Spiritual elasticity and crisis: From non-religiosity to transreligiosity—An introduction

Abstract

From the socio-economic and political crisis in southern Europe during the last few decades, to the more recent global healthcare crisis created by the COVID-19 pandemic, contemporary societies have faced and are still under the impact of considerable sociocultural change. The domain of religiosity has certainly not remained unaffected at the level of institutional, vernacular religion (Bowman and Valk 2012) and lived religion (McGuire 2008; Ammerman 2021) and of religious “belief without belonging” (Davie 1994) or “believing in belonging” (Day 2011). One of the most prominent consequences with reference to the shifting boundaries of contemporary religiosity, for example, is the rising popularity of non-denominational forms of “holistic” (Sointu and Woodhead 2008) and/or “New Age” (Heelas 1996; Sutcliffe and Gilhus 2013) spirituality.