Faith, religion, and spirituality: A phenomenological and hermeneutic contribution to parsing the distinctions

Abstract

Religion and spirituality are contested terms in the fields of Religious Studies, Theology, Sociology or Anthropology of Religion, and other areas, and the notion of faith has often been abandoned altogether. The present article attempts to make a distinctly philosophical contribution to this debate by employing phenomenological parameters, as they are articulated in the work of Martin Heidegger, for proposing distinctions between faith, religion, and spirituality. It then goes on to “fill” these structural distinctions in more detail with hermeneutic content by drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s work on faith and religion, as well as Johann Michel’s analysis of Ricoeur’s account of the self as a “spirituality.” The article thus employs Heidegger’s phenomenological categories and Ricoeur’s hermeneutic project in order to think through the possibility of making phenomenological distinctions between personal confession of faith, religious adhesion to a tradition via myth and ritual, and a broader spirituality as a fundamental dimension of the human being.