Coming Interspiritual Age. A review

I was intrigued by this book for two main reasons, I think: one was that, as someone working with different expressions of faith, I am finding myself a little weary of 'interreligious' and 'multifaith' as labels; the other is that the blurb told of an 'integral' worrld view.

The 'multifaith' and 'religions' issue is that I have a suspicion of 'religion'. I'm only too aware that institutional forms and 'brand loyalties' can obscure what might actually be going on with people. So 'inerspirituality' seemed to hold out the promise that there might be ways to address that.

I've enjoyed the attempt to situate spirituality in a "big history" of the scientific understanding of origins -both cosmological and anthropological and it is certainly important to do this and to co-ordinate this with the various spiritual traditions. There's a fascinating engagement with the idea of the bicameral mind, though I'm not convinced by the thesis and so the account of human cognitive-cultural development which is developed and relies on the thesis seems, therefore, less strong than the author might hope.

In fact, this seems to point to a weakness in the book more generally. At various points where the ambitiously wide-ranging account touched on areas about which I know a reasonable amount (eg areas to do with linguistics), I found the account sometimes inaccurate in ways that did not instill confidence in the overall argument. In fact, quite a lot of the time this read as a kind of updating of New Age thinking and approaches to spirituality, so I became increasingly concerned as I read that there is a particular politico-spiritual agenda at work which was not entirely 'respectful' of those of us who baulk at certain dimensions of syncretism.

My hope was that this book would give ways to handle spiritual dialogue and inter-religious encounter creatively and respectfully and there are insights in it to help this. However, it does have it's own spiritual agenda and is, in effect, arguing for a particular way of reading the world which could actually not convince many of the people whom it would include. I fear that the mistake is to offer a meta-narrative for a task where learning to sit light to meta-narratives for the sake of dialogue is required. We need a practical wisdom to handle plurality and this is not served well by trying to replace viewpoints with ones own.

Coming Interspiritual Age: Amazon.co.uk: Johnson, Ord: Books: Coming Interspiritual Age