The website academia.edu is one of those sources that keeps me continuously informed about the progress of academic discourse in the domains of the humanities and social sciences, but also about news from the natural and formal sciences, including quantum physics.
Today a reading recommendation landed from academia.edu in my mailbox, which drew my attention to a work by Linda C. Ceriello with the striking title: “Toward a Metamodern Reading of Spiritual but Not Religious Mysticisms“It is a chapter released by Ms. Ceriello from one of her books.”
SBNR – this is the acronym of a movement that operates under the label “Sspiritual But Not Religious” and has triggered a sometimes controversial discussion in the academic-sociological environment, but is naturally also viewed as a challenge by church institutions. New York Times cites the results of a survey according to which 72 percent of the so-called millennials (those born between 1981 and 1997) identify more spiritually than religiously, meaning that they can get by well without a personal concept of God or church-related religious accessories.
What is interesting to me about the work of Linda C. Ceriello is her classification of the SBNR movement as a metamodern phenomenon. According to her, the followers of this movement consciously move between poles of interpretation (“oscillate”) by accepting practices, media, and narratives as part of their life experience despite, or perhaps because of (!), their contradictions. Pop culture and social media are seen as carriers and amplifiers of such mystical tendencies, which migrate from the New Age phase into a broader SBNR everyday culture.
Well, it's fine. Their definition of mysticism, as well as the general definition of mysticism, is something to argue about. At least, I see it this way at the moment: It would be too easy to pigeonhole this movement into the so-called widespread esoteric syncretism; metamodernism's view of humanity and the world is considerably more nuanced. My feeling, rather, is that the hype surrounding the SBNR movement could be a kind of precursor or trailblazer for a much more sophisticated approach, which Einstein already described as follows: "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." Are we on the path to a science or psychology of the mind?
