After reading chapter 1, I was under the impression that it was trying to define what a religion was, and from there, understand situations where religion plays a big role. In this case, it talked about San Antonio and how religion played a role in the lives of people living there. After reading it, I still didn’t quite understand what it is about religion that makes an impact, just that it does.

Reading through Chapter 2, it became more clear just how religion plays a role. As stated by Geertz (1966:40), religion serves as a template to serve meaning. It not only interprets meaning, but it also shapes it. It’s meant to make experiences fit with it, and it’s done to make sense out of them, shaping the meaning and experiences of the individual based on what framework fits and makes sense to them. (pg. 27). That would explain why there are so many religions in the first place: it’s subjective based on the experiences of the individual, and it also explains why people can shift their religious affiliations as they get older and reflect on their own experiences. This can be applied to social settings; particularly if people within a single group share similar experiences and use the same framework to make sense out of them.

Chapter 3 expands from it. It focused more on the individual, and what I got out of it is that a lot of the shaping of one’s religion falls within their self-identity, “each person’s biographical arrangement of meanings and interpretations that form a somewhat coherent sense of ‘who am I?’.” (pg. 52) I found that interesting because I initially put self-identity first, then religion. After reading, I started thinking about religion first, then self-identity.

When I read first chapter of Religion: the social context, where it talks about defining term “religion”, I could not think about any definition of religion. Honestly, although I have learned about religion for little bit, I still couldn’t state what religion is/does clearly. Maybe it’s because religion does not affects me in the way it does to believers.

But when I read second chapter it kinda started to be little bit clear. Religion helps to make sense of everyday life and events by “meaning system”, which Berger explains that it “explains why things are way they are and prescribes how it should be”(28). The example of losing job was really easy to understand for me. The event in life, such as losing job, happens, and person wants reason for that even that reason doesn’t give hope to him/her. For event such as losing job, it is easier to make sense out of it; it could be bad luck, market force, not enough work, or boss was mean person…etc. But the reason also could be God will or order for those who use religion’s viewpoint to interpret meaning of this event. People have desire to know the meaning of what they are going through because with reason it is easier to figure out appropriate course of action(32). And to find a meaning of the events, seeing through religion’s worldview can help.

As I said in the class, I don’t have any specific religion I believe although I assume some of ideas affects my way of thinking and meaning system. For me, honestly, it uses to be little bit hard to understand why people believe in religion since it is not familiar thing for me. But as a way of life, to make sense and give meaning to life events, religious people use religion’s worldview, just like I use my view to interpret my event in my point of view. It’s just difference of what group’s worldview that person decided to apply to the life events.

My relationship with God is the most important aspect in my life and throughout my time in college I have pushed myself to take classes that challenge me to dig deeper into religion. It’s a topic that intrigues me, because the definition of religion has so many meanings depending upon who you talk to. In class this past week we were able to discover that our individual views on religion differ but also cross many similar paths. The idea of spirituality and religion is something that many of us are trying to tackle. In McGuire’s chapter one of her book she brings up a point towards the end, that Religious organizations are losing their influence. The point was something that I think is quite true, people have become so spiritual and stopped being “religious” because it has become harder to feel at home in certain religious environments. Since we live in a very opinionated society people find it harder to coexist and believe in the same things. McGuire’s book has challenged me to think differently about religion in ways that I normally wouldn’t. In chapter two she brings up the concept of meaning and that as humans we create and hold our meanings for certain areas of our life. For those of us who are religious, she believes we use this as our motivation for the meaning behind everything. In a sense, I understand where she comes from because I have always thought of my life having meaning and that is because of my relationship with God. I do believe that he has laid out my path, but I don’t think this is an excuse for why things happen, I genuinely draw closer to him when I realize that my life is being led by him. Later on she connected the idea of our self-identity coming from these meanings we create for our lives.   Thinking about how my meanings and my identity can very closely connect to a Christian from hundreds of years ago is something that is so unique about religion and something she got me thinking about. I am really fascinated by her discussions because I will now consider other people’s thoughts in the details of their life when they have different viewpoints than I do.

Having grown up with religion as a major part of my early life, I never looked at it from a sociological standpoint until now. Because I had grown distant from religion I wondered what made people so devoted to it.

In McGuire’s Ch. 1 text, she opens with a discussion of San Antonio’s religious landscape. She brings up the question in this chapter about if we are living in an age where religion and organization are become separate. This was interesting to me because religion has a lot to do with the organizational aspect about it – the followers with certain beliefs who perform rituals or prayers to emphasize those beliefs. However, we are coming into an era where more people are striving away from those traditional beliefs and the “organization of religion” and rather becoming more of an individual with a spiritual life. That’s what I felt had happened to me.

Ch. 2 was very fascinating in that it explained “meaning systems” within religion and why religion brings meaning into people’s lives. Meaning refers to the interpretation of situations and events in terms of some broader frame or reference. Most historical religions are comprehensive meaning systems that explains a social group’s worldview. It’s important to keep in mind as well that meaning systems are not simply abstract, but are created and help by people. By understanding how meaning-giving processes work, it makes it easier to understand some of the ways religion links the individual with the larger social group. After reading these chapters, I can understand why religion actually helps keep social order and gives meaning and explanation for many people’s lives.

I grew up raised as a Catholic and with everyone around me also raised as a Catholic.  In school, I was taught not to questions the things we learned and to instead accept everything with blind obedience and faith.  A lot of my beliefs, early on, were centered around the teachings of the church and the teachings of Jesus.  My religiosity was intrinsic rather than extrinsic, however, as I never really found a community within the church that I felt a part of.  McGuire talks about personal meaning, and in class we also learned about the different paths our classmates took in regards to their religion/spirituality or lack there of.  I learned from reading Victor Frankl, that the search for a purpose and the task to create personal meaning, is one that each person must find on their own, but once it is found, the world takes on a new light.  “If one has a ‘why’ to live for, one can endure almost any ‘how’.”  These words have proven true for me as I have lived my life.  Recent months have been one of the most trying of my life, but my own ‘why’ allowed me to be resilient and endure.  Religion can be the ‘why’ of a person’s life.  It was not the case for me, but it has the power to be for many others, as I recognized in hearing the stories of others in class.  This shows how much power religion has over people’s hearts and actions and I just hope that it is used for good rather than to harm in those who accept religion into their hearts.

Thinking back to our class discussion regarding the personal religious experiences of each individual, one of the themes that we seemed to continuously stumble upon was the notion of a tragedy being the deterring factor in someone’s relationship within their religion. One of the theories that McGuire discussed in chapter 2 is the concept of theodicies or explanations that are given for these sorts of experiences. Looking at this from my own experiences I can remember hearing people say, most often when a loved one died, that it was just their time and that God had more important things for them to do, or that they had finished everything they had to do in this life, and I would remember thinking whether there was truth to this, or whether it was a justification and a way of coping. Now I look back and realize that someone’s belief in a religion, or belief in a higher power, as well as religious teachings themselves, instill in people that there is a purpose, even when it seems to come at the wrong time, or out of order as most people would feel. Looking at the other side of this story are those whose beliefs don’t carry the idea of a purpose and don’t see an explanation in a disorganized system, those who feel that their higher power wouldn’t allow tragedies, therefore there must not be one. Coming from someone who has grown up in a religious household, I was always taught the greater purposes, but as I got older, I grew to understand where the other half was coming from, and although I haven’t abandoned my religion, I find myself questioning these things as well as found it really interesting, but also relieving that others also identify this way.

While reading chapter two, The Provision of Meaning and Belonging, McGuire touched on a term I have never come across, theodicies. As McGuire describes it, “[t]heodicies are religious explanations that provide meaning for meaning-threatening experiences” (McGuire 33) I was quite surprised to find that this notion actually has a name for itself. In my opinion, a large portion of religious people are drawn to faith since it helps answer and bring comfort to the hard questions life offers, such as what happens when you die and does my life have meaning. I also believe that fear plays a crucial role in people’s attitudes toward religion, many people who seek answers to these questions like to think there is more after one’s death or that god in fact does have a reason for x,y, and z to have occurred. I think religion can provide an unparalleled comfort and reassurance that one’s actions do matter and thus will yield to repercussions that would affect them later in life or the afterlife. Religion can also manifest itself more dangerously when people use it as a shield or excuse for their behavior, there have been instances of crime occurring where the guilty use religion as a means of justifying their actions. I think that at times religion can suppress the truth and taint the reality of things that many find too hard to handle. There is a large grey area that comes with the “crisis of meaning”.

If interpretations of how and when a child becomes an adult—both biologically and socially—have changed in fairly recent generations, what might the socially accepted definition of “adulthood” be in future post-modern generations? What does it mean for the state of religious traditions and rites of passage, that for so long have determined one’s entrance into the adult world, if they are no longer considered indicative of an “official” adult within the greater modern society? Today, outside of religious communities it seems as though there is not one definitive age in which someone becomes an adult; instead, there are various stages in life in which someone may be considered an adult, depending on the perspective. In the U.S. some may consider someone as an adult when they reach legal age at 18 years old, or may not consider them an adult until they reach 21 and are permitted to drink alcohol. Even then, some may not be considered an adult until their mid-twenties. Being that many laws and ideas of adulthood stem from biblical interpretations and religious rites of passages, it is clear that what previously determined an individual as an adult has shifted, even within religious communities that continue to go through with rites of passage. McGuire presents these coming of age rituals as having become more of a tradition of religious celebration of children completing the last of their “obligatory religious training” rather than being recognized as an adult member of both religious and everyday society (pg. 63). As religious traditions and organizations continue to change and shift over time it will be interesting to watch for which aspects from the original interpretation of a certain religion remain, and which transform over time.