In several countries, an increasing number of people are identifying as “Spiritual But Not Religious” (SBNR). This heterogenous group is made up of many different kinds of people. But a unifying thread is a desire to have a meaningful spiritual life outside of the beliefs and/or practices of a traditional religion such as Christianity. Many SBNRs are spiritual seekers who report meaningful non-ordinary experiences, including awareness of presences, but many other kinds of experiences as well. Our current project is to investigate the spiritual experiences of SBNRs to help shed light on this growing population and their experiences.
The spiritual experiences of SBNRs raise a host of questions at the intersection of anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and religion. To better address such questions, we’ve enlisted an interdisciplinary group of scholars. These include anthropologists (Tanya Luhrmann and Eleanor Schille-Hudson, Postdoc); cognitive scientists who work both on bodily awareness (Olaf Blanke and Courtney Applewhite, Postdoc) and hallucinations (Philip Corlett and Santiago Castiello de Obeso, Postdoc); and philosophers working on epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of religion (Dean Zimmerman, Terence Cuneo, Jada Twedt Strabbing, Eric Steinhart, Timothy Perrine, and Wes Skolitis).
More specifically, our interdisciplinary team will look at four interrelated questions:
Anthropologists, with some assistance from philosophers, will conduct phenomenological interviews with SBNRs to better understand their questions and thereby answer the first question. Anthropologists will use the insights from the interviews to help craft training protocols for cultivating spiritual experiences for SBNRs. Anthropologists and cognitive scientists will then recruit participants to test the training protocols. The cognitive scientists will use neuroimaging both before and after the training to better understand the potential mechanisms underlying such training. Lastly, the philosophers will look at both the interviews with SBNRs, and the results from the training protocol, to explore whether and how SBNRs find meaning in their spiritual experiences.
To better answer these questions, our team will meet yearly to collaborate, compare notes, provide feedback, and assist each other. Given the rapid rise of SBNRs in recent years, we think that addressing these questions is quite timely.