Week Eleven Post Two

         While reading chapter eighteen I developed a passion for the section called stages of faith. There are a lot of spiritual strugglers across the globe, which questions their religious and spiritual beliefs. Feeling unsettled about religious or spiritual matters, struggling to understand evil, illness, and death, sometimes feeling angry with God, in the development of the emerging adult.  James Fowler used the work of Piaget and Kohlberg to describe the process of maturation, which may move them past the doctrine religion of childhood to a more flexible, dialectical, postformal faith. He put the process into a sequence of six stages. Stage one is the intuitive- projected faith. In this time faith is magical, logical, imaginative, and filled with fantasy, especially about the power of God and the mysteries of birth and death.  In stage two individuals take the myths and stories of religion literally, believing simplistically about the power of symbols. This stage is called Mythical-literal faith. Stage three is called Synthetic-conventional faith, also known as the conformist stage. Faith in conventional, reflecting concern about other people and favoring what feels right over what actually makes intellectual sense. In stage four faith is characterized by intellectual detachment from the values of the culture and from the approval of other people. This stage is called Individual-reflective faith. Stage five is called Conjunctive faith, where faith incorporates both powerful emotional ideas and rational conscious values.  In stage six, called Universalizing faith, people have a powerful vision of universal compassion, justice, and love that compels them to live their lives in a way that others may think is either saintly or foolish. I found this section to be so mind blowing because I have never heard of such thing, and it is a process I can absolutely relate to with my own development of faith. When I first started CCD and starting learning about God at about the age of 5 or 6, I thought my faith was so magical, logical, imaginative, and filled with fantasy. I was typically attached to the mysteries of life and death since a lot of my relatives were dying at this time in my life. Stage two I can say went hand in hand with stage one with me, but I can’t consider it a separate stage because I was more influenced on symbols at this time in my life.  I can say I did go through all the rest of the stages, but I can’t exactly put it into yearbook order. But there was a time when I thought I favored what felt right over what actually made sense. I also focused on the values of the culture and the approval of others.  I also went through a time when my brother was in Iraq that I relied on the power of prayer and the love of God. I also realized the worth of life compared to that of property. I do not have any experiences with stage six, but I wont turn down the idea of it in my future.