Centre member Ryan Byerly will be leading “The Beliefless Spirituality Project: Conceptual Foundations and Empirical Explorations” beginning next year. This is a 32-month, interdisciplinary research project generously funded by the John Templeton Foundation, with additional support from the University of Sheffield. The team will be investigating forms of sincere religious or spiritual engagement that are underpinned not by explicit beliefs but by alternative cognitive attitudes such as assumptions, conditional attitudes, credences, or pretences. They aim to investigate which distinct types of beliefless spirituality there are, the (dis)value of these types of spirituality, and how they can be fruitfully studied in empirical research. The results of the project will be especially illuminating for understanding the options for religious/spiritual practice available to those who find it difficult to hold explicit beliefs in religious/spiritual realities, which may include spiritual-but-not-religious individuals, agnostics, atheists, and people of faith experiencing significant doubt.
In addition to Byerly, the core group of co-investigators consists of Laura Ekstrom (William & Mary), Philip Goff (Durham University), Daniel Howard-Snyder (Western Washington University), Elizabeth Jackson (Saint Louis University), Jonathan Jong, Shieva Kleinschmidt (University of Southern California), Neil Van Leeuwen (Florida State University), and Daniel McKaughan (Boston College). There are also four advisors for the project: Julie Exline (Case Western Reserve University), Philip Ivanhoe (Duke University), Tanya Luhrmann (Stanford University), and Elizabeth Mancuso (Pepperdine University).
The project will host a capstone conference in its final year and will publicise a CFA for this in due course. A project website with additional details will be published very soon, and interested parties are welcome to contact Ryan Byerly with any questions.
Centre for Engaged Philosophy 