…stories of growth and stages of belief…
In reading over a lot of the stories I am working with a pattern seems to be arising. Ok, I know I do not have a statistically significant sample size and double blind studies to work off of, but maybe my observation could trigger some solid research on the part of people with the credentials to do so.
I have worked with a lot of Rational level stories by now and Read the rest of this entry »
So it turns out David Keirsey’s son runs this website http://www.personalityzone.com which is related to his father’s work, mentioned in my last post from March 31. I was able to contact Keirsey’s son through the site and ask him whether his father had found that temperament styles could change over time. I did this in hopes of shedding any light on whether the temperament styles could be related to our belief stages. Well, his reply was that they have evidence that temperament styles are formed very early in a person’s existence and are not subject to change over time. However, he did state that a person’s personality is a combination of their temperament style PLUS their character….and personality can and does change over time!
So that was helpful. Whether there really is any correlation between the temperament styles and our stages or not is still a bit up in the air, but at least there are factors allowing for the possibility of change over time.
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 »
Fowler based his stage theory on empirical research done early in his career where he and his students interviewed hundreds of people about their beliefs. The thought processes that came into play in developing Faith Development Theory (FDT) were heavily influenced by Fowler’s study of Read the rest of this entry »
Ok, in the last post I mentioned there were some new developments I was finding out about that cast some question on the validity of stage theory. It is taking me a while to work through how those might influence my work on this blog.
Well, by now I have decided the best thing to do is to present the dilemmas as they appear to me now. I am going to do my best to share those developments one by one over time. Bear with me as I backtrack a little bit to create a base on which to build this discussion.
For today, I will just start with James Fowler. He was the one who mainly did the original research about the religious stages. It was in 1981 that his main book, Stages of Faith was published. This book detailed six stages a person might go through as they grow in faith. His stages mirror what a person would experience as he develops normally from childhood on - as opposed to some of the other theorists whose stages reflect points at which a typical adult might find himself to be stuck.
For the purpose of this blog, I did not want to spell out Fowler’s six stages one by one because, while they do more or less agree with the four stages I have been referring to (remember? The Lawless, The Faithful, The Rational and the Mystic?) the way they are numbered does not correspond and I am afraid it would cause confusion. You can find a nice summary of each of Fowler’s stages, using his numbering system at http://faculty.plts.edu/gpence/html/fowler.htm.
Anyway, Fowler’s stages begin with a childhood stage based upon imagination and magic, such as would be typical of a child. They move through several more stages including one based upon conformity and the need for a source of external authority, such as a church (our “Faithful” group,) one where reliance upon reason and an internally based authority is primary (our “Rational” group) and then onto two higher levels where the primary concerns reach beyond the person himself and his immediate society, out to increasingly broader, more global issues (our “Mystic” group.) At the highest stage Fowler discussed a person will even risk personal harm – think Ghandi or Mother Teresa - for the sake of others.
I am going to leave the discussion there and will pick up on it in the next post - to appear soon.
Ok. Sorry I have not been posting much here lately. A combination of a couple of personal situations I have had to tend to and - some new interesting factors I came across in the theory - have been holding me up.
The personal factors are now in better control - I hope. My father in law has moved in with me, requiring some but not a great amount of care; my two sons in college have needed more of my assistance arranging a few matters. That plus the fact that my husband is now in Alaska for a year (was called to active duty from the Army reserves) has been draining some of my emotional energy.
All along while I was dealing with that, some ladies in one of my writing groups introduced me to a concept that may conflict a bit with this stage theory. And then thanks to some information I am getting courtesy of a professor in Australia who is doing current research on my topic, I am learning there are a whole lot of other factors to consider here! I am putting a lot of energy into studying the conflicting data. It may be a while before I have something intelligent to share with you - but it will be interesting, that I can promise!
Thanks for your patience - and stay tuned!
Margaret Johnston