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Turco, Benedetta | Esposito, Maurizio

Spiritualità, religione e costruzione di senso tra i malati pellegrini del santuario di Lourdes

2024 - Franco Angeli

37-64 p.

  • This article aims to explore the sociological changes in the understanding of religion and spir-ituality, as a cultural and symbolic system, in creating meaning in the human activities of the chronically seriously ill. The past two decades worldwide have witnessed a rapid increase in the number of people visiting religious shrines and simultaneously the creation of new sites by those operating outside the boundaries of institutional religion. This increase can be associated with the revival of traditional routes and the creation of new ones but also with the invention of rituals, religious and spiritual in nature.
  • With the help of data collected in the field at the Marian pilgrimage site of Lourdes, this paper moves away from existing pilgrimage studies that focus on the sick, contested medical-miraculous narratives and healings, to approach a new space understood as a place of exploration and negotiation of community and holistic as-pirations capable of transforming the indeterminate into the determinate for the sick living with a serious chronic illness. To this end, interviews were administered, analyzed from a sociolog-ical perspective through NVivo software, on religion using a qualitative content analysis, through a methodological approach that prioritizes connectivity and views religions as sup-porting dialogic dynamics of sense-making for those living with illness in a severe form. [Publisher's text].

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Salute e società : XXIII, 1, 2024