In What Can I Hope? Spiritual Yearning in the Nones and Dones
Kelly J. Clark (Ibn Haldun University)
Emil Salim (Sekolah Tinggi Teologi Reformed Indonesia)
Award: $100,000
Start Date: October 1, 2026
End Date: September 20, 2028
Focus: This international, cross-cultural project examines the spiritual lives of religious 'nones' (people without a religious affiliation) and 'dones' (people who have left a religious tradition). Rather than assuming that disaffiliation simply produces secularization or spiritual absence, the team asks what people have left behind, what commitments and practices remain, what they may have gained or lost, and what their spiritual searching is now moving toward. Special attention will be given to the way religious departure can reshape trust, authority, belonging, and a person's sense of what counts as knowledge.
Approach: The project brings philosophical and virtue-theoretic analysis into conversation with interviews, ethnography, self-narratives, and selected quantitative evidence. Its cases span Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, Confucian, Sufi, Quaker, Hindu, Yoruba, and Indigenous contexts across six continents. This breadth will allow the team to test whether familiar Western categories adequately describe spiritual yearning elsewhere and to develop a more inclusive account of spiritual seeking.
Contribution: The project will clarify when spiritual yearning fosters humility, curiosity, truth-seeking, compassion, and solidarity, and when it instead creates vulnerabilities to gullibility, superiority, appropriation, fanaticism, cynicism, or despair. It will also ask whether spiritual fulfillment can remain compatible with continued inquiry. Anticipated outputs include scholarly articles, an integrative theoretical framework, a conference in Istanbul, public-facing resources, and a semi-scholarly book presenting the team's cross-cultural findings.
