Dialectical thinking in contemporary spirituality: Reconciling contradictory beliefs through metamodern oscillations between two ways of thinking
Psychologists are paying increasing attention to a distinction between two ways of thinking. Cognitive psychologists discern between non-reflective “intuitive” and critical reflective “analytic” thinking. Cultural psychologists discern between context-focused “holistic” and object-focused “analytic”...
| Authors: | ; |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2025
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| In: |
Archive for the psychology of religion
Year: 2025, Volume: 47, Issue: 1, Pages: 79-98 |
| Further subjects: | B
dual-process models of cognition
B Spirituality B Dialectical thinking B metamodernism B International Community of Unividuals B holistic versus analytic thinking B Tim Freke B intuitive versus analytic thinking |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (kostenfrei) |
| Summary: | Psychologists are paying increasing attention to a distinction between two ways of thinking. Cognitive psychologists discern between non-reflective “intuitive” and critical reflective “analytic” thinking. Cultural psychologists discern between context-focused “holistic” and object-focused “analytic” thinking. Both find the former strongly correlated with religious beliefs and Asian cultures, the latter with secular beliefs and Euro-American cultures. Yet, recent studies convincingly suggest: first, that analytic thinking does not just relate to secular beliefs but also to alternative beliefs that straddle the boundaries between secular and religious worldviews; second, that critical reflective thinking includes both the holistic context-focus of Asian religions and the analytic object-focus of European philosophies and sciences. This article supports these recent studies in the psychology of religion based on recent studies from the history and sociology of religion and a discourse analysis of interviews with members of a small-scale twenty-first-century spiritual group, as an example. We show that people who identify as spiritual in a metamodern context use both holistic and analytic thinking in creating alternative worldviews, which dialectically reconcile beliefs that many within modern western cultures would consider contradictory. We conclude that this both/and logic challenges theories and stereotypes about “secular versus religious” and “eastern versus western” thinking. |
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| ISSN: | 1573-6121 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Archive for the psychology of religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1177/00846724241245147 |
