This book seeks to explore how peopleâs lives are transformed as they engage in recovery programs and how those new selves are interwoven with new ways of being religious. How do they enact their conversion and speak about their recovery? How are the changes embodied and lived in the many settings in which such programs exist? And how do they navigate the authorities that often mandate their participation? It seeks, therefore, to demonstrate the vital relevance of the concept of lived religion for the study of religious conversion in the particular context of recovery.
Recovery-based conversion research not only allows for a broader range of understanding spiritual transformation; it radically alters the impact of the religiously lived life itself. A focus on lived religion underscores the role of linguistic regimes (âautobiographical remixesâ), meaning-making processes and the effect of bodily practices in different recovery settings in which what is deemed sacred is produced and performed in the realm of the everyday. Therefore, readers are invited into a deeper, unique exploration of lived religion and how it functions to keep alive the possibility that underneath recovery processes is a transformative realm that might bring things back into a meaningful order.
In tackling the main theme of the book, the nexus between the self, the social, and what people deem sacred in recovery from a lived religion perspective, we focus on the power of the âordinary,â âeverydayness,â and âembodimentâ as key to exploring the intersection of religious conversion, lived particularities of recovery and the expectation and action of everyday reality of religion. By this we mean that our point of departure is lived experience. This lived dimension of religion focuses on the real presence and active involvement of God in everyday life or what Robert Orsi (2016, 216) calls âintimacy with God really present.â1 Religious meaning-making, narrative coping strategies,2 material and spatial immersions in recovery processes are embedded in practices and actions, which allow us to correlate these experiences to the everyday habitus of religious actors and their specific abilities of negotiation, articulation, and modes of lived religious expressions. In recent years, this framework for studying lived religious complexities from the perspective of ordinary people (âreligion from belowâ) has started to cover a broad field of scientific discourses and gained popularity within religious studies, practical/ empirical theology and the social sciences in general (cf. Sremac and Ganzevoort 2018). The very fact that the discussion on lived religious studies calls for both cultural empirical reflection as well as conceptual clarification (it is still very descriptive, lacking a well-developed onto-epistemological apparatus) makes it an interesting area for multi- and interdisciplinary research of conversion and recovery. Taking and engaging a lived-religion framework provides more than a tool for expression-formation, description, interpretation, explanation, analyses, or a heuristic revealing of the everydayness of lived recovery. Lived religion studies of conversion and recovery take their starting point in religious practices and the process of experience-formation in which subjects articulate and negotiate their lived experiences in a specific context of recovery. Streib et al. (2008, ixâx) claim that â[l]ived religion thus shifts the focus in order to attend to the religiosity of individuals and groups as embedded in the contexts of biographies, which implies that the phenomenon in question doesnât have to have an overtly religious nature.â In other words, lived religion as empirical cultural hermeneutics aims to more implicit or ambiguous religious realities. In this way, lived religion is seen as performative praxis of what someone deems sacred. By sacred is meant here those dimensions of our experience that allow for another way of relationality, negotiating, perceiving, being and acting in the world (Sremac and Ganzevoort 2018, 4). What someone deems sacred is not necessarily another reality outside this world/ reality that transcends the mundane of everyday life, but rather another orientation (or re-negotiation) toward this reality (Sremac and Ganzevoort 2018, 4).
In this volume, we home in on a large number of performative behaviors and discursive and semantic regimes through which recovery is practiced as the basis for spiritual transformation. Complex interactions happen between the person, what a person deems sacred, and various recovery settings (such as prisons, substance-dependence recovery settings and domestic violence shelters). As some of the chapters show, these settings are intertwined with each other. The present volume, Lived Religion, Conversion and Recovery, covers this broad and complex area of interrelated issues. Thus, an additional goal of this volume is to broaden the language of conversion and recovery in lived religion studies beyond a sole focus on substance dependenceâto show how conversion and recovery apply also to the social rehabilitation from prison and to the transformation of victim status in domestic violence.
The faith-based recovery movement as a specialized system of care has grown rapidly over the past half-century. For example, today, the system of substance-dependence care involves the expansion and diversification of nonclinical recovery supports available as an alternative to established empirical medicine, and new recovery mutual aid groups have emerged through processes that fall outside the traditional categories of medical treatment (cf. White 2009, 2010; White et al. 2013). White and Kurtz (2006, 25) define recovery as the process through which severe substance dependence is âresolved in tandem with the development of physical, emotional, ontological (spirituality, life meaning), relational and occupational health.â The strength of the recovery principle is that it can bring about a shift in thinkingâa transformation in attitude and behavior both by the recovery community and by the individual. For us in this volume, a spiritually grounded characterization of recovery is of utmost importance. A spiritually based recovery program can be understood as a set of suggested strategies and practices that are based on religious world-making embedded in lived experience whereby the recovering individual is motivated to rely on external metaphysical powers, what someone deems sacred, or God (Galanter 2007, 269). For Rodriguez (2013), spiritual recoveries encompass profound transformation in a personâs sense of self. These emerge through variations in the individualâs affective, linguistic, cognitive, and spiritual aspects. It is then important for us to focus on spiritually based treatment and recovery in which existential issues are resolved within the religious and/or spiritual framework and its discursive and bodily regimes. In these particular recovery programs, profound religious or spiritual experience can serve, for example, as a catalyst in overcoming substance dependence.
While the relationship between religious conversion and homelessness, imprisonment, and substance dependence has received some attention by sociologists, religious studies scholars and psychologists (e.g. Kerley 2014; Kerley and Copes 2009; Smilde 2007; Sremac 2015, 2018; Sremac and Ganzevoort 2013), more research in this area is certainly needed. At the same time, conversion as lived, performed, narrated, embodied and practiced in recovery settings still remained under-studied. This book thus seeks to address the gaps in the literature through the collection of chapters from authors in different academic fields situated on various continents and cultural contexts. We c...