Analysis Of Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes By Nancy Ammerman

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Nancy Ammerman writes Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes: Finding Religion in Everyday Life to convey her findings of studying spirituality and religion in the ordinary life of her sample population. The inspiration for this book came from previous data about Christians and the “Golden Rule,” the concept of treating everyone how you would like to be treated (3). In order to understand this concept better, Ammerman decided to study religion and spirituality in everyday life. Her population included 95 people from the Boston and Atlanta areas. These participants came from “Catholic, liberal Protestant, conservative Protestant, African American Protestant, Jewish”, Mormon, Wicca and Neopaganism as well as an internet chat group (11). Unaffiliated participants were also …show more content…

The extra theistic landscape includes stories from the participants that include beliefs that transcend the mundane, but are not related to the belief in God. The third path of spirituality described by Ammerman is ethical spirituality. This is essentially the common ground between the theistic and extra theistic landscapes; ethical spirituality “is that real spirituality is about living a virtuous life, one characterized by helping others, transcending one’s own selfish interests to seek what is right” (45). Ammerman has found that most of the participants consider themselves spiritual and religious, the minority consider themselves spiritual but not religious, these participants included those from the unaffiliated and the non-attenders. This is the fourth and final path Ammerman outlines in chapter 2 of her book. As Ammerman continues, she describes activities of the theistic and extra theistic such as, praying, reading scripture, meditating, and using music as a way to show

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