SPIRITUALITY IN MODERN SOCIETY
KEYWORDS
Modern Spirituality, Orientalist Spirituality, Indian National Spirituality, Asia Transnational Spirituality
The origins of modern spirituality are, in my view, to be found in the nineteenth century and in the West. One can, Obviously, find deep histories of spirituality in mysticism, Gnosticism, hermeticism, and in a whole range of traditions from antiquity, but modern spirituality is something that is, indeed, modern. It is part of modernity and thus of a wide-ranging nineteenth-century transformation, a historical rupture. Spirituality is notoriously hard to define, and I want to suggest that it’s very vagueness as to the opposite of materiality, as distinctive from the body, as distinctive from both the religious and the secular, has made it productive as a concept that bridges various discursive traditions across the globe.
Peter van der Veer
The author is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the study of Religious & Ethnic Diversity at Gottingen, Germany. He may be reached at vdvoffice@mmg.mpg.de