Hylomorphic Attitudinal Spirituality

Abstract

Our hylomorphic attitudinal perspective is an alternate view of spirituality. Herein we posit a priori that spirituality is essential to human nature and it can be studied in a taxonomical sense. We argue that spirituality disposes us toward what is good and truthful as we live our lives; how we involve ourselves with our immediate reality imbues how we experience life. We argue that spirituality and religiosity are not congruently human phenomena. And, we disjoint spirituality from religiosity against the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ’ (4th ed.; merican Psychiatric Association, 1994) conflated codification of these constructs via loss of faith. We explain spirituality is inherent to humanity instead of religion, and it substantiates all human phenomena; organic and intellectual. We also report two studies. Study 1 established initial confidence of content validity of the Spiritual Typology Inventory (STI). Study 2 examined the STI’s emergent psychometric properties: acceptable internal consistency coefficients (α = .949), test–retest reliability coefficients ( r xy = .759), and exploratory factor analyses (factor loadings > .30). These properties adduce acceptable stability and construct validity for our inventory’s conceptual scales (α = .910, r xy = .770; α = .917, r xy = .667) from an adequate sample ( n = 1,080) and stability subsample ( n = 619). These psychometric properties evince our theoretical assumptions that spirituality is fundamentally human and it can be viewed as complementary types of a fundamental spiritual profile. Our inventory stands as a useful assessment tool for research and clinical practices in health care disciplines.