Response to Saad: The Sociology of Spirituality
Published in Academia Letters, 2021
In this article, Mike Sosteric responds to Marcelo Saad’s claim that science must incorporate the concept of spirit in order to explain anomalous phenomena such as mediumship, past-life memories, and near-death experiences:contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}.
Sosteric agrees on the need to re-enchant the sciences but critiques reliance on Spiritism or traditional religions without acknowledging their historical corruption by elites. He shows how systems like Zoroastrianism and Christianity were co-opted to serve imperial and colonial agendas, embedding elite ideology into spiritual thought.
Key contributions of the paper include:
- Identifying the “Fool in School” archetype as an elite-inspired construct that legitimizes exploitation and passivity.
- Arguing for a sociology of spirituality attentive to class, gender, ethnicity, and colonial power.
- Proposing a new framework developed with Gina Ratkovic, where the spiritual ego and bodily ego are integrated to enable authentic human flourishing.
- Positioning this framework within an evolutionary vision of a Pinnacle Species capable of developing eupsychian utopias that resist elite distortion.
The article closes with a call to recover authentic spiritual knowledge and transform political, economic, and social systems to allow full connection between bodily and spiritual egos.
Recommended citation: Sosteric, Mike. (2021). "Response to Saad: The Sociology of Spirituality." *Academia Letters*, Article 4524. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL4524
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