What Motivates People to Join Monastic Life Today?
Catie Brooks, Department of Sociology
Seminal sociologist Emile Durkheim studied to be a rabbi like his father, grandfather and great-grandfather before him, but finally decided he would rather study religion from a social-scientific perspective instead of a spiritual one. Recent translator of Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Karen Fields (1995), wonders about Durkheim’s assertions that religions are the core of all societies, functioning to bring citizens together and to organize social life, often beyond religious constraints. She says,
“It is gripping drama to see how a man of science positive could possibly
make such claims, how he could go about arguing them in an era when
science seemed to be dismembering religion, and most of all, why such
a man would choose to. This drama is gripping for us still: The dispute
between science and religion is at least as loud now as it was in his time” (xxv).
During a time when religious commitment is waning and agnosticism is growing, people around the world seem more concerned with secular pursuits. Also, as educational and vocational opportunities grow for women outside religious institutions, but remain stagnant in the Catholic church’s formal organizational structure, I wonder why a person would choose the path of joining a convent today. Specifically, during an age when fewer and fewer women and men are becoming religious sisters and brothers (nuns, monks and friars), and even more so in the United States than around the world, why do some individuals still choose a life of poverty, chastity, devotion to God and charity toward others? I hope that by reading the articles and books attached, I will get closer to an answer.
Anecdotally, there is an assumption that those who seek monastic life, that of a nun, monk or friar, have experienced a calling or some sort of deep, religious feeling that pulled them toward this extreme commitment; away from family and other social networks, renouncing romantic connections and sexuality, subservient to a higher power and a bureaucracy, and giving up most worldly goods and financial wealth. I would like to investigate whether “the calling” is ubiquitous or is connected to other variables such as class status, gender or age/generation. I would also like to search for a connection to personal feelings of anomie (normlessness), rather than anomie on a societal level. In other words, are novitiates looking for order and a connection to other people, God or a cause.
Research on this topic has assumed that people who join religious orders are running from something (Sharma, 1977:38) or that the decline in convent membership is due to women having more vocational choices (Ebaugh et al. 1996:35, Stark and Finke 2000:42). Other research has delved into the concept of relative deprivation (Sharma, 1977:38) being a possible motivator. In particular, women, while not allowed the same official leadership roles as men in the Catholic church, have more vocational opportunities generally and more lay support roles in the church (Lipka, 2014). This might lead fewer women to become nuns since they can be involved in religious life, while retaining their freedom. On the other hand, research from the Georgetown University affiliated CARA (Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate) suggests that those committing their lives to the Catholic church find a connection to traditional religious life. The characteristics of religious orders that tend to find more new members and to be most successful at keeping them are living communally rather than separately, coming together daily for Communion and other devotions, wearing traditional garb such as a habit and focusing on proselytizing (Carey 2016).
This study grant would help satisfy personal fascination and academic curiosity about the topic of committed religious life. In the future, I hope to create a research plan to investigate reasons for joining monastic life and I believe these readings will also help me narrow down a research question. I also believe this study grant would help me enrich my students’ experience in class in several ways. First, I conduct a week-long section about discipline-specific research methods in my courses. I have useful examples from research I participated in relating to different topics and using survey, interviewing and ethnographic methods. I think this new research will help me relate to their struggles in the methods project I assign that requires students to create a short project and analyze issues of ethics, logistics and validity, particularly in discussions about using secondary data. Second, my courses deal with a wide variety of topics, from gender, culture and social change to issues of socioeconomic disparity and the meanings, functions and dysfunctions of religions. By researching a specific aspect of a specific religion, I believe I can offer interesting and timely examples to my students. I also think that if I can engage them with what I have studied, this will make them more socially conscious and better critical thinkers. Using nuns as an example, a group of people about which most Americans have preconceived notions, can both grab student attention and then, hopefully, encourage cultural relativism over stereotyping. I think my studies will also increase my own understanding of a life I am not familiar with in a social scientific sense and lead my students to be more empathic. If a student sees a nun, monk or priest as a human being who is affected, just as they are, by social forces (the generation they are born into, macro changes in religious tenets, increasing or decreasing opportunities in vocations), they will see how they themselves are influenced by, and influence, others in the world. Hopefully this will also lead to engagement in that world and feelings of self-efficacy.
Literature Review and Reading Schedule - Fall 2017
Week One: History of Religious Life
*I want to learn more about the history of Catholic monasticism in the U.S., what the nuns/monks/friars were charged to do, what changed after the Vatican II Conference and how the numbers and demographics of the monastic populations are shifting. There are quite a few books in the preliminary list, so they will be divided up over several weeks.
Durkheim, Emile. 1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by Karen E. Fields. New York, NY: The Free Press.
Fialka, John J. 2004. Sisters: Catholic Nuns and The Making of America. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Griffin Press.
Kuhns, Elizabeth. 2007. The Habit: A History of the Clothing of Catholic Nuns. Danvers, MA: Image Publishers: Sold by Random House.
Week Two: History Continued
Batts Morrow, Diane. 2002. Persons of Color and Religious at the Same Time: The Oblate Sisters of Providence, 1828-1860. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
McGuinness, Margaret. 2013. Called to Serve: A History of Nuns in America. New York, NY: NYU Press.
Price, Teresa. 2013. Letters from a Black and White World: The Making of a Nun. Bloomington, IN: WestBow Press: A Division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan.
Week Three: History Continued
Stark, Rodney and Roger Finke. 2000. Catholic Religious Vocations: Decline and Revival. Review of Religious Research 42(2):125-145. 21 pages
Tobin, Mary Luke. 1986. “Women in the Church Since Vatican II: From November 1, 1986”. America: The Jesuit Review: November 1, 1986. Retrieved February 19, 2017 ( 5 pages
Wittberg, Patricia. 1989. “Non-Ordained Workers in the Catholic Church: Power and Mobility Among American Nuns”. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 28(2):148-161.
13 pages
Week Four: Activism and Politics
*This week will examine the relationship between women and men religious and politics and social change. I would also like to investigate gender roles in bureaucracy. [in the Church]
Garibaldi Rogers, Carole. 2011. Habits of Change. Oxford Oral History Series. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Norbert Wiley. 1967. “Religious and Political Liberalism Among Catholics”. Sociological Analysis 28(3):142-148. 6 pages
Stalp, Marybeth C. and Bill Winders. 2000. “Power in the Margins: Gendered Organizational Effects on Religious Activism”. Review of Religious Research 42(1):41-60.
19 pages
Week Five:The Current Situation for Nuns and Brothers in the United States
* What is happening around the world generally in religious communities, in upper versus lower-income countries and to sizes of monastic communities?
Carey, Ann. 2016. “What Does 2016 Hold for US Women Religious”? The Catholic World Report online. Retrieved February 18, 2017 ( 7 pages
“Global Catholicism: Trends and Forecasts”. 2015. Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA). Retrieved February 19, 2017 (
catholicism%20release.pdf). 51 page report
*CARA is a national, non-profit, Georgetown University affiliated research center that conducts social scientific studies about the Catholic Church. Founded in 1964, CARA has three major dimensions to its mission: to increase the Church's self-understanding, to serve the applied research needs of Church decision-makers, to advance scholarly research on religion, particularly Catholicism. CARA’s longstanding policy is to let research findings stand on their own and never take an advocacy position or go into areas outside its social science competence.
Lipka, Michael. 2014. “U.S. Nuns Face Shrinking Numbers and Tensions with the Vatican”. Pew Research. Retrieved February 18, 2017 ( 7 pages
Stark, Rodney 2015. The Triumph of Faith: Why the World is More Religious Than Ever. Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
Week Six: Looking at (Religious) Women Globally
*These readings are relevant, but did not quite fit into any other week’s theme. The first reading might help formulating future research questions and gauging attitudes toward formal religion. The last article does not seem to relate to Catholicism, but actually begins with an analysis of former research on my study topic and while it relates later to Buddhist nuns in particular, it also addresses the core topic of why people might choose monastic life.
Byrne, Anne. 2003. “Developing a Sociological Model for Researching Women’s Self and Social Identities”. The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10(4):443-464. 21 pages
Norris, Pippa and Ronald Inglehart. 2011. Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press: Second Edition.
Sharma, Arvind. 1977. “How and Why Did the Women in Ancient India Become Buddhist Nuns”? Sociological Analysis 38(3):239-251. 12 pages
Week Seven: Community
*This week’s readings are dedicated to the idea that community might be a core quality that novitiates are looking for, possibly as a reaction against our overly-connected, modern world, but also as a reaction to changes to monastic life after Vatican II.
Ebaugh, Helen Rose, Jon Lorence and Janet Saltzman Chafetz. 1996. “The Growth and Decline of the Population of Catholic Nuns Cross-Nationally, 1960-1990: A Case of Secularization as Structural Change”. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 35(2):171-183. 12 pages
Schneiders, Sandra M. 2001.Selling All: Commitment, Consecrated Celibacy, and Community in Catholic Religious Life (Religious Life in a New Millennium, V. 2). Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press.
Week Eight: Identities
*These readings deal with the idea that, while to some extent joining a convent or monastery is a traditional choice, today it might be considered a deviant identity from a sociological or organizational perspective.
Brinkerhoff, Merlin B. and Marlene M. Mackie. 1993. “Casting Off the Bonds of Organized Religion: A Religious-Careers Approach to the Study of Apostasy”. Review of Religious Research 34(3):235-258. 23 pages
Lofland, John and Rodney Stark. 1965. “Becoming a World-Saver: A Theory of Conversion to a Deviant Perspective”. American Sociological Review 30(6):862-875. 13 pages
Week Nine: Individual Stories
*Individual stories are important in trying to glean depth and detail in reasons behind the decision to leave lay or public life, at least those known to the joiners.
Dearborn, Renee-Therese. 2016. The Holy Habit: My Love Affair and Break-Up With the Convent. Amazon Digital Services LLC.
Hawksley, Theodora (2015) Why I’m Giving Up My Academic Career to Become a Nun: The Telegraph. April 24, 2015: Retrieved February 18, 2017 ( 2 pages
Reese, Abbie. 2013. Dedicated to God: An Oral History of Cloistered Nuns. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Smith, William L. 2016. “Vocation Stories of Cistercian Monks”. Michigan Sociological Review 30(Fall 2016):69-90. 21 pages
Week Ten: Current and Cultural Views of Nuns
*I think it is also important to look at the way popular media portrays monastic life and how many journalistic stories are in the media and their style. At a glance, some of the “popular” or news stories are portraying religious women and men as “cool” and trendy. I would like to investigate whether current novitiates were affected by media in the way they envision their monastic lives.
Bradley Hagerty, Barbara. 2010. “For These Young Nuns, Habits Are the New Radical.” Transcript from NPR All Things Considered. Originally aired December 22, 2010: Retrieved February 18, 2017 (
5 pages
Caschetta, MB. 2015. “The Comeback of the American Nun”. New York Times Live: Women in the World. September 24, 2015: Retrieved February 8, 2017 ( 5 pages
Gordon, Mary. 2002. “Women of God”. The Atlantic. January 2002 edition: Retrieved February 11, 2017 ( 49 pages
Green, Emma. 2013. “Why Would a Millennial Become a Priest or a Nun”? The Atlantic. August 16, 2013: Retrieved February 18, 2017 ( 5 pages
Hereford, Amy. 2013. Religious Life at the Crossroads: A School for Mystics and Prophets. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.
“This book explores the movements in religious life today and the currents that are emerging among the smaller cohorts of younger religious in mainstream communities of religious women. Hereford traces the history of religious life, including the impact of Vatican II and examines some of the theological sources for the reinvention of religious life today. She explores the current situation of religious, re-imagines the meaning of vows, community, and mission, and examines how the emerging forms of religious life will fit into an emerging church.” - Amazon, Retrieved February 17, 2017
Johnson, Mary, Patricia Wittberg and Mary L. Gautier. 2014. New Generations of Catholic Sisters: The Challenge of Diversity. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
*I also intend to follow some social media, websites and blogs created by current monks/friars such as usfranciscans.org, breakinginthehabit.org and trappists.org. The sites contain some current video blogs about life as a novitiate, while others have collections of rules for novitiates and other details of monastic life.