SPIRITUALITY

SPIRITUALITY is the concern of human beings with their appropriate relationships to the cosmos. How the cosmic whole is conceived and what is considered appropriate in interacting with it differ according to worldviews of individuals and communities. Spirituality is also construed as an orientation toward the spiritual as distinguished from the exclusively material. This entry considers classic spiritualities, contemporary spiritualities, and spirituality as an alternative to religion. By the end of the twentieth century spirituality, long considered an integral part of religion, was increasingly regarded as a separate quest, with religion being distinguished from secular spiritualities. A predilection to speak of having spirituality rather than having religion indicated a change in worldview and a transition from exclusive religious traditions to inclusive, overlapping expressions of commitment to world and community.

Classic Spiritualities

Each religion has a characteristic way of living in the world. Each embraces an attitude and outlook rooted in its particular worldview and has developed a set of disciplines that assists devotees in pursuing their relationship to the cosmos. Thus, one speaks, for example, of Islamic spirituality, Christian spirituality, indigenous Australian spirituality, or Hindu spirituality. By spirituality one denotes the characteristic sentiments and way of life of those who were born into, or came to embrace, a particular tradition. Thus, Crossroad Publishing's series, World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest, which treats spirituality as essential to religious traditions, has published volumes on world religions and on indigenous religious traditions. However, recognizing the trend that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century of not confining spirituality to religious contexts, the series includes volumes titled Modern Esoteric Movements and Spirituality and the Secular Quest. In a preface, the series editor, Ewert Cousins, states:

The series focuses on that inner dimension of the person called by certain traditions "the spirit." This spiritual core is the deepest center of the person. It is here that the person is open to the transcendent dimension; it is here that the person experiences ultimate reality. The series explores the discovery of this core, the dynamics of its development, and its journey to the ultimate goal. It deals with prayer, spiritual direction, the various maps of the spiritual journey, and the methods of advancement in the spiritual ascent. (Olupona, 2000, p. xii)

Spirituality regarded as a dimension of religious expression may describe the sensibility and practices of schools, orders, or denominations within a tradition. Spiritual leaders and scholars of Christianity distinguish approaches to the spiritual life of various Catholic and Protestant groups—for instance, Jesuit spirituality, Franciscan spirituality, Anglican spirituality, and Calvinist spirituality. Each spirituality employs resources of the Christian tradition (Bible reading, sacraments, prayers, good works) to develop a life based on the example of Jesus Christ and the New Testament. Similarly, each of the schools and movements within Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam has its characteristic spirituality.

The difference between classic spirituality and those who claim to have spirituality but not religion is not so much a disagreement about what constitutes spirituality. The latter may agree with Cousins that spirituality has to do with "the deepest center of the person" and with experiences of "ultimate reality." Both see spirituality as a way of situating the self in the world. However, while the practitioners of classic spiritualities see spirituality is an aspect of religion, those on contemporary spiritual quests do not limit it in this way. Moreover, they may see their spirituality as an alternative to religion.

Contemporary Spiritualities

Contemporary spiritualities combine practices of particular religious traditions with concern for the global situation and the life of the planet. Like classic spiritualities, approaches to spirituality that were developed in the last quarter of the twentieth century are also concerned with cultivation of the self and have generated many volumes on self improvement. Contemporary spiritualities are pluralistic and diverse; they search for a global ethic, are concerned with ecology, encourage the cultivation of healthy relationships, support feminism, and pursue peace.

In A Spirituality Named Compassion and the Healing of the Global Village, Humpty Dumpty, and Us (1979) Matthew Fox pointed toward spirituality as an alternative to religion and, indeed, as resistance toward traditional religion. Fox was concerned with compassion as the mode of spirituality that the world needed. Aware of regional and international conflicts, some of them provoked by religious differences, he sought to discover how the members of the global community might learn to live and survive together. "Now that the world is a global village we need compassion more than ever—not for altruism's sake, nor for philosophy's sake or theology's sake, but for survival's sake" (p. 11). Thus, from within his Roman Catholic heritage, Fox began to promote what he said was "a spirituality named compassion," a spirituality that did not belong to a particular religious tradition, but that could be adopted by anyone genuinely committed to the world community. "Survival's sake," as Fox put it, is also the focus of those who, with him, advocate an ecological spirituality. For them it is not only the survival of human communities that is at stake, but also the survival of animal and plant populations and of the earth itself. "Green spirituality" has increasingly become part of religious traditions. David Kinsley, in Ecology and Religion: Ecological Spirituality in Cross-Cultural Perspective (1995), showed how concern with the environment becomes part of ongoing religious commitments, building on and reinterpreting the resources of existing traditions and, perhaps, adding to them. This was the concern, too, of the Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions when in the late 1990s and early 2000s it conducted a series of conferences on "Religions of the World and Ecology." The participants reflected on the literary, doctrinal, and ritual resources that help traditions to think about and respond to the earth. Many of the contributors recognized that religions stand in need of dialogue with each other and with the disciplines of science, education, and public policy. An openness to other traditions and disciplines is a characteristic of many spiritual quests at the turn of the century.

Some, though, have sought not so much to expand traditional religious spirituality to incorporate environmental concern as to abandon traditional religious beliefs and practice in favor of commitment to the environment. Faithfulness to earth as their home, and solidarity with the creatures of the earth as their community, shape their orientation toward the world. Some call their quest and their commitment spirituality rather than religion. With a broad definition of religion, environmentally concerned spirituality could be seen as a new kind of religion—an ecological religion—but such terminology at the beginning of the twenty-first century was still in the making. All religion may have been turning to ecology as some people left behind more organized forms of religion and adopted more flexible and personal forms.

Classic spiritualities prescribed practices to help the person come closer to the ideal upheld by the religion. The self-cultivation aspect of contemporary spirituality has been presented in much popular writing, including that of Thomas Moore. In the early 1990s his trilogy on the soul—the first volume called The Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life (1992), the second Soul Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationship (1994), and the third The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life (1996)—were on the New York Times best-seller list. His later works have also been popular. Moore advised readers and workshop participants to attend to relationships, to cultivate a sense of place, and to make time for music. Many people who belong to organized religions and many who do not have found his nonjudgmental approach and encouragement of authenticity in daily life appealing. Yet, he has suffered scathing criticism by those who see his work as pandering to self-indulgence.

Contemporary spirituality contended with the many changes the world underwent in the second half of the twentieth century. James Conlon, the director of the Sophia Center in Culture and Spirituality at Holy Names College in Oakland, California, wrote in The Sacred Impulse: A Planetary Spirituality of Heart and Fire (2000) of a new vision of the world and of ways of living authentically within that vision. Expressing hope for where this would lead he asserted:

This new vision will involve a synthesis of the wisdom of science, mystical and prophetic traditions, women, indigenous peoples, and other groups that have not previously been heard. We will strive to create a culture that will foster new energy and a zest for life, a culture based on interaction and choice, identity and purpose, images and stories, values and structures that will give renewed expression to harmony, balance, and peace. This will be a culture that celebrates diversity and pluralism at every level—pluralism revealed in the lives and stories of people and groups whose diversity is manifest in language, lifestyle, temperament, economics, and a capacity for inclusion. (pp. 30–31)

Spirituality as an Alternative to Religion

Among people who say that they do not have a religion but do have spirituality are some who say they once had a religion but that they outgrew it or it let them down. In North America and elsewhere, affirmation of spirituality while criticizing religion has been particularly evident in New Age groups, but has been seen, too, within traditional religions as their members search to become more attuned to contemporary circumstances. The shift in terminology that led people to say that they do not have "religion" but do have "spirituality" marked a change in consciousness, representing both a rejection of the perceived shortcomings of religion—such as inflexibility, dogmatism, and authoritarianism—and an embracing of spiritual paths that are both individual and inclusive. Moreover, this shift in terminology pointed to new visions of the world.

Those who wanted spirituality, but not religion, desired to develop themselves in their own ways. They embarked on a quest for authenticity—a quest with promise and problems. The promise lay in the potential for genuine engagement with the world in which they lived, with their own being, and with whatever they considered sacred. The problems were the dangers of self-indulgence and self-delusion against which classic spiritualities warned their devotees. The latter-day emphasis on the self may be at odds, for example, with classic Christian spirituality, which expects the Christian to be selfless in love and good works, and with the Buddhist emphasis on overcoming the self. Reflecting on the fact that many people pursue their spiritual quests without relationship to organized religion James J. Bacik urged respect for, and use of, classic religious ways when he wrote: "Individuals who pursue spiritual growth without benefit of traditional religious wisdom are in danger of adopting faddish approaches or muddling along without a clear goal or a disciplined regimen. Even those who seem to be making good spiritual progress may be missing opportunities for even greater personal growth" (1997, p. viii).

The discourses of religion and spirituality represent different, but often overlapping, understandings of self and world. The language of "religion" points to the shared past of particular groups as a basis for living now. It includes well-honed doctrines and disciplines. It tells devotees how the world is and how they should live in it. Many of the new spiritualities are eclectic, adopting texts and practices from various sources to fashion something that works for the individual. Eclecticism can be offensive to those from whom it borrows. Workshops in the United States that use Native American traditions have drawn the ire of Native people who object, for example, that their purificatory sweat lodge ceremonies have been removed from traditional social and religious contexts and inserted into the New Age seeker's repertoire. Native American scholars, including Christopher Ronwanièn:te Jocks, have called appropriators of indigenous traditions, such as Carlos Castenada and Lynn Andrews, to task for their distortion of Native traditions.

The late twentieth-century discourse of spirituality reflected the struggle of people seeking authenticity and wanting to affirm a meaning to life, but not willing to concede control over meaning to religious institutions. The disavowal of doctrine may, indeed, be a hallmark of their spirituality. Among emerging forms of spirituality were New Age, Wiccan, feminist, twelve step, and earth spiritualities. Many, too, saw spirituality expressed through sport, music, art, and other aspects of cultural life. Thus, jazz, with its improvisational direction, was seen as a manifestation of the spirit of the twentieth century. Not everyone who sought spirituality joined a group, while others went from group to group or belonged to several simultaneously. Seekers of spirituality, usually committed to authentic living, may exhibit great courage in pursuing a life that is faithful to family, friends, and environment.

At least since Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), modern Western culture has spoken of the death of God or the absence of God. As the theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg noted in his Taylor lectures at Yale Divinity School, "Talk about the death or the absence of God points to the fact that the interpretation of the world, as well as the behavior of human beings in the everyday life of modern culture, gets along without reference to God" (1983, p. 71). Similarly, it seems that many human beings can get along without reference to religion, the system that in Western cultures is built around commitment to God. Roots of secular spirituality in Western cultures can be found both in ancient Greek philosophy and in Enlightenment thinkers who were concerned with linking the self to the larger whole without recourse to religion. While the classic usage of the term spirituality remains, the term has broadened so that in popular usage spirituality has become something that one might embrace not as a discipline of religion or as a characteristic style of religion, but instead of religion. Spirituality has come to denote a realm of concern with nonmaterial life that may include both religious and secular attitudes. Given the increasing scholarly attention in conferences and publications to the role of spirituality in contemporary culture, it is clear that the academy has recognized spirituality as a subject of study both within and independent of the study of religion.

See Also

New Age Movement; Religious Experience.

Bibliography

Series

Cousins, Ewert, ed. World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest series. Crossroad Publishing. New York, 1985–. As of 2003, there were twenty-five volumes.

Payne, Richard J., ed. The Classics of Western Spirituality series. Paulist Press. New York, 1978–. As of December 2003, there were 107 volumes in this series, most concerned with aspects of, and figures in, the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions.

Tucker, Mary Evelyn, and John Grim, eds. Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions, Religions of the World and Ecology series. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Mass., 1997. These volumes highlight the nature spirituality that is part of all religious traditions and the challenges to traditional spiritualities occasioned by awareness of the environmental crisis.

Books

Albanese, Catherine, ed. American Spiritualities: A Reader. Bloomington, Ind., 2001.

Bacik, James J. Spirituality in Action. Kansas City, Mo., 1997.

Conlon, James. The Sacred Impulse: A Planetary Spirituality of Heart and Fire. New York, 2000.

Dean, William. The American Spiritual Culture: And the Invention of Jazz, Football, and the Movies. New York, 2002.

Fox, Matthew. A Spirituality Named Compassion and the Healing of the Global Village, Humpty Dumpty, and Us. Minneapolis, 1979; reprint, San Francisco, 1990.

Fox, Matthew. Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth. San Francisco, 1991.

Gottlieb, Roger S. A Spirituality of Resistance: Finding a Peaceful Heart and Protecting the Earth. Lanham, Md., 2003.

Jocks, Christopher Ronwanièn:te. "Spirituality for Sale: Sacred Knowledge in the Consumer Age." In Native American Spirituality: A Critical Reader, edited by Lee Irwin, pp. 61–77. Lincoln, Neb., 1997.

Kinsley, David. Ecology and Religion: Ecological Spirituality in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Princeton, N.J., 1995.

Moore, Thomas. The Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life. New York, 1992.

Pannenberg, Wolfhart. Christian Spirituality. Philadelphia, 1983.

Plaskow, Judith, and Carol P. Christ, eds. Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality. San Francisco, 1989.

Wuthnow, Robert. After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s. Berkeley, 1998.

Mary N. MacDonald (2005)