Dominika Motak

The paper is an attempt of applying the urban history criteria for the deliberations on the future of cities. On the basis of historic and contemporary urban design the hypotheses and reflections on the future directions of cities’ development are discussed. They are presented in six basic groups referring to six factors of the creation and evolution of cities in the past, which were determined by Tadeusz Tołwiński. In the future the factors are likely to maintain their importance, although with certain change of their image and contents. The principle of a number of urban factors sharing their influence to induce city’s balanced development will remain unaltered, too. The harmony of functional and spatial transformations is desirable in urban evolution and the harmonious evolution of theoretical basis of urban design features positive impact on the future of cities likewise.

Religion was a recurrent theme in Georg Simmel’s thought. Despite this fact, and despite the current rediscovery of Simmel’s ideas, his insights into religion remain relatively neglected. The task of integrating Simmel’s legacy into the current study of religion remains a continuing challenge. This paper, based on an on-going study of Simmel’s work (involving a close reading of his writings in the original version), reflects on his conceptualisation of the relationship between religion understood as an objective, social and historical phenomenon and subjective religiosity.
In Simmel’s view, the religious perspective – a “particular spiritual quality” or “attitude of the soul”, a way of looking at the world as a whole – constitutes a kind of pre-stage of religion. This particular perspective of a religion-like (religioid) character makes up an individual foundation for religion, but it can also express itself in other cultural pursuits, like science or art. It only becomes religion after it assumes a specific form in human interaction. Simmel claims that many human relations have a religious character; faith, which is regarded as the substance of religion, is first a relationship between individuals. Out of the subjective faith-process there develops an object for that faith: the idea of God, who is “the absolute object of human faith”. For Simmel, the idea of God (conceived of as the unity of existence, the coincidentia oppositorum) is constitutive for religion.

An effect of the revision of the secularisation thesis is an array of conceptions attempting to capture the essence of the modern transformations of religions and the shape of non-traditional forms of religiosity. The concept of „(new) spirituality”, which is supposed to signal a new religious megatrend, today aspires to the role of „universal key” to contemporary analysis of religion. The aim of this article is to attempt to clarify the meaning of this term by reconstructing the origins of spirituality – the phenomenon itself as well as the term used to describe it. The concepts used to describe this subject are ordered in the sequence religion – religiosity – spirituality, which also corresponds to the direction of religious transformations in the West. The course of these changes is presented in a three-phase model of the origins of new spirituality based on the metaphor of change of the concentration of religious material: from the solid body, via fluid form to a gaseous state. This model is diachronic in character, but is also a reflection of synchronic order (the spectrum whose poles correspond to traditional religion and new spirituality).