This article employs ethnographic material from Sweden and Estonia to examine the relationship between religion and the love of nature in Northern Europe - a region known for its widespread secularisation. We propose that the existential depth that is often ascribed to nature experiences in this part of the world points to a facet of the secularisation process, indicating that love of nature among today's Northern Europeans is deeply entangled with the processes of modernisation. The article provides a historical analysis of how this phenomenon arose and explores ways of approaching it that move beyond the religious-secular dichotomy. It concludes by construing love of nature as belonging to an 'existential field' in the Northern European cultural landscape.

Vad är detta märkliga som jag känner igen som religion? Varför tycks det spela en så stor roll i mänsklig kultur? Och varför skrämmer och lockar det mig på samma gång?

Genom historien har religion format världsbilder, livshållningar och samhällen, gjort tillvaron svårtolkad, mångbottnad och motsägelsefull för människor, men också levande och meningsfull. Och oavsett vad vi tycker om den, visar religionen inga tecken på att försvinna. Varför är det så? Vad är det för längtan den svarar mot?

Tillvaron är full av sådant vars orsaker och verkningar vi kan överblicka och förstå. Men för många rymmer den också dimensioner som inte lika lätt låter sig fångas, sådant som bryter mot vardagens profana ordning: stämningar, känslor och upplevelser som tycks peka mot något bortom det vanliga, något förtrollat och besjälat.

I En lockton i ödemarken fortsätter David Thurfjell att utforska och upplösa gränsen mellan religiösa och sekulära uttryck. Det blir en personlig berättelse som rör sig mellan olika världsdelar, tidsepoker och perspektiv, med nedslag i författarens egna erfarenheter såväl som i myter, riter och maktstrategier i världens olika religiösa traditioner.

The practice of shinrin-yoku, usually translated as forest bathing, originated in Japan in the 1980s. In the last decade, practices under this label have spread rapidly in Western countries, and since 2016, it is established in Sweden. Henrik Ohlsson has followed its development in Sweden through connections with leading practitioners, interviews, and participant observations. In Western and Nordic contexts, the practice finds itself as part of a wider movement on the junctions between wellbeing and green activism, and between medical science and holistic philosophy. Forest bathing, as it is practiced here, thus includes strong influences from many other sources besides Japanese shinrin-yoku, among which is at least one more source of arguably Eastern origin: that of mindfulness. One important development in the Swedish (or generally Western) context which distinguishes it from the Japanese context is its increasing politicisation and explicit association with radical green ideologies. This chapter has two main purposes. The first is to describe and discuss the establishment of shinrin-yoku in Sweden. The other is to understand why and how it becomes politicised in this context. A key appears to lie in how embodiment and sensory attention are construed as a break with what is seen as a Western paradigm of disconnection.

This chapter engages with the burgeoning international phenomenon of therapeutic nature practices, such as ecotherapy, forest bathing, and forest therapy. This is informed by the author’s ethnographic research in European geographical and cultural contexts with much in common but also notable differences: Wales, Sweden, and Finland. In all of these fieldwork contexts the idea that ‘natural’ spaces were somewhere one could ‘get away’ to as an ‘escape’, as something ‘set apart’ or seen as ‘other’, was key to the therapeutic framing of the activities. This was both an escape from perceived pathological effects of society and an escape to a complex community of life represented by nature. Therefore in these fields nature is a community, but one without social roles and stratification, a communitas, as described by Victor Turner. In Turner’s understanding, communitas arises in a liminal state, an in-between state where the social system is dissolved within a ritual framework, enabling participants to transform, reconstitute themselves, and re-enter society in a new role. A lack of social roles and demands is still an absence, of course. However, in many practitioners’ accounts it is also clear that positive characteristics are attributed to earth beings. The presence of life and living beings is experienced as revitalising. A transformation can be argued to take place, but this is primarily within the individual, rather than outer cultural or societal change. Also of note was a mostly positive view of nature, with little consideration of the potential for threat or danger. The chapter concludes with a reflection on how therapeutic nature practices both reflect and resist contemporary Western culture.

Through field research in Sweden and Finland between 2017 and 2022, the thesis follows a burgeoning social movement in which connection with nature is seen as a means of both personal wellbeing and ecological sustainability at the societal level. The thesis describes and analyses ideas, practices, organisations, and literature in a contemporary cultural context in the borderland between health practice, environmental activism, and spirituality. It also examines participants' personal experiences and understands both the practice and its social milieu as a cultivation of experience, whereby experiences of nature as alive and communicative are maintained and enhanced. This leads into a discussion of animism in a contemporary Western context, where the thesis aims to develop a multidimensional understanding which takes into account not only ontology and cognitive-perceptual patterns, but also lays emphasis on emotional and ethical dimensions.

The thesis employs the concept face, which, in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, signifies the encounter with subjectivity outside of oneself. In contrast to objects, which can be grasped intellectually and thus controlled and incorporated, the face reveals a reality beyond conceptualisation to which one must relate ethically. The thesis arrives at an understanding of both health and spirituality as states of (relative) openness toward the world and its human and non-human inhabitants. 

Activities for a deepened nature connection are promoted as ways to increase personal wellbeing and as a solution to the ecological crisis. This chapter is based on an ethnographic study of practices at the junction between spirituality, wellbeing practice, and social activism, practices which will here be referred to collectively as the nature connection movement. The practices include exercises of sensory attention and ritual activities, all of which seem to affect the way practitioners experience nature, leading to a proneness to experience communication with non-human entities, i.e., what can be classified as a form of animism. The chapter is divided into three main parts. The first seeks to place the movement in a contemporary cultural context and introduces the chapter’s central concept: subjective activism, which here refers to activism with an inward direction but with social ambitions. The second part describes the nature connection movement and its practices, which here serves as a case study of subjective activism. The third part discusses the potential social impacts of these practices in the light of Stephen Vaisey’s dual-process model for motivation and justification, and Philippe Descola’s modes of identification and modes of relation, which puts cognitive patterns and practical relations on equal footing as simultaneously cause and effect of each other. I conclude that the potential impacts range from temporary relief from the negative impacts of the current social order – in which case it may help to conserve that order – to a fundamental disruption.

Inherited or acquired secularity? Secular identity among post-Muslims and post -Christians in Sweden Sweden is both secularised and multi-religious. This article analyses the secularity of Swedes with Muslim and Christian family backgrounds. Survey data were collected from people living in Sweden with a family background in Iraq, Iran, Yugoslavia, or Turkey, as well as from a control group of Swedish origin. We first present the extent to which respondents agree with the statement "I see myself as secular (non-religious)". This is followed by an exploratory regression analysis of what is associated with self-identification as secular. Country of origin and secularity in the immediate family were the variables that correlate most clearly with a secular self-image. Length of residence in Sweden, exposure to majority Swedish culture and socio-economic factors also have some influence. We conclude that secularity is mainly something that Swedes with a Muslim family background bring with them from their countries of origin, rather than something that they acquire in Sweden. The article concludes with a discussion that opens up the results for further theorising in the field of secularisation studies.

Sverige är samtidigt sekulariserat och mångreligiöst. Föreliggande studie bidrar till förståelsen av denna situation genom att diskutera sekularitet bland svenskar med muslimsk respektive kristen familjebakgrund. Materialet i undersökningen kommer från en enkät som skickades till i Sverige bosatta personer födda i, eller med föräldrar som föddes i, Irak, Iran, Jugoslavien eller Turkiet, samt till en kontrollgrupp (personer med familjebakgrund i Sverige). Inledningsvis presenteras i vilken utsträckning de svarande instämmer i påståendet ”jag ser på mig själv som sekulär (icke-religiös)”. Därefter följer en explorativ regressionsanalys av vad som sammanfaller med att beskriva sig som sekulär. Analysen visar att ursprungsland och graden av sekularitet i den närmsta familjen är det som tydligast samvarierar med en sekulär självbild. Viss betydelse har också vistelsetid i landet, exponering för svensk majoritetskultur och socioekonomiska faktorer. Vår slutsats är att sekularitet bland svenskar med muslimsk familjebakgrund huvudsakligen är något de har med sig från sina anknytningsländer och inte något de förvärvar i Sverige. Detsamma gäller svenskättade svarspersoner utan migrationsbakgrund. Artikeln avslutas med en diskussion som öppnar för vidare teoretisering inom sekulariseringsfältet.

Global Phenomenologies of Religion offers a new way of looking at the past, current and future trajectory of the study of religion. The phenomenology of religion was once widely acknowledged to be the core of the study of religion as an autonomous discipline. First used as a term by the Dutch scholar Chantepie de la Saussaye in 1887, it was developed by Gerardus van der Leeuw in the 1930s and 40s, became popular in the 1960s and 70s and then met severe criticism, virtually disappearing by the beginning of the twenty-first century.

This book adds to our global understanding of the history of the study of religion. Interviews with scholars from ten different countries offer a lived history, covering more than half a century. The resulting picture is diverse and nuanced, revealing important national and regional differences, and challenging long-held views about the rise and decline of this venerable approach to the study of religion.