Transgressive Behaviours and Readiness to Engage in Interreligious Dialogue in Young Adulthood

Abstract

One of the key aspects of an individual’s spiritual intelligence is the ability to transcend, which allows one to identify dimensions of reality that go beyond the boundaries of the material world. In the present study, we look at transcendence from the theoretical perspective of a conception proposed by Kozielecki, who defines human transgressive behaviour as all those actions and acts of thinking which exceed the limits of an individual’s existing material, symbolic and social capacities, and achievements and which constitute a source of new important values. One important social value is the readiness to engage in dialogue with people of other faiths. We wanted to investigate the associations between transgression and young people’s readiness to enter into such dialogue. Rydz and Bartczuk, departing from a psycholinguistic definition of dialogue, developed a definition of readiness to engage in interreligious dialogue, describing it as a person’s mental readiness to exchange views about religious topics with people of other religions. We hypothesised that there was a relationship between transgressive behaviours and dimensions of readiness to engage in interreligious dialogue among young adults. To verify these hypotheses, 528 people aged 18–25 were surveyed using the Readiness to Engage in Interreligious Dialogue Test (REID) and the Alternative Behaviours Checklist (ABC) based on Kozielecki’s conception of transgression. The results we obtained show that the dimensions of social transgression, creative transgression, and psychological transgression were positively related to dimensions of readiness to engage in interreligious dialogue.