Secular Societies, Spiritual Selves? : The Gendered Triangle of Religion, Secularity and Spirituality

Secular Societies, Spiritual Selves? is the first volume to address the gendered intersections of religion, spirituality and the secular through an ethnographic approach.

The book examines how ‘spirituality’ has emerged as a relatively ‘silent’ category with which people often signal that they are looking for a way to navigate between the categories of the religious and the secular, and considers how this is related to gendered ways of being and relating. Using a lived religion approach the contributors analyse the intersections between spirituality, religion and secularism in different geographical areas, ranging from the Netherlands, Portugal and Italy to Canada, the United States and Mexico. The chapters explore the spiritual experiences of women and their struggle for a more gender equal way of approaching the divine, as well as the experience of men and of those who challenge binary sexual identities advocating for a queer spirituality.

This volume will be of interest to anthropologists and sociologists as well as scholars in other disciplines who seek to understand the role of spirituality in creating the complex gendered dynamics of modern societies.

Anna Fedele is Senior Researcher at the CRIA-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), Portugal. Her research focuses on the intersections of gender and religion with a particular interest for ritual creativity and pilgrimage. She has done fieldwork in Southern Europe and Latin America about holistic spiritualities and Catholicism.

Kim E. Knibbe is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Sociology of Religion at Groningen University, the Netherlands. She is currently directing the project 'Sexuality, Religion and Secularism' (funded by the Netherlands Foundation for Research, NWO). Previous research focused on Catholicism and spirituality in the Netherlands and on Nigerian Pentecostalism in Europe and the Netherlands.