At the start of the twenty-first century Catholicism is still the prevailing belief system of most Italians, but a recent project on Italian religion and spirituality, carried out in 2006, has found that Italians are now more interested in spirituality, that they might describe themselves as ‘spiritual, but not religious’, and that they privilege the ‘God within’ rather than the transcendent God of traditional Catholic belief. This article presents the findings of The Italian Religion and Spirituality Project and focuses on what Italians mean by a ‘spiritual life’. After an overview of the growing interest in spirituality in the Italian socio-cultural setting, various aspects are illustrated: Italians’ self-assessment of religiosity and spirituality; meanings of spirituality; involvement in church and/or in holistic activities; various attitudinal variables, such as preference, beliefs, identification, and willingness to lead a religious and/or a spiritual life. A typology is then elaborated to study the profiles of four groups: (1) neither religious nor spiritual; (2) religious, but not spiritual; (3) spiritual, but not religious; (4) both spiritual and religious. Two key concepts, intra-religious spirituality and extra-religious spirituality, are introduced to examine some of the ways in which spirituality finds expression in the context of contemporary Catholicism. After describing the different ways Italians understand the term ‘spirituality’, I identify three profiles of spirituality: ‘ethic’, ‘religious’, and ‘inner-self’. Finally, the significance of the ‘God within’ is discussed, a phenomenon that is perhaps more readily associated with Protestant forms of holistic spiritualities, but is surprisingly also significant within Italian Catholicism.

Users show a growing interest in expanding the implementation of digital tools as a support of technical and management issues in healthcare. This medical care has focused on telemedicine but does not include the recognition of needs as an important part of patient-centred healthcare. Nurses interact with patients at critical times in their life journeys, including birth and death, which are historical events linked with religious beliefs. Furthermore, large migration flows have led to multicultural societies in which religion and spirituality are experienced in distinct ways by different people. Finally, most healthcare professionals lack the proper skills to handle the spiritual needs of their patients, especially for core and digital competences. This article shows the results of qualitative research applying as a research tool an open-ended questionnaire, which allows detecting the educational needs for nurses’ interventions aimed at providing spiritual support to their patients using digital tools. The results obtained reveal that nurses need education and training on fundamental spiritual concepts and digital competencies to meet the multiple demands of their patients’ spiritual needs. Finally, we present an open digital educational proposal for the development of competencies for nurses and other health professionals to provide spiritual care with the support of digital tools.

“Religious freedom” has many different meanings, and its social perceptions vary depending on different factors, including different understandings of the role of religion in society. In this paper, we contribute to the analysis of the intersections between the institutional definitions and the social perceptions by comparatively analyzing the practices and discourses on religious freedom in the fields of healthcare and school canteens through regional and municipal case studies in Italy. Results allow exploring the role of individual actors and local and sectoral cultures in enforcing specific practices in the broad area of “religious freedom”.

Catholic women’s movements, networks and initiatives have a long history of advocating for an equal role in the Church—especially in the North American world. In recent years, their presence and visibility has been increasing in Europe too, also in relation to a series of initiatives and events, such as the Mary 2.0 campaign in Germany, which led to the launch of the Catholic Women’s Council (CWC) in 2019. This article focuses on the emerging discourse on women and gender promoted by the developing network of initiatives related to the role of women in the Catholic Church in different European countries. After reconstructing the map and history of this network, the contribution explores its emerging discourse, drawing on a triangulation of data: key-witnesses’ interviews; the magazine Voices; social network pages and profiles.

The practice of yoga has become an integral part of practitioners’ lifestyles, spirituality and therapeutic paths across the world, not to mention institutional and governmental interventions of a pedagogical, rehabilitative and political nature in settings as diverse as schools, hospitals and prisons. While social science literature has explored some of these areas of analysis, we currently know little about how particular conceptions of health and wellbeing, of the sacred and of the economic-political continuum overlap, diverge and reciprocally influence each other, with reference to yoga and beyond. Using the example of “modern postural yoga”, this article aims to provide a preliminary account of what we term the Health-Spirituality-Neoliberalism Nexus, that is, of the ways in which different “social fields”, such as the medical/therapeutic, the spiritual/religious and the political/economic fields, are partly governed by the same practical-discursive logics and display profound “symbiotic relationships”. More specifically, this article elucidates how specific health discourses, centred around practitioners’ self-care, self-responsibility and self-control, dominate not only the medical/therapeutic field, but also the landscape of contemporary spiritualities and the widespread neoliberal ethos that characterizes the current social, political and economic model of Westernized societies. Here, the categories of physical and psychological health, the idea of a fulfilling spiritual life, and economic success display deep “elective affinities” that we seek to uncover by mobilizing a series of foundational sociological concepts such as the Bourdieusian notion of “field” and a Foucauldian reading of “biopolitics” and “governmentality”.