…stories of growth and stages of belief…
A woman in my writing group and I were discussing the religious stages and something in our discussion rang a bell for her regarding something she had studied in grad school. She ran to another room in her house and came back with the book, Please Understand Me, by David Keirsey. It seems this Keirsey had taken the Myers-Briggs Personality Types and simplified them into four Read the rest of this entry »
In contrast to Fowler who says faith development occurs in stages, Heinz Streib, a more recent researcher, posits that instead we should use the word styles. What he means I believe is two things.
First, where Fowler says his styles occur in a set way in every person (”hierarchical and invariant”) Strieb posits that rather than being strictly hierarchical, the styles evolve more like geological layers, where elements of all the prior stages/styles still exist in the person and the newest one just sits on top. This means the layers can be subject to upheaval, Read the rest of this entry »
There is a movement afloat to petition the United Nations to establish an international World Unity Day. This in a way is related to the Stage Four or Mystic concept that we all are one. It speaks to a global consciousness instead of an ethnic (or patriotic) one. It honors the fact that we have to stop thinking in terms of “my church,” “my religion” or “my country” and Read the rest of this entry »
Besides correlating well with Fowler’s stages, Reich’s (see my post from March 16, 2008 on Relational and Contextual Reasoning) levels of reasoning ability also matched up well with the stages of religious judgement delineated by Fritz K. Oser. And - Oser’s stages more or less fit in with Fowler’s stages. (I will supply more information about Oser soon.)
In fact, Reich did a small study in which he interviewed thirty people and rated them on both their stage of religous judgement and their stage of reasoning ability. Well, he found a very high correlation between religious judgement (or stage) and level of relational and contextual reasoning. Although Reich’s study was very small his results do imply that people who can reason better tend to reach higher levels on the religious development scale.
Ok, so next we want to consider the work of K. Helmut Reich. In 2002 he published Developing Horizons of the Mind with a subtitle of “Relational and Contextual Reasoning and the Resolution of Cognitive Conflict.”
Well, in a nutshell, what Reich said was that people’s reasoning powers develop over time - or to a greater extent in different people. Those whose reasoning is further developed can resolve cognitive conflict more effectively than Read the rest of this entry »