Spirituality and Secular Religion

ECTS: 7.5

“I’m spiritual, but not religious”—that is what many people today respond when they are asked about their religious ideas and values. If we look closer at what this spirituality entails, we often find convictions about a higher meaning of life, about the place of the human being in the cosmos, about the sacredness of the world, about hidden powers in nature, and about modern physics and biology as not conflicting with spiritual experience. In this course, we will reconstruct the genealogy of these ideas and practices, which have emerged from a philosophical, religious, scientific, and allegedly “secular” constellation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We will trace the impact of these constellations on new spiritual practices from the 1950s through today. Such practices include nature-based spirituality, Paganism, astrology, shamanism, and related currents that have sometimes—and misleadingly—been called “New Age.”