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Document Details :

Title: Lay Spirituality
Author(s): WAAIJMAN, Kees
Journal: Studies in Spirituality
Volume: 10    Date: 2000   
Pages: 5-20
DOI: 10.2143/SIS.10.0.505256

Abstract :
Lay spirituality distinguishes itself from institutional forms of spirituality and spiritual counter-movements as a specific form of spirituality. A closer examination of this form of spirituality from a historical, cross-cultural, and systematic perspective teaches us that the following constants are definitive:
1. Its Sitz im Leben is the network of family relations: husband-wife, parents-children, children among themselves, family-neighbourhood, and so forth
2. Its time dimension is genealogical in nature: it calculates time in terms of generations, not in terms of the periodization of the official calendar.
3. Its spece dimension has its center in the home which on the one hand preserves intimacy and on the other mediates between the internal and the external world (labor, possessions, societal organizations, hospitality, and so forth).
4. Central, in lay spirituality, is the person in his/her existential concreteness as it unfolds over the course of life

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