Why Metanoia Studies?
Pierre Hadot (1968) held that “the idea of conversion represents one of the constitutive notions of Western consciousness and conscience. In effect, one can represent the whole history of the West as a ceaseless effort at renewal by perfecting the techniques of conversion, which is to say the techniques intended to transform human reality.” The evolving meaning of metanoia tracks the gradual development of this central notion over the centuries. Literally meaning “after-thought”, classical Greek rhetoricians spoke of metanoia to describe a persuasive figure of speech in which the speaker takes back an earlier statement and replaces it with a new one to reinforce their point. In doing so, the speaker performs a change of heart, but the change occurs in their words rather than in their forum internum – still, if effective, it may effect a change within the listener.
The advent of Christianity brought a new emphasis on individual interiority, the ethical imperative for personal conversion, and the central idea of rebirth through a change of ethos. Under the Christian influence, metanoia came to signify an act of substitution of “the old sinful being with a new personal identity—an ethos that is defined by a penitent relation to the self” (Ellwanger, 2020). How is such a thing possible? That is of course Nicodemus’s question in John’s Gospel when Jesus tells him that a person must be “born again”. And it is a question which continues to animate us today, whether or not we phrase it in overtly Christian terms.
The process of radical personal transformation can be observed in a variety of contexts, such as religious and political conversion, ideological change, criminal desistance, and radicalization. These processes involve complex interactions between internal psychological and spiritual factors and external social and environmental factors. For example, work on cognitive and emotional transformation and the construction of meaning (Garcet, 2021) shows how individuals adopt radical beliefs or become involved in extremist movements, often motivated by personal uncertainties and perceived injustices (Doosje et al., 2013). Transformative experiences can profoundly alter an individual’s knowledge, values, and perspectives (Arvan, 2020; Brieley, 2023). Research into personal transformation and metanoia also raises questions about the notion of a “true self” that might be discovered through deliberate spiritual practice (Nouwen, 1991) or through the stages of individuation (Jung, 1951) or self-actualization (Rogers, 1961; Maslow, 1962). Others have questioned the conditions under which personal identification can be said to persist through change (Locke, 1690; Parfitt, 1984).
On a collective scale, radical transformations encompass phenomena such as the Christian transformation of Europe (Holland, 2019), the Cultural Revolution in China (Jiang, 1997; MacFarquhar, R. & Schoenhals, 2006) or the Nazi Cultural Revolution (Chapoutot, 2017). These revolutionary movements show how radical social transformations can redefine cultural norms and practices, permanently affecting social structures and collective attitudes (Drury & Reicher, 2000). These moments of rupture are often associated with the idea of “the birth of the new man” in the socialist (Marx & Engels, 1845; Trotsky, 1937; Zedong, 1940), fascist (Gentile, 1916) and Nazi (Rosenberg, 1930) repertoires, describing either a transformative change in living people, or a seismic generational shift in norms and attitudes. At the same time, some revisionist historians have challenged the identification of revolutions with radical change, stressing instead the dynamics of social inertia and continuity over time (Furet, 1978; Doyle, 1980).
With an aim to develop and synthesize these diverse lines of inquiry, this year’s Metanoia Symposium will explore two main themes detailed below.
Theme 1: The Religious Analogy of Conversion in Non-Religious Contexts
Religious metaphors have long haunted the social and human sciences, from Marx’s description of capitalism as a form of primitive totemic religion (1867) to Yuri Slezkine’s analysis of the “religious fervor” of communist revolutionaries (2017). This is also true in the fields of politics and the media, on both sides of the political discourse; for example, commentators on the right have used religious analogies to delegitimize the “woke” movement (Dejean, 2022) or climate concerns (Woods et al. 2012), whilst those on the left have described neoliberalism as a religion (Mavelli, 2019), as well as rightwing “panics” as “witch-hunts” against “folk-devils” (Cohen [1972] described the behavior of conservatives in religious terms that have since been widely successful in the political space ; see as well Hutchins-Viroux, 2008). This is particularly true for the theme of conversion: religious vocabularies and frameworks are often used metaphorically to describe transformation experiences pertaining to commitment, outlook, or ethos in domains not typically considered religious. Examples include ideological change on specific issues such as abortion (Layman & Carsey, 1998; 1999) and feminism (Yang et al., 2022), political party affiliation switching (Clark et al., 1991), life trajectories of radical political activists (Linden & Klandermans, 2007; Raynaud, 2017), sexual orientation change efforts (Davison & Walden, 2024), environmentalism (Schauffler, 2003), management development (Peters, 1997), and shifts in values (Tjeltveit, 1986) or morality (Mac Laughlin, 2008).
Contributors are invited to approach this phenomenon from an empirical perspective (studying religious analogies applied to past and contemporary contexts) or from a theoretical perspective (analyzing the value, limits, and implications of such analogies (Heinich, 2014)). Both perspectives should aim at an operationalization of religious analogy, seeking to better define the epistemic strengths and weaknesses of this discursive device. Contributions combining the two perspectives (e.g. by integrating a reflexive dimension in an empirical study) are also welcome.
Empirical questions of interest include but are not limited to: What are the current and historical non-religious areas in which religious analogies have been employed? Who are the protagonists (emitters, receivers, and objects) of these analogies? Are religious analogies explicitly/consciously acknowledged by the protagonists who employ them, those who receive them, or those who are described by them? Are such analogies used as secularist arguments to critique, dismiss, or delegitimize people or ideas? Or are there cases where religious analogies convey a message of empowerment or recognition? We are also interested in specific case-studies of personal transformations described in religious terms but occurring within non-religious settings such as healthcare, politics, the arts, education, etc.
Theoretical proposals may respond to these or cognate questions: Under what circumstances does the use of religious analogies constitute an intellectualist “over-interpretation”, dismissing what is literally said as naive in favor of hidden, esoteric meanings never intended by the actors themselves (Bouveresse, 1999)? Does the use of religious analogies risk conflating poetic analogies with analytic comparisons, creating evocative images rather than building explanatory frameworks (Veyne, 1971)? Does the use of religious analogies privilege outward form over substance? When is the use of religious analogies a rhetorical weapon to delegitimize an opponent and when is it a heuristic tool to understand human phenomena? Are religious analogies useful for the analytic understanding of non-religious conversion phenomena? What elements of “religion” are most used and most useful in the use of such analogies? Does the use of religious language emerge for lack of a better vocabulary, for example because a political crisis hinders the recourse to secular socio-political frameworks? How do religious analogies indirectly expose the way secular thinking—especially in its Enlightenment form—misattributes certain anthropological universals of human experience to an ill-defined category of “religion”?
Theme 2: Measuring Transformations
The social and human sciences are traversed by various epistemic mirror-oppositions (positivism vs interpretivism, explanatory analysis vs descriptive narration, behaviorism vs culturalism, etc.), many of which are expressed in the methodological polarity between qualitative and quantitative approaches. Some researchers adopt a single approach while others favor mixed methods (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2017). Each approach has its own language and challenges, and the methodological critiques or controversies surrounding each of them can sometimes reach a high level of intensity, where each perspective attacks the legitimacy of the other. Andrew Abbott (2004) maps this “cycle of critique”, which consists of a series of skirmishes between small N and large N research; the lack of generalizability of qualitative approaches constitutes the impetus for larger sample studies, which are in turn critiqued for their lack of contextualization. Each method thus continuously trumps all the others, though in different ways, such that “nearly all of these trumpings have been tried and have led each methodological community to forms of revisionism that try to deal with the shortcomings other communities have pointed out. These, too, complicate the methodological landscape” (ibid, p. 64). Donghyun Kang and James Evans (2020) lend credit to the approach in their analysis of the vocabulary used in quantitative and qualitative studies, and their results suggest that both approaches play a complementary role by valuing symmetrical opposite aspects of the scientific method. This complementarity is not always recognized as such by scientific actors within each field, as they tend to believe that their respective methods are inherently and objectively better or more fit to their object than the methods used in other traditions (Lamont, 2009).
Processes of personal and collective transformation can serve as informative test cases to distill these debates and explore the complementary (or irreconcilability) of quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Identifying when a transformational event has occurred, how it is to be described and analyzed and from whose perspective, situating its level of occurrence (individual or collective) and its salient indicators, assessing its degree of magnitude and moral qualities, and determining what its effects are; these are the challenges which this second theme of the symposium should address.
Papers which respond to this theme may ask how we can measure conversion rates, social transformations, or personal changes (such as shifts in personality or deep commitments) and what the challenges are of quantifying these transformations? What have been the major methodological advances in this field, and what new methodological breakthrough can be imagined with the recent technological advances in computing capacities (Grossmann et al., 2023; Espín-Sánchez et al., 2024)? Are there measurable historical patterns of individual and collective adaptation to crises, and if not, what are the obstacles to establishing such patterns? Papers may also assess the implicit or explicit normative assessments of existing accounts of transformational processes.
In particular, we would be interested in papers which either investigate how qualitative and quantitative approaches complement each other in measuring personal transformation or which analyze the frictions and obstacles that limit such complementarity. What are the contributions of psychometric evaluations and the obstacles to generalizing these approaches in such highly subjective phenomena – especially when measuring values (Sijtsma, 2021)? How to quantify personal transformation without decontextualizing it to the point of unintelligibility? How to describe transformations qualitatively without naively generalizing from a non-representative sample? How to reconcile or talk across the divide between competing imaginaries and epistemologies on this specific issue?
The Center for Metanoia Studies invites submissions for its Second Annual Symposium on the themes of (1) the Religious Analogy of Conversion in Non-Religious Contexts and (2) Measuring Transformations.
Location: All Souls College, Oxford
Dates: 15-16 December, 2025
Costs: There is no registration fee. The Center can provide a limited number of bursaries to cover the costs of travel and/or accommodation.
Submission Instructions: We welcome submissions from scholars across all disciplines (philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, psychology, law, theology and religious studies, and beyond) as well as practitioners working in relevant settings such as schooling, psychotherapy, pastoral ministry, prisons, visual, literary, and performative arts, and others.
Please submit your proposals via the online platform.
- 500 word proposal submission deadline: 16 June 2025
- Full paper submission deadline (for accepted proposals): 8 December 2025
Organization and committee: The symposium is organized by the Center for Metanoia Studies. The symposium committee is composed of:
- Pieter Francois, University of Oxford
- Ruth Harris, University of Oxford
- Alexis de La Ferrière, University of London
- Charles Mercier, University of Bordeaux
- Gauthier Simon, University of Bordeaux
Please direct any questions to alexis.delaferriere@gmail.com
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