This week we looked at religion, culture and ‘unchurched spirituality’. Prior to today’s class I was unaware of the ways in which religion and culture are interlinked. Similarly to last week, I felt that learning about the views of different scholars enabled us to look at the topics in more depth from a non-biased approach. This week we could compare the two scholars – Max Weber and Karl Marx – as they both had completely different views about religion. Having previously studied Sociology I have come across these two theorists before when studying social class. Regardless of being familiar with their work I was unaware of their work on religion. I am going to read more of each theorist’s work on religion to prepare me for the exam.
We later looked at ‘unchurched spirituality’. Over several years there has been a great decline in the number of people who would consider themselves to be religious. Unchurched spirituality are forms of spirituality that are not associated with any organised religions. I found this part of the lecture incredibly interesting, however, I also found that unchurched spirituality – in some cases- is very extreme.
Monday 16th January – Reflective Blog
In our first lecture of the module, Society and Lifestyles we were introduced to the topic of religion. After having no education in religion for the last 5 years I found this input to be incredibly eye opening. I enjoyed the way the concept of religion was introduced to us. From my school experience of studying religion, we would consider individual religions and their beliefs and traditions. However, today I felt we could look at religion from scholarly approach, considering many aspects such as the Functions of Religion and Religious Diversities. From the classes I learned a great deal about theorists and their views on religion. I felt this was beneficial as we could have theory to back up the ideas being presented to us.
In my opinion, we were given a lot of information in a short time. Because of this I am struggling to fully understand some concepts such as functionalism. However, I hope to revise the notes given and complete the past exam papers. Doing so will allow me to have an overall better understanding in the areas I am struggling to comprehend at present and, additionally, allow me to understand how to answer the exam questions to a high standard.
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