The Secular Search for Religious Experience

Abstract

“Our culture is now struggling to escape both nihilism and cynicism. … To do so, however, we will require a new type of religious sensibility. That sensibility must contribute to the search for style and vision. It must allow us to combine critical awareness and religious immediacy, sophistication and ecstasy. … The new religious sensibility I refer to is the comic elan, the spirit of festivity and fantasy which one finds at the creative edges of the churches and in the religious underground.”