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very pragmatically, “following one and then another strategy ‘works’ for
them.” 7
To review the key dimensions of these arguments about the nature of
questing or seeking spirituality today, the following seem most important.
First, religion and spirituality are everyday things. They are pursued,
constructed, and experienced in the context of daily life. Second, the prac-
tices are reflexive, meaning that they involve a level of complex
self-consciousness and orientation toward self-identity. Third, they involve
agency on the part of the individual, a sense of autonomy in the quest and in
the construction. Finally, the object does have to do with integration of these
various symbols, practices, and values into an ideal construction of self.
The importance of Roof’s work to our project of understanding reli-
gious and spiritual meaning-making in the media age lies in its nuanced
interpretations of contemporary religious culture and how that culture is
expressible and expressed in the lives and accounts of individuals, families,
and groups as they encounter religious and spiritual culture. The fact that
his categories are not formal or inductive should further serve to connect
our conversations about religion, spirituality, and media to larger themes
in the study of religious culture. As Roof, Warner, Albanese, and other
“new-paradigm” religion scholars argue, it no longer makes sense to look
for religion in received, formal, inductive, or essentialized categories.
Roof’s religious “types” thus provide us with a way of organizing and
interpreting expressed experiences of daily life in a way that reflects what
we think we know about how religion today is reorganizing itself.

Roof’s categories
I introduced Roof’s categories in Chapter 3, including there some
proposals about what kind of media practice we might expect to find
among the various types. We’ll look at each of his categories in turn,
beginning with a review of what we speculated we might find in terms of
media practices in each category. From there, we’ll proceed to see what we
can say about the individuals and families we’ve interviewed that seem to
most closely fit Roof’s definitions. We’ll then move on to some overall
conclusions about what we’ve seen here.
This project of placing our interviewees into these categories is a bit
more difficult than we might have expected. As we already saw with Glenn
Donegal in Chapter 4 and will be seen in other cases as we proceed, inter-
viewees here do not fall neatly into Roof’s taxonomy. Instead, it is
necessary to use his classifications somewhat formally at times, other times
making assignments to the various categories using a combination of his
descriptions, received labels, and self-descriptions.
There are some clues to this challenge in the interviews we looked at in
the last chapter. One thing that typifies many of the narratives there is a