Workshop inner-life spirituality (Windermere, UK, June 2-5 2008)
At the beginning of June, Kim Knibbe and I visited a workshop entitled ‘Inner-life spirituality’ in Windermere, UK. Windermere is a very touristic, but beautiful village in the Lake District. Once the Lake District was home to the great Romantic poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge), which was probably one of the reasons for the organizers of this conference, Paul Heelas (Lancaster University) and Dick Houtman (Erasmus University Rotterdam), to choose Windermere as the location for this conference on inner-life spirituality. After all, contemporary inner-life spirituality has been deeply influenced by the Romantic Movement.
The workshop took place in the gorgeous Langdale Chase, a hotel situated on a beautiful country estate on the shore of one of the bigger lakes in the Lake District. The quiet atmosphere of the hotel and the views from my hotel room and the conference room was very conducive to an unconstrained intellectual reflection.
The overarching aim of this workshop was to provide a landmark contribution on inner-life spirituality (which by the way, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2009). Both senior experts and young academics (25 in all) were invited to engage in this project. A number of topics were discussed, among which spirituality and business, spirituality and the internet, the spiritual dimensions of online gaming, spirituality and New Age, and the subjective turn in ‘traditional’ religions such as Catholicism, Protestantism and Islam.
Kim Knibbe presented a paper based on her PhD-research, to show how religious power works in shaping subjectivities across several generations and how this feeds into the contemporary longing for a ‘religion without power’ (i.e. spirituality). This longing shapes experimenting with various forms of power and critique in Catholic and spiritualist contexts. Furthermore, Kim Knibbe was asked to contribute to a book on possession/spiritualism, edited by Andrew Dawson of Lancaster University.
In my own contribution, entitled ‘Selfation: Exploring the evangelical third way’, I discussed ‘the subjective turn’ in contemporary evangelicalism as this religious movement takes shape among Dutch youngsters. Compared to the many scientific accounts that relate the subjective turn mainly to new religious movements such as New Age and not to a ‘traditional’ religion such as Christianity, I argued that evangelicalism offers a Christianity which to a certain degree is characterized by the subjective turn of modern culture as well. This is most visible in the way evangelicalism incorporates (and redefines) the moral ends of contemporary ‘culture of authenticity’ (an expression of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor) such as well-being, authenticity, self-fulfillment and pleasure in its religious repertoire, which I demonstrated by discussing three distinct domains: sexual ethics, popular culture, and worship.
The discussions were very stimulating. The papers were of high quality and plenty of time was allotted to discuss each separate paper. Because all the participants work in more or less the same field of study, this workshop was an excellent opportunity to get an overview of the field and to relate one’s own research to that of others.
I am most grateful to the BOAS fund and the Blaise Pascal Institute for having made this conference visit possible.
