A Pastafarian Heart in a Catholic Body

Abstract In recent decades, sociology has struggled with the definition of “religion.” Along with other authors that addressed the matter, we believe these “definitional issues” can be tackled by adopting a contextual, qualitative perspective on religion, which we employ to describe the activities of the Italian Pastafarian Church ( IPC ). IPC ’s core elements are an undeniable expression of the Italian discourse on religion; therefore, our aim is to prove how this Pastafarian movement should be rightfully considered a religion within the Italian religious discourse. By scaling down the scope of our analysis, we show that the limitation of functional and substantial definitions can be overcome if one drops the claim to describe religion in universal, taxonomic terms. Overcoming this claim means, in our view, rethinking the concept of religion from a contextual perspective that considers the specificities assumed by religious discourse within the researcher’s specific field of study.