The paper addresses major terms and theories within contemporary German studies of spirituality, that are related and largely based on the ideas of Ernst Troeltsch, Thomas Luckmann and Detlef Pollack. The authors discuss basic definitions and spirituality research results based on German sample. They aim at showing particular features of German research as well as putting it in the context of various sociological approaches to spirituality.The authors conclude that within spirituality there is a tendency to use one’s own transcendence experience as the source and moral criteria for one’s personal religion. That is why in the sociological perspective spirituality is often differed from churchliness and emancipated from the influence of historical churches.This, according to the authors, leads to the attractiveness of the concept of “spirituality” for the modern Western man: on the one hand, it refers to a transcendent reality, on the other, it does not appeal to ecclesiastic religiosity.
The paper summarises the process of adaptation of the God as a Causal Agent Scale (GCA) carried out on a sample of students of orthodox educational institutions. This scale aims to measure religious attribution in an individual, that is, is/her inclination to attribute the causes of events to divine agents. The data obtained in the study proved that all items of the GCA Scale have acceptable internal consistency. The first stage of validisation involved analysing the correlations with the rates of the Subjective Control Scale (SCS). Weak positive correlations were found with the rates of internality in all scales of the SCS except for the Interpersonal Relationships scale. The second stage invovled a quasiexperimental study that revealed positive correlations between the GCA and supernatural attribution. Moreover, the outcomes of factor analysis of variance showed significant differences between the subjects with high and low rates in GCA in their likeliness to use supernatural explanations. All these findings suggest that the GCA Scale is an effective tool for measuring one’s inclination to religious attribution within the Russian orthodox context.
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