Original scientific paper
Dimension of Religious Experience in Croatia: »A Rumor of Angels« from a sociological perspective
Ankica Marinović Bobinac
orcid.org/0000-0002-0120-0173
; Institute for Social Research in Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The most general conclusion of this analysis indicates a correlation of
experiencing various religious sensations with the religious affiliation
of the respondents in the broadest sense, what was also evidenced
in all the researches mentioned in this text. Most of the respondents
did not connect the most widely spread religious experiences related
to the context of a predominant traditional church religiosity with the
experience of supranatural forces. Obviously, this notion did not evoke in them any Christian, respectively Catholic context in which
prevail religious experiences of God of a lower intensity especially in
relation to the experiences that belong more often to some other
Christian traditions, to those that don't necessary belong to the Christian tradition or to the ones from the field of various alternative
spiritualities. Most of the experiences are emphatically connected to
the folk religiosity, to the pilgrimage to Medjugorje, in particular. The
more the respondents are religious and attend the church mess more frequently, the more often they have religious experiences,
being they of a lower or higher intensity but not, of course, the experiences from the domain of alternative spiritualities. When related to the socio-dernographic indicators, the figures also fit into
the existing results of the researches of some other dimensions of
religiosity. So, more widely spread religious sensations of a lesser
intensity are experienced by the respondents with a lower degree
of education, women or from underdeveloped regions of Croatia.
The presence of some supranatural force that did not have any
connection with the notion of God as it is perceived in the Catholic
tradition, as well as some sensations from the field of the occult are
more experienced by more educated respondents, those from the
cities, practically equally men and women, evenly spread across the
all Croatian regions. Besides the awareness of many problems related to the research of the religious experience in connection to
its conceptualization, operationalization, measurement and defining,
this paper also deals with an awareness of a delicacy of the interpretation of the religious experience, especially when it is examined only by using the quantitative methodology.
Keywords
dimensions of religiosity; religious experience; traditional religiosity; alternative religiosity; folk religiosity; Medjugorje
Hrčak ID:
33094
URI
Publication date:
9.3.2009.
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