Peggy C. Giordano, Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology at Bowling Green State University, is heading a research project looking at adults who successfully turned around lives of crime and delinquency. Much research has been done on the conditions that lead young people into such troubled personal circumstances, but little is known about those inspiring cases where people have emerged out of those circumstances.

What kind of dramatic spiritual transformation leads troubled young people to a brand new view of themselves, their world, and their relationship to that world? Giordano hopes her research will illuminate “how spiritual experiences stimulate a new sense of direction, foster new social experiences, and provide a blueprint for productive life changes."

Katz believes the research will return the kind of quality results that will capture the interests of funding agencies, once they see the value of the projects. “We have a project out of the University of Chicago with the National Opinion Research Center (NORC). They’re going to do a national survey, a totally balanced survey that allows you to generalize to the whole United States about the phenomenology of spiritual transformation. How often does it occur? What’s going on? What lies behind it? What are the antecedents? What are the consequences of it? What differences does it make in people’s lives?”

Roberta G. Sands, professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work, is looking at a common spiritual transformation within Judaism. Sands’s project, titled Baalei Teshuvah’s Spiritual Transformational Soul Work, seeks to understand the process by which secular Jews embrace Orthodoxy. (Baalie Teshuvah is the name given to a Jew who embraces orthodoxy.) Sands and her colleagues “wonder what kinds of changes baalei teshuvah make in their identities, family relations, and connections with other people and institutions, and how integrated they become into the larger Orthodox community.” When a secular Jew, whose Judaism is primarily cultural, becomes a religious Jew, what happens? How does the embrace of the Jewish religious faith influence their understanding of themselves, their world and their relationship to other Jews?

Spiritual transformation is a widespread and meaningful part of human experience. Learning more about it will greatly enrich our understanding of ourselves and others.

For more information please visit: www.metanexus.net/spiritual_transformation