#AcaWriMo accountability post 9 (Nov. 11)

In "Religious and Nonreligious Spirituality in Relation to Death Acceptance or Rejection" (/Death Studies/ 2011, 35), Victor G. Cirelli asks important questions, but has a flawed framework.

The central research question is how a person's relationship to #spirituality correlates with their attitude about #death. Citing relevant literature, Cirelli synthesizes a definition of spirituality that highlights the ideas of "peak emotional experience" of connection with a "person, object or idea" outside the self (126).

Where Cirelli loses me is in his section on "Spirituality Derived From Religious Belief" (126-129). This section presents itself as being ecumenical or interfaith, but is really very #Christonormative without acknowledging its #Christonormativity.

The results and discussion sections, in which Cirelli discusses the interviews with his research participants are interesting to read. Cirelli finds that the participants whom he coded as having religious spirituality were more likely to favor death acceptance over the prolonging of life while those he coded as having non-religious spirituality were more likely to reject death in favor of prolonging life (142). He does note that these were initial pilot studies with a small number of participants, so not generalizable, but definitely indicative of this being a fruitful area of inquiry.

[This part is all me: In addition to a schema that is not Christonormative, I would be particularly interested in the relationship between a person's degree of spirituality and their attitudes about death. What I've seen anecdotally in my religious circle of acquaintance is that observant but not overly devout people (in other words, people for whom spirituality is not a central part of their life) tend to have beliefs about death and the afterlife that are more shaped by non-religious spirituality than by the tenets of the religion.]

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07481187.2011.535383