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This book is part of an ongoing project that David Tacey has been working on since 1988, that of reading human experience through psycho-spiritual perspectives. This book is the 7th dedicated to this theme and it springs essentially from his contact with his university students and their spiritual strivings and struggles. A large part of the book is in fact dedicated to the exploration of ‘youth spirituality’ and the inadequacy of the response of cultural, educational, medical and religious institutions to these new spiritual needs of the young.
Tacey argues that both organized religion and secular society are in the throes of a profound cultural crisis, a crisis he attributes to the contemporary breakdown of the old religious forms and the exclusion of the sacred and of notions of the soul and the spirit from modern culture. The result of this crisis is two-fold: on the one hand, we can observe what Derrida, in a 1994 encounter between post-modern philosophers held on the island of Capri, refers to as ‘the return of religion’ (the eruption of spirituality and of the desire to connect to the sacred); on the other, there is the incapacity of the old established religions to respond adequately to this new tide of spiritual fervour that is emerging from below, so to speak.
All this has led to a gap or a split between spirituality and religious and social forms. Without the support and containment afforded by symbolic forms, spirituality risks degenerating into an a-critical, individualistic and superstitious kind of New Age spiritualism or, worse still, into various kinds of fascism that promise mythical renewal. Without the vitalizing power of spirit, religious or social forms become frozen and