Roberto Cipriani

Do all clocks and calendars refer to the same time? EE Evans-Pritchard reported that the Nuer culture divided time into ‘ecological’ and structural temporal categories. Alheit made a distinction between everyday, routinized, cyclical time and life-experience time. Time is capable of devouring everything; it can reach beyond what has already been; it can sunder itself from the past, without turning back. Social time has many facets: it may be very short, short, long or very long. Immobility within life space, as time passes, is tantamount to continuous change in space and time. Finally, a categorization of time might be founded on four modalities: micro-time, meso-time, macro-time, mega-time.

It is quite likely that the origins of prayer are to be found in ancient mourning and bereavement rites. Primeval ritual prayer was codified and handed down socially to become a deep-rooted feature of people’s cultural behavior, so much so, that it may surface again several years later, in the face of death, danger, need, even in the case of relapse from faith and religious practice. Modes of prayer depend on religious experience, on relations between personal prayer and political action, between prayer and forgiveness, and between prayer and approaches to religions. Various forms of prayer exist, from the covert-hidden to the overt-manifest kind. How can they be investigated? How can one, for instance, explore mental prayer? These issues regard the canon of diffused religion and, therefore, of diffused prayer.

(2011). About religion in contemporary societies. International Review of Sociology: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 103-105.

The publication of The Invisible Religion by Thomas Luckmann inspired conflicting judgements. It was hard to accept the idea of religion in terms of modern approaches, thus overturning a series of defining schemas of religion. It has really not been subjected to a screening by specific field research. When this has occurred in a partial sense, there has been evidence of a certain gap between the abstractness of the theory and the concreteness of empirical data. Actually historically organized and consolidated religions are still active and dominant. Luckmann's thesis is very useful at the methodological level provided we do not force the terms of his concluding argument so as to make it universally and aprioristically valid. Probably at the root of the resistance of visible, or more exactly, diffused, religion is the fact that in Italy there is a situation different from that where religion is not generally and successfully transmitted through the basic socialization procedures.