Abstract
This chapter chooses a concept of impeccable sociological heritage – lifestyle – and looks at it in terms of religion: religious lifestyles. A religious lifestyle is, in effect, a quasi-formulated set of “ways of going about living” that a person develops across the adult life-course. Religious lifestyles are how people work out a combination of personal, familial, social, and similar relationships in regard to belonging, consumption, style, or persona more or less in a public or private way, but without obligation; that is, the privatization of religious life such that within wide bounds the religious life is capable of being socially ignored, yet personally meaningful, with or without perceivable consequences beyond the individual.
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Notes
- 1.
Among the authors who have amply developed this theme of dissonance, Arnold Gehlen (1990) writes that man’s typically “non-specialized” nature makes him superior to other animals: “open to the world.” The behavior of man can be placed between the two spheres of objective world and subjective world, with the possibility of reacting autonomously to his environment by means of selective choices. It is not by chance that a key concept in this tradition of thought is contingency. The post-modern condition marked by high contingency is that which most indicates a sense of limit and the situated nature of the individual.
- 2.
Yet the same Weber points out more than once in The Protestant Ethic that all the reformation doctrines tried to bridge the gap between doctrine and everyday behavior. Indeed daily life proceeded with styles of life far from the exhortations of puritanical theologians. People’s style of life was so different from the official ethical line that places of “ordered disorder” were set aside, where, periodically, individuals’ otherness and transgressiveness could explode.
- 3.
This principle is the thesis of a classic work on style, A. L. Kroeber’s Style and Civilizations (1963). This sentence was placed on the exergue by Kroeber, who defined style as a “super-organic” tendency of culture. The great civilizations were characterized by “super-styles,” “styles of style,” and/or “total lifestyles.”
- 4.
It was above all Berger’s co-authored volume The Homeless Mind (1973) that highlighted the pluralization of life worlds and the biographical possibilities that characterize the modern subject.
- 5.
All the phenomenological models have made significant contributions to the clarification of relations between social and subjective complexity, starting with Schütz’s subjective “multiple realities,” i.e., “orders of reality in contrast or competition with one another: … daily life, the world of our imagination, of art, of science, etc.” All experiences in the circle of each of these worlds constitute “finite provinces of meaning,” each of which has its own particular lifestyle (Schütz 1945; cf. Bellah et al. 1996: 99 ff).
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
This is the situation interpreted by Berger and Luckmann (1966: 140 ff) in terms of “cognitive pluralism.”
- 9.
The reference here is to Italian scholars who, in numerous works, have documented this transformation of religious life in Italy, most notably Salvatore Abruzzese, Stefano Allievi, Carmellina Canta, Alessandro Castegnaro, Vincenzo Cesareo, Roberto Cipriani, Federico D’Agostino, Italo De Sandre, Giuseppe di Gennaro, Luca Diotallevi, Franco Garelli, Giuseppe Giordan, Gustavo Guizzardi, Renzo Guolo, Clemente Lanzetti, Pino Lucà Trombetta, Stefano Martelli, Arnaldo Nesti, Vito Orlando, Enzo Pace, and Luigi Tomasi.
- 10.
Hervieu-Léger (2003) identifies six separate paths among young people for identifying with Christianity. These paths, in their means of reproduction, have some elements in common with the concept of lifestyle. The six types (affective Christianity, heritage Christianity, humanitarian Christianity, political Christianity, humanistic Christianity, aesthetic Christianity) “do not automatically result in the affirmation of an identity which conforms to the criteria required by the ecclesiastical institution, or a community integration capable of guaranteeing definite stabilization of the religious reference to which the young people have appealed” (pp. 65–66).
- 11.
Chaney (1996: 8) has defined the concept of sensitivity as “a way of responding to events, actions or phenomena which possesses a particular system of consistency insofar as in identifying a sensitivity it is possible to explain or predict responses to new situations.”
- 12.
Within the present interpretative model, we can adopt a distinction between “sense” and “meaning.” Whereas “meaning” refers to the expressive communicative content of every practice, and therefore to the individual’s interpretation of every lifestyle component, “sense” refers to the same individual’s interpretation of the totality of practices that make up the lifestyle, and therefore the lifestyle considered as a whole.
- 13.
For this reason Reimer (1995: 125) writes that “the analysis of lifestyles should show similarities and differences between groups of individuals rather than similarities and differences between individuals.”
- 14.
Baudrillard (1982: 10) describes the Beauberg Center (or Pompidou Center) in Paris as a great “cultural hypermarket” that attracts the masses.
- 15.
Here there is a particularly thorny problem for lifestyle analysis. The development of these identity potentialities changes the very concept of lifestyle or indicates that there are two different kinds of lifestyle: one that develops by imitation and participation on a practical level; the other that also embraces the level of values and beliefs (cognitive-value dimension). The Catholic religion has undoubtedly always expected the sharing of both practices and values.
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Berzano, L. (2011). Religious Lifestyles. In: Giordan, G., Swatos, Jr., W. (eds) Religion, Spirituality and Everyday Practice. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1819-7_5
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