Ex- and intrinsic

[oursin]

I've been mulling over this extract from the Winston article on religion and evolution that I posted the other day:
A Harvard psychologist named Gordon Allport... came up with a definition of religiosity that is still in use today. He suggested that there were two types of religious commitment - extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic religiosity he

Comments

[chickenfeet2003]

I'm trying to think of vivid and telling examples,

Political activism comes to mind.

[callunav]

What this eminds me, but only sort of, is what I ran into in divinity school, training for ministry. Even among those who very definitely felt a 'call,' it's complicated, certainly any protestant denomination, and in a lot of other cases as well: often people go into ministry because they feel strongly called to lead a religious life.

But there's a real difference between what would, in Catholicism, be a call to a clerical life and a call to a monastic life. Protestantism - and other religions - doesn't offer people a way to live within their religion except as clergy...but often what they want is really more monastic. They don't want to be community leaders, counselors, public speakers. They simply want to be able to live their lives in such a way that their religion is their primary concern

[forthwritten]

I'd also say that the individual can shift between these two 'end points'; I think a lot of teenagers stay with my church in particular because of the social network built and the fact that Mass becomes a social affair.

Having said that, I don't see that much of a divide between the social and religious aspect of the Church, or at least see them as being at odds with each other. In Roman Catholicism the body of Christ is the people of the Church, and communion is an social act carried out in the presence of the community that unites this body.

Other 'vivid and telling examples' I can think of are charity work and probably school - at times school was much more of a chance to see my mates than actually, y'know, get taught something. To be honest, there's probably this aspect to any activity where the purpose is something other than purely social.

[coalescent]

Not at all predictably, that makes me think of this:[EXT NIGHT