Spirituality, religion and the sacred
Rome Campus, Australian Catholic University
June 4-7, 2025
The modern west has made a certain kind of subjectivity possible, if not compulsory – the self-identification of individuals as “spiritual, not religious.” Although now common, this kind of identification is historically unique. While spiritual energies have been regularly deployed in times of religious renewal throughout Western history, no previous generation would have figured itself in quite these terms. And yet, from the enormous popularity of Russell Brand’s podcasts and online courses offered by publishing houses such as Sounds True, to the celebrity resurgence of Transcendental Meditation and the wide reach of Instagram yoga “influencers,” the pursuit of “spirituality” has come to be seen as the most intellectually – and perhaps politically – responsible way of approaching the transcendent.
Accompanying the trend towards spirituality is a critique of religion. The critique and disavowal of organised religion is undoubtedly part of the complex history of other critiques of authority which characterise modernity – of feudal power, of the power of the church, and, after the second world war and the Holocaust, of national sovereignty and the “military industrial complex.” There is indeed much to recommend in the pursuit of spirituality – especially as it is connected to the yearning for authenticity, ecological holism and a recovery of meaningfulness – and in turn, much to value in the critique of tradition and authority. The wars of religion (as much about national as religious sovereignty), the horrors wrought by the divine right of kings, and the atrocities which were endorsed by “official” science and state power in preceding centuries – and even our own – should give any thoughtful person some pause about submission to the arbitrary exercise of authority.
By the same token, however, this development has not given us a world free from sectarian struggle, human rights abuses, and new forms of authoritarianism, while the kinds of freedoms that were thought to be withheld by tyrannical traditions have not all eventuated. There are a host of reasons to doubt that “spirituality” in all its forms is an adequately sustaining force, and that the religious impulse can or should so easily be left behind. The turn to individualised forms of spirituality and the fragmentation of cultural and religious forms – especially as a number of lines of empirical evidence indicates the effectiveness of these forms in providing a means for human flourishing, transcendence and sociality – poses fundamental questions about the liberal, “individualist” model of being human which achieved precedence during modernity. Attention must also be given to ways in which spirituality has been annexed by the commodity form.
These questions become more urgent when considered in the light of modern threats to human survival, particularly the extreme violence of modernity (e.g., world wars, terrorism, genocide, nuclear weapons) and ecological crisis. These threats indicate if nothing else that humans gravitate to cultural, political and religious forms – which they so easily sacralise – to find fundamental meaning, social bonding and transcendence, especially during crisis—even in an individualistic age, even when they are thought to have abandoned them. This apparent modern contradiction – increasing individualisation accompanied by dangerous collective behaviour – can be helpfully understood in the light of Rene Girard’s analysis of modernity and the foundational and regulative function of religion, along with his critique of a newly emerging post-secular sacred.
This conference will problematize any too-simple disjunction between “religion” and “spirituality”, not least because “religion” and “secular” are freshly contested classifications that from a functionalist perspective can be seen to overlap. Accordingly, we will seek to identify a third way beyond the stale standoff between these modern categories. The implications of the conference will entail, we believe, not only a different way of considering who we are – and might become – as individuals, but a novel reading of our unique historical moment, and how we have emerged into it.