Read the PDF version here.
Spiritualise: Cultivating spiritual sensibility to address 21st century challenges
Spiritualise is a tenacious inquiry into the philosophical coherence, scientific grounding and cultural relevance of spiritual perspectives, experiences and practices.
The first edition wasthe culmination of a two-year project at the RSA in London involving over three hundred participants including atheists, agnostics, and people of various faiths.
This second edition includes an extended new preface and an additional chapter focussed on the relationship between spiritual sensibility and political imagination. The booklet is written by Dr Jonathan Rowson, formerly Director of the Social Brain Centre at the RSA, and now Director of Perspectiva – a new research institute that examines the relationship between complex global challenges and the inner lives of human beings.
“Perhaps our irresolute response to climate change is not just about failure to agree a robust price for carbon, but because of our shared denial of death – another open secret. Like the slow burning existential threat of a warming world, death is inexorably coming towards us, and we are implicated in its arrival. Such a fate must be avoided at all costs – in the first instance by not thinking or talking about it. A society with greater spiritual sensibility would connect these issues more deliberately and more publicly.”
— Jonathan Rowson in Spiritualise
“Invites readers as participants to imagine and create radical futures around a new conception of being and becoming human.”
– Professor Indy Johar, Founder of Dark Matter Labs
“It is a rare claim to suggest that reading a think tank output might change the way you think about yourself and reality, but in this case it just might.”
– Matthew Taylor, FAcSS, RSA Chief Executive and former advisor to the UK Prime Minister.
“One of the most sensible and sincere documents ever written in the field.”
– Professor David Tacey, author of The Spirituality Revolution (2004) and Religion as Metaphor (2015)