Wednesday, December 01, 2021
Quotable: Spirituality as Do-Without-Religion
The most natural constituency of this "multireligious America" perspective is the "spiritual but not religious" demographic, whose first principle seems to be disdain for so-called organized religion ... twenty-first-century spiritual folk believe that authentic piety is fundamentally a matter of practice, not belief. To them, dogma is always stolid and ritual always empty. Real religion—which is to say spirituality—happens not when some authority tells you what to think but when you discover in your own experience some sliver of the ineffable Something. Spirituality, in short, is religion stripped down to its experiential dimension. More than do-it-yourself-religion, spirituality is do-without-religion, a form of faith that denies its connections to the institutions, stories, and doctrines that gave it birth—religion without memory.
Source: Stephen Prothero, Religious Literacy (Harperluxe, 2007) pp. 223-224.
See also: "Quotable: Religious but not Spiritual"
Labels: quotations, religion
