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204 Believers, dogmatists, and secularists

believers and seekers. This means that one of the essential dynamics I’d
suggested would be at work here – that of autonomous “seeking” – is
present across categories rather than limited to one or two of them.
In the next chapter, we will look at interviews in a different way that is
more closely related to how media might relate to deeper and more funda-
mental narratives of the religious or spiritual “self.” This is a different way
of looking at these issues. Rather than the inductive approach in this
chapter, the next one will look at things more deductively. As I’ve noted
earlier, many of our interviewees have had a difficult time describing the
ways that media relate in a fundamental way to their religious or spiritual
lives. In many interviews, though, there comes a point when they finally
are able to make such an articulation. In Chapter 8, we will look at those
moments and others in which interviewees describe the range of ways that
they see media relating to their lives.