Annie M. Fujikawa’s research while affiliated with Fresno Pacific University and other places

This article summarizes 2 qualitative analyses investigating the experience of Christian spirituality in emerging adulthood. The 2 grounded theory analyses utilized a common dataset collected from Christian college students (n = 18) who completed the Relational Spirituality Interview, an in-depth, semistructured interview that explores numerous domains of spiritual experience from a relational spirituality perspective. The first analysis explored the spiritual experiences of all 18 participants and looked for general themes that commonly characterized emerging adults' perceived relationship to God. The broader sample of participants described their spirituality as authentic, maturing, and corrective but also as guarded, fluctuating, and insecure. The second analysis examined thematic differences between sample participants nominated as spiritual exemplars (n = 8) and spiritual nonexemplars (n = 10). The primary themes differentiating spiritual exemplars from nonexemplars were taking ownership of one's faith, being shaped by spiritual community, and facing spiritual pain.

This article empirically investigates two alternative, competing hypotheses regarding human attachment patterns and attachment patterns with respect to people's spiritual experiences of relationship with God. The correspondence model posits that attachment patterns with humans correspond to, or are reflected in attachment patterns in individuals' experiences of God. The compensation model, in contrast proposes that attachment patterns with humans do not correspond to God attachment patterns presumably because God functions as a substitute attachment figure for those with insecure human attachments. Overall, the evidence has been somewhat mixed, with some findings supporting correspondence and some supporting compensation. It is argued here that this is due to limitations of the conceptual models, more specifically, lack of clarity regarding the compensation model, and the limited way in which spirituality and religiousness has been conceptualized and measured. We propose a conceptual distinction between implicit spiritual functioning and explicit spiritual functioning, which reflect two separate ways of knowing and processing emotional information: explicit knowledge and implicit relational knowledge (Stern et al., 1998). Based on this distinction, we propose a conceptual model arguing that correspondence operates at implicit levels of spiritual experience, and that human attachment patterns are not associated with explicit spiritual functioning. Results overall provided strong support for this model.