La società secolare e i potenziali mediatori dell'esperienza religiosa: una proposta teorico-metodologica per lo studio della religione contemporanea

[Autom. eng. transl.] Simmel's lesson in thinking about religion in terms of a tension between life and form resonates in the contributions of the sociology of contemporary religion. This, in the face of a revision of the classic theses of secularization, affirms that religious experience continues to occur in contemporary Western societies, in a disharmony between organized forms and subjective experience. By reviewing this literature, the present essay shows how in particular the contributions of Charles Taylor and Peter Berger help to define an interpretative framework of the current condition of the religious. The sociological question that arises from this is the following: is a religious change taking place that springs from current movements? What are the emerging religious forms that indicate the possible future developments of the religious? After tracing the question, the essay presents a possible sociological approach to the question that follows two directions: the invitation of some sociologists to search for the religious outside the traditional boundaries and the need to "refocus" the specificities of this phenomenon. Focusing on the substantive definitions of religion, in particular on the dimension of lived experience, and drawing on the literature on the subject, the essay outlines a methodological proposal which consists in the adoption of a new possible object for the study of the contemporary religious: what Berger defines the potential mediators of religious experience. The last part presents, by way of example, a case of application of this methodological proposal to an empirical research on the emergence of the ultimate issues in the public communication of science. In the hypothesis that the ultimate questions constitute a potential mediator of religious experience, the research aims to detect, through this object, the references to the religious dimension expressed and mediated by the public communication of science.