Call for Papers

Editor: Géraldine Mossière, Associate Professor, Institut d’études religieuses, Université de Montréal

Abstract Submission Deadline: July 15, 2020

In this special review, we want to articulate Foucault’s idea of “political spirituality” as it relates to youths for whom religious change is a special inspiration for the transformation of the self and the contestation of prevailing and historical norms and values. The literature shows that while youths are more prone to test new social, political and symbolical experiences and disrupt dominant values and ethical chains, including religious change, such experimentation is also meant to convey new values and ideas. Youths are therefore often seen as vigorous forces of innovation and change in societies.

Contributions will consider youths’ religious behavior, and more specifically their embrace of non-transmitted religions as specific ethics, as commitment to alternative or counter- social or political conducts. Papers will address following concerns:

• How do religious practices and beliefs articulate transformations of the self? Through which mechanisms? By mobilizing and appropriating what kind of religious or spiritual resources?

• Through these operations and negotiations, which personal, social and political desires blossom or are conveyed? How might we interpret spirituality in contrast to religion in this setting?

• How does political spirituality unfold? How might religious beliefs and practices frame political, social and ecological alternative orders? What kind of ideological and political orders do such forms of religious counter-conduct convey? To what extent do these conducts display counter or alternative orders?

• How might spiritual views of the self become integrated into specific patterns of community or sociality? How does political spirituality articulate other views of social justice and human dignity and respect?

• How do affect and temporality support and colour youth’ political spiritualities?

Source: isa-rc22.org