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People experience meaning in various ways across different secular and sacred situations. However, scholars know relatively little about the situational contexts in which meaning occurs. In this article, we first explored the daily contexts of meaning using data collected by a unique, 2-week experience sampling method through participants’ smartphones. Meaning levels were highest during religious and spiritual practices, as well as during traditional work hours. They were also higher with some activities, such as talking to other people, than other activities, such as playing video games. Second, we examined how feelings of meaningfulness were related to sacred states, parsing out which preceded the other. Sacred states, in which people were aware of God or a higher being, tended to come before feelings of meaning rather than the reverse. From these analyses, meaning emerged as richly patterned in everyday life and closely associated with—and often a consequence of—sacred awareness.

Using Arab Barometer data (2011), the authors examine Muslim men’s gender attitudes in four predominantly Muslim Middle Eastern and North African countries (Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen) during the Arab Spring. They examine if living in insecurity – which may threaten men’s ability to attain masculine ideals – is related to male overcompensation, evident in strong support for patriarchal gender ideology. They then investigate if Islamic religiosity influences this relationship. Results reveal that political Islam is strongly related to Muslimmenamen’s patriarchal gender attitudes across the region. The effects of living in insecurity and other facets of Islamic religiosity on men’s gender ideology vary by country. The results on the many effects of insecurity and Islam on men’s gender ideology challenge stereotypical representations of the region as uniformly Islamic and patriarchal.

We explore how people experience the sacred in their everyday lives using a recently developed research technique—smartphone-based experience sampling method (S-ESM). The primary goal of our experience-driven approach is to explore the contours and variations of spiritual awareness within people's day-to-day lives. We seek to better understand when and where spiritual awareness is likely to arise, and the contexts in which it is rare. Our smartphone-based data allow us to track the many contexts in which an awareness of the sacred occurs, as reported in real time during people's normal daily activities. We parse out how immediate contextual factors and how people's more habitual behaviors are related to their spiritual experiences. This illuminates a wide range of factors that influence spiritual experiences that have not received much scholarly attention, and enables us to connect cutting-edge quantitative methods with qualitative scholarship on spirituality. We hope this will open the door to the development of new theories of situated spiritual experience.

To advance understandings of how religion manifests in subtle, nuanced ways in secular institutions, we examine student religiosity and spirituality at an elite liberal arts school marked by a strong intellectual collective identity. Using mixed research methods, we examine how the college’s structures and dominant culture influence students’ religiosity and spirituality. Despite an institutional commitment to promoting students’ self-exploration and inclusion of social “diversity,” we found both campus structures and mainstream culture deterred open spiritual and religious exploration and identification. The structure of the college and its dominant secular, intellectual culture reinforced: (1) a widespread stigma against religious and spiritual expression, (2) a lack of dialogue about the sacred, (3) discreetness in exploring and adhering to sacred beliefs and practices, and (4) a large degree of religious and spiritual pluralism. Our findings additionally illustrate that early exposure to the campus culture’s critical regard for religion had a long-lasting impact on students’ religiosity. A majority of students kept their religious and spiritual expressions hidden and private; only a marginalized minority of students embraced their expressions publically. To increase students’ comfort with religious and spiritual exploration, we propose that colleges foster intentional peer dialogues early in the college experience. Furthermore, we recommend that campus communities prioritize religious and spiritual literacy and respect. (author's abstract)