Paul Heelas’s research while affiliated with Erasmus University Rotterdam and other places

... "More exactly," he says, "it appears that belief in the sacred of inner-life spirituality is becoming more popular than belief in the sacred of transcendent theism." 8 Kasselstrand, writing as recently as 2022, said that in Northern Protestant Europe "non-attendance at religious services is typical, importance of religion in people's lives is low, religious disaffiliation is increasingly common, and fewer and fewer individuals believe in the traditional tenets of a Christian heritage." 9 Spirituality in Nordic countries tends to be conceived in existential terms as about the meaning of existence for human beings and the world of which they are part. ...

Reference:

Authentic Subjectivity as a Lens for Christians Studying Spirituality

... However, this theoretical concern soon runs into a methodological impasse. Indeed, the sudden mismatch between new theoretical interests and former goals of data collection (Houtman et al., 2012) makes the existing data largely sub-optimal for the tasks currently at hand. In fact, for decades researchers collected data about religion to historically trace the decline of beliefs and practices in an attempt to test hypotheses based on secularization theory. ...

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Non-Religious Discourses and the Secularization of the Secular: A Computational Study of Organized Non-Religion in the United States and the United Kingdom (1881-2019)

... In practice, this implies that questions of belief, belonging, and practices receive answers that are not necessarily coherent in terms of the religious-secular divide. In other words, the secular-sacred boundary becomes less clear as the religious community becomes less obviously religious and the secular less obviously secular (Heelas, 1998). ...

Reference:

It Takes Two for a Culture War

... É importante ressalvar que o termo é dificilmente balizado porque o seu "conteúdo permanece extremamente vago" (Hanegraaff, 1996, p. 1), dificultando uma definição comum. Apesar disso, trabalhos de autores como Hanegraaff (1996), Sutcliffe (2003), Faivre (2010) e Heelas (1996;2008) permitiram, através de uma análise sócio-histórica da estrutura implícita de crenças, estabelecer a sua polissemia, isto é, encontrar os seus múltiplos sentidos. ...

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NEW AGE: UMA REVOLUÇÃO CULTURAL EM DOIS MOMENTOS (NEW AGE: A CULTURAL REVOLUTION IN TWO MOMENTS)

... In addition to shaping the ideology of the "New Age", Christianity has influenced the development of specific spiritual practices within the Movement. For example, the practice of "Christian yoga," which combines yoga postures with Christian prayer and meditation, reflects the syncretic nature of contemporary spirituality (Houtman, Auper, Heelas, 2009). ...

Reference:

New Age as a form of individual religiosity

... At the root of this debate is Leila Amaral's influential work. In collaboration with Paul Heelas during the early 1990s, they noted an ideological bifurcation between a Bwisdom/love wing^of Romantic practices and beliefs emphasizing the selfcultivation ideal, contrasted with a Bpower/energy wing^upholding an instrumental approach to self-empowerment (Heelas and Amaral 1994). Yet, later, departing from Heelas' own emphasis on holistic individualism (Heelas 1996), Amaral instead focuses on the carnivalesque nature of Brazilian New Age posited as a Bsyncretism in motion ( Amaral 1999: 68). ...

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From Gregarious Syncretism to Reflexive Individualism: a Critical Review of New Age Studies in Latin America

... Inspirations and free borrowings from non-Western culturesare also popular in New Age spirituality. In turn, Anna and her husband's narrative was characterized by another conviction: that both institutional and non-institutional paths of various kinds can lead to the same immanent Godthis is a common belief in New Age/new spirituality (see Heelas 1993), to which they seemed to be attached. 7 Anna claimed that one can find God not only in buildings but also in nature. ...

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Humanist marriage ceremonies in Poland: re-enchantment and four social constructions of the sacred

... Moreover, an one-off 'body count' does not teach us much about growth over time. And even if it could, this research practice suffers from so many shortcomings that it is actually better to avoid it altogether (Houtman, Heelas & Achterberg 2012). We therefore need to rely on the questionnaires of the large internationally comparative survey programs such as the European Values Study (to be discussed in more detail below). ...

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In the Shadow of Secularization Theory: Neglected Issues in the Social-Scientific Study of Spirituality

... Self-understanding in turn transforms by undoing restrictive self-conceptualisations (Vaughan 1979). The reclaiming of self-agency in areas such as felt experience and meaning-making provides a more fluid identity-narrative as a result (Aupers and Houtman 2006;Ceriello 2018;Heelas 2006;Saucier and Skrzypińska 2006). Self-transformation can as such be articulated as the unification of spiritual experience: as a holistic type of knowing sourced in a connectedness to a unified reality (Walach 2015) with one's concept of self, actualised as a radical shift in perspective leading into an expanded sense of identity, in turn affecting changes in relationships, values, meaning, and priorities (MacDonald 2009;Masters 2010;Schlitz, Vieten, and Amorok 2009). ...

Reference:

Spiritual pathfinding: The meaning and process of self-agency in contemporary spirituality

... For example, the item measuring the diffuseness and immanence of the sacred can be found in a slightly altered form in the WVS, in the EVS, in the Religious and Moral Pluralism (RAMP) survey, and in CentERdata's 'Who Designs the Best Telepanel Study' of 1997. The RAMP survey also contains, in a slightly modified form, the item measuring self-spirituality (see Heelas & Houtman, 2009;Houtman et al. 2012), and CentERdata's 'Who Designs the Best Telepanel 21 Study' of 1997 also includes the item measuring perennialism (see Houtman & Mascini, 2002). ...

Reference:

The Post-Christian Spirituality Scale (PCSS): Misconceptions, Obstacles, Prospects