Coping with the Vicissitudes of Life (The Study of Pargament's Theory of Religious coping)

The role of meaningful systems in designing the goal and meaningfulness of life is undeniable. Coping with the vicissitudes of his lifetime and relying on some frameworks, man tries to create and maintain his goals and meaning of life and sometimes to even evolve them. In this course of considering religion as the system providing the meaning of life, Kenneth Pargament has gone to suggest his theory of religious confrontation. He considers confrontation as a constantly changing process to meet regional or personal needs. Accordingly and in the course of religious confrontation, every event goes to be interpreted in the light of the Holy. Having embraced the reciprocal relation between religious and none-religious coping, Pargament introduces three religious paradigms, which can be positive or negative. He then goes to suggest a standard of 21kinds of religious coping through his interviews and the review of the preceding works, mentioning five functions for them. According to those experimental studies, man’s conception of God determines the kind of his paradigm of coping. In this article, the author has examined Pargament’s viewpoint, his method, and practical consequences of his theory through a descriptive-analytic method.