed, factual, alternative) impacts, nonexistent (hypothetical, no) impacts, as well as conditional (on supernatural sender, information, humans, situation) and unconditional impacts. This inquiry revealed several new varieties of information impact and even built whole new typologies, because quite little was known about both the targets and actuality of the impacts of information before the present study.
While increasing numbers of people are visiting historical sites and museums, the reasons for those visits are not well understood. An exploratory survey concerning what Americans want from their visits to such sites discovered that many tourists are motivated by more than information- or pleasure-seeking. Some indicated a quest for a deeper experience at heritage sites and a desire to make a personal connection with the people and spirit of earlier times. This impulse, termed "numen-seeking," is a strong motivation for many who visit historical sites.
This paper outlines the subject and findings of the author's doctoral thesis, completed at Flinders University of South Australia in 2010, entitled “The Spirit of Change in Museums” which examined the influence of Indigenous cultural and spiritual beliefs and practices on contemporary museums and considered the implications for future developments of the role of the Museum (Simpson 2010). The author demonstrates that in mainstream and community museums, Indigenous elders, ceremonialists and artists are using both cultural protocols and museological methods to protect culturally-sensitive knowledge, preserve or renew spiritual aspects of culture, and address contemporary social and cultural issues such as protection of cultural rights and recovery from post-colonial trauma. This is creating new models of museums shaped by local cultural and spiritual values and ceremonial practices. The author also suggests that by recognising spiritual and intangible dimensions of cultural artefacts and their significance to traditional owners, mainstream museums can potentially play an important role in contributing to these efforts.
This essay explores the dichotomous way we talk about and experience the sacred in art museum space. While Western museum culture has generally encouraged the notion of the museum visit as a quasi-religious, even transcendent, aesthetic encounter with art and architecture, it has shunned
particular and obvious expressions of religious devotion. Why is a certain understanding of “sacred space” permissible, while other meanings of that term seem to make museum professionals uncomfortable? Using numerous examples, this essay first considers museum space and the way
we have come to talk about it, paying particular attention to the evolution from classical to modern architecture and the effect that has had on the museum experience. It then considers the treatment of religious artifacts and cultures in museum spaces and how this might be changing today,
as museums deliberately pursue exhibitions with a more ambitious social agenda, one with contemporary religious content and relevance. The author uses Stephen Greenblatt's formulation of two contrasting modes of museum experience, “resonance” and “wonder,” to think
through varying dimensions of visitor response, and suggests how a sacred/not sacred tension in Western museums is a product of specific historical relationships between culture, art, and museums.
The present study attempts to measure how individuals define the terms religiousness and spirituality, to measure how individuals define their own religiousness and spirituality, and to examine whether these definitions are associated with different demographic, religio/spiritual, and psychosocial variables. The complete sample of 346 individuals was composed of 11 groups of participants drawn from a wide range of religious backgrounds. Analyses were conducted to compare participants' self-rated religiousness and spirituality, to correlate self-rated religiousness and spirituality with the predictor variables, and to use the predictor variables to distinguish between participants who described themselves as "spiritual and religious" from those who identified themselves as "spiritual but not religious." A content analysis of participants' definitions of religiousness and spirituality was also performed. The results suggest several points of convergence and divergence between the constructs religiousness and spirituality. The theoretical, empirical, and practical implications of these results for the scientific study of religion are discussed.
Historic battlefields provoke a broad range of responses from visitors. This article reports on the reasons people give for visiting Gettysburg National Military Park and the perceptions and images they have of the park. The meanings that Gettysburg has for people are varied and in some cases highly affective. The research provides empirical support for the suggestion of other studies that sometimes battlefield visitors begin as tourists, but then are transformed into pilgrims. (Battlefield tourism, pilgrimage, historic sites).
This article explores the outcomes of spiritual information via publications containing such information. Out-come of information is defined as any process that ensues from receiving a message, and the defining feature of spiritual information is that it is perceived as a message originally provided or received by extraphysical means. Finnish publica-tions reportedly produced by means of a spiritual method were sought out. As a result, 109 documents ranging from the 1940s to the 2000s were obtained, processed and analyzed. The qualitative data analysis was carried out inductively, fol-lowing the tenets of the interpretivist methodology. The data suggested that spiritual information is of great significance in all contexts, especially in everyday life, albeit there were also outcomes that can be regarded as trivial. The main result of the analysis is the discovery of five types of information outcome: processing, dispositions to, communicating, using, and effects of information. These types are also categorized at a general and specific level, yielding more detail about the con-cepts. The real contribution of this study is that it pulls together a multitude of various outcomes of information, and orga-nizes them into a coherent, holistic typology. In so doing, the conceptual structure simultaneously implies that research ar-eas which have earlier been considered as separate (e.g. information use and information sharing) can in actual fact be connected, if there is just a will to do it.
1. For an intellectual history of the Western concept of the “secular,” see Taylor (2007).
“Spirituality” often has been framed in social science research as an alternative to organized “religion,” implicitly or explicitly extending theoretical arguments about the privatization of religion. This article uses in-depth qualitative data from a religiously diverse U.S. sample to argue that this either/or distinction not only fails to capture the empirical reality of American religion, it does no justice to the complexity of spirituality. An inductive discursive analysis reveals four primary cultural “packages,” or ways in which people construct the meaning of spirituality in conversation: a Theistic Package tying spirituality to personal deities, an Extra-Theistic Package locating spirituality in various naturalistic forms of transcendence, an Ethical Spirituality focusing on everyday compassion, and a contested Belief and Belonging Spirituality tied to cultural notions of religiosity. Spirituality, then, is neither a diffuse individualized phenomenon nor a single cultural alternative to “religion.” Analysis of the contested evaluations of Belief and Belonging Spirituality allows a window on the “moral boundary work” being done through identifying as “spiritual but not religious.” The empirical boundary between spirituality and religion is far more orous than is the moral and political one.
In this paper we present results from an investigation of religious information searching based on analyzing log files from a large general-purpose search engine. From approximately 15 million queries, we identified 124,422 that were part of 60,759 user sessions. We present a method for categorizing queries based on related terms and show differences in search patterns between religious searches and web searching more generally. We also investigate the search patterns found in queries related to 5 religions: Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism. Different search patterns are found to emerge. Results from this study complement existing studies of religious information searching and provide a level of detailed analysis not reported to date. We show, for example, that sessions involving religion-related queries tend to last longer, that the lengths of religion-related queries are greater, and that the number of unique URLs clicked is higher when compared to all queries. The results of the study can serve to provide information on what this large population of users is actually searching for.
In this article the author revisits an earlier study on the information seeking behavior of clergy members. Wicks found that clergy members tend to operate within closed information systems when their work role is highly dependent upon their work world. The Wicks study differentiated between the work roles of preaching, care giving, and administration and between theological, denominational, and congregational work worlds. In the current article the author reports on a qualitative research project that focuses on sermon preparation as a regular task of the preaching role. Through the current study the author confirms the findings from the Wicks study regarding the influence of clergy member theological and denominational worlds on their preaching role. The findings also suggest that the congregational world significantly affects the information behavior of clergy members engaged in the sermon preparation task, which does not contradict, but expands upon the findings of the Wicks study.
In a recent essay, Dawson (2000) has called for empirical studies of religion in cyberspace. This article contributes one case study toward this larger project, an examination of Kemetic Orthodoxy, an Egyptian revival religion that has developed a following largely through communication on the Internet. Most of the people who become members of Kemetic Orthodoxy learn about this faith, meet other believers, convert and worship online. As Dawson (1998) expects of religious compatible with the Internet, Kemetic Orthodoxy is monistic, tolerant, organizationally open, and experientially oriented, but contrary to his expectations, Kemetic Orthodoxy is based on ritual authority and stresses tradition more than individualism. Like Wicca, Kemetic Orthodoxy is a religion of late modernity
As cultural institutions begin to share physical and human resources, and as new technologies reshape approaches to access and preservation, educational programs must respond in kind. However, it is important to ask in what ways the current convergence of libraries, archives, and museums marks a return to tradition rather than a departure from it. Are new technologies and curricula leading these three fields of study and practice into new territory, or do they represent new stages in an ongoing history of acquisition, documentation, representation, and access to the enduring knowledge of our communities? This article examines the historic convergence between these institutions, with a focus on museums and libraries as repositories of cultural artifacts. The long-standing epistemological links between libraries and museums are explored using archival records and examining two contemporary cases, pointing to the reconvergence of a traditional shared history.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore one broad question: what do information, information processes, information services, as well as information systems and technology have to do with the spiritual?
Design/methodology/approach
The task is accomplished by conducting a literature review of 31 refereed texts in information studies. The paper proceeds by inspecting the manifestation of spirituality in information sources, generic information processes, as well as specific information processes: conceptualizing, seeking, processing, using, storing, describing and providing information.
Findings
A total of 11 relationships between information phenomena and the spiritual are discovered. Based on these, a definition of spiritual information is put forth. There are also some descriptive statistics on the corpus as a whole.
Research limitations/implications
The results are susceptible to limitations imposed by the reviewed studies themselves. Errors of interpretation were a possibility. The article suggests many directions for further research in the context of the spiritual, and discusses how to view spirituality in information science.
Practical implications
Practical implications are only mentioned here and there, because research implications are of primary concern in the investigation.
Originality/value
This paper is the first to synthesize information research in the spiritual domain. Beyond the subject area, the article demonstrates how to classify information processes, and conduct a context‐centric literature review in the field of information studies.
What is the experience of information seeking (IS) by leaders of a church in transition, as they seek the will of God for their church? In this ethnographic pilot study, I begin to create a picture of leaders’ information seeking, first for personal faith building and then for corporate decision making, and I consider the impact of new technologies on these processes. Religious IS did not differ significantly from other everyday-life information seeking (ELIS) experiences, except when subjects were acting in leadership roles. Prominent themes were theological diversity and prayer.
Résumé:
Quelle est l’expérience de recherche d’information des dirigeants d’une église en transition, tandis qu’ils sont en quête de la volonté de Dieu pour leur église ? Dans cetteétude ethnographique pilote, je tente d’élaborer une image de la recherche d’information des dirigeants, d’abord pour l’édification de leur foi personnelle, puis pour leurs prises de décisions corporatives, et j’examine l’impact des nouvelles technologies sur ces processus. La recherche d’information religieuse ne diffère pas significativement des expériences de recherche d’information de la vie quotidienne, sauf dans les rôles de leadership. Les thèmes importants ont été la diversité théologique et la prière.
This article explores how people experience health-related uncertainties and how they look to biomedical and religious sources of information in response. Data were gathered in a larger project focused on spirituality in everyday life. Respondents were not asked any direct questions about their health or health care, but almost all of the 95 participants brought up the topics in response to other questions. About one-third spoke of being uncertain about some aspect of their health or healthcare. We explore the health-related topics about which people were uncertain and how they looked to biomedical and religious sources of information, most often seeing the religious as a support for the biomedical. We outline the range of ways they experienced God in this process pointing to the multiple complex ways they make sense of health-related uncertainties.
The mass suicide of 39 members of Heaven's Gate in March of 1997 led to public fears about the presence of ‘spiritual predators’ on the world wide web. This paper describes and examines the nature of these fears, as reported in the media. It then sets these fears against what we know about the use of the Internet by new religions, about who joins new religious movements and why, and the social profile of Internet users. It is argued that the emergence of the Internet has yet to significantly change the nature of religious recruitment in contemporary society. The Internet as a medium of communication, however, may be having other largely unanticipated effects on the form and functioning of religion, both old and new, in the future. Some of the potential perils of the Internet are discussed with reference to the impact of this new medium on questions of religious freedom, community, social pluralism, and social control.
The aim of this article is to determine how Baptist ministers seek information. Further research questions were used to narrow down the broad aim to a workable level. What causes ministers to seek and stop seeking information? What sources do they use? How do the information-seeking habits change as they pursue their various roles? A multiple-case study design was used. Ten ministers were interviewed with a protocol that used the Critical Incident Technique. Interviews were transcribed and coded in order to identify patterns. Baptist ministers sought information in order to accomplish a wide variety of administrative tasks, prepare for sermons, and provide counsel. When ministers searched for information in the role of administrators, they preferred informal sources of information but often used formal sources also. When searching as preachers, they used formal sources. Level of effort was influenced by experience, potential impact, and the importance of the task. When they had enough information to complete a task and when collecting more information was not worth the effort, ministers stopped looking for information. I concluded that Baptist ministers varied their information-seeking process based upon the roles they played, primarily the roles of administrator and preacher.
The main aim of the article is discussion of the conceptual framework for defining religion from a sociological perspective. One of the possible orderings of its development is showing historical periods and conceptual streams. As far as history is concerned the author distinguishes three periods: classical, post-classical and contemporary, showing dominant themes and ways of approaching religion in each of them. An alternative way of ordering is proposed in the second part of the article based on the source of religious change identified as the crucial point by sociologists working on theories of religion. There are three perspectives in identifying religious change: giving priority to individuals, to social systems and to religion itself. Every perspective has some outcomes for understanding the place of religion in social and individual life. The last part of the article is devoted to presenting the impact of religious conceptions on interpretational disputes between sociologists of religion.
IntroductionPatterns of Religious Life in EuropeEurope from the Inside: a Memory MutatesEurope from the OutsideConclusion
Recent discussions of religious attitudes and behavior tend to suggest—and in a few cases, provide evidence—that Americans are becoming “more spiritual” and “less religious.” What do people mean, however, when they say they are “spiritual” or “religious”? Do Americans see these concepts as definitionally or operationally different? If so, does that difference result in a zero-sum dynamic between them? In this article, we explore the relationship between “being religious” and “being spiritual” in a national sample of American Protestants and compare our findings to other studies, including Wade Clark Roof’s baby-boomer research (1993, 2000), 1999 Gallup and 2000 Spirituality and Health polls, and the Zinnbauer et al. (1997) study of religious definitions. In addition to presenting quantitative and qualitative evidence about the way people think about their religious/spiritual identity, the article draws implications about modernity, the distinctiveness of religious change in the recent past, and the deinstitutionalization of religion.
This study asked whether the information-seeking behavior of pastoral clergy was governed by the interaction of their work worlds and work roles. It was proposed that the pastor operates in a closed system when world and role are significantly dependent upon each other and in an open system of information-seeking when world and role are less dependent upon each other. The study was grounded in the sense-making theory of information seeking developed by Dervin and colleagues, and in a combining of social network theory and role theory. The investigator employed a mailed survey with a large stratified random sample of 378 pastoral clergy from six religious groups and structured interviews with 20 practicing clergy and qualitative techniques to analyze the content.Findings indicate that pastoral clergy tended to use different types of sources in different roles and that certain combinations of pastoral worlds and pastoral roles influenced whether the information-seeking behavior would be open or closed. The theological world contributed to a closed pattern in all three roles, while the denominational and congregational worlds helped produce this effect in only the administrative role.
This article explores how the post 9/11 climate has impacted Muslim-Canadians' information practices, including their uses of various information sources, and their attitudes and perceptions regarding their information rights in a post 9/11 world. A survey was conducted in 2004-2005 with 120 participants and supplemented by in-depth interviews. The population consisted of Muslim students enrolled in post-secondary institutions in Toronto, Ontario. The findings highlight Muslims' malaise in a post 9/11 environment; the deep mistrust they hold vis-à-vis the media; the importance they give to media and information literacy skills for all; as well as a call for increased introspection inside the Muslim community(ies). The study contributes to shedding light on a community that has often being talked and written about but not often heard. By soliciting Muslim individuals' perspectives, we enable them to voice their opinions about how the 9/11 events impacted on their lives and how their information practices inform their experiences.
This article explores informational uses of spiritual information presented in spiritual publications. Informational use entails cognitive or communicational activity that — on the basis of information — focuses on representations of the perceived existence, whereas practical use of information centres on tangible — material or energetic — activities of the real world. Some earlier research has been done on the informational uses of information, but spiritual information has been ignored almost altogether in this context. The empirical work was grounded on a representative sample of spiritual texts. The method of analysing the data was inductive content analysis. The main result of this study was the discovery and dissection of three fundamental varieties of informational information use: internalizing information, processing knowledge, and externalizing knowledge. The classification constructed in this study can be seen as a useful tool for further investigation into information use, but it should be refined in subsequent research.