Response to Dr. Mariam Cohen

I am honored that Dr. Cohen has written such a thoughtful response to my paper. Her comments on what she calls my “vague notion of spirituality” and the impression my paper gave of favoring a postmodern spiritual individualism over traditional religious tradition and community are both useful observations and stimulate a reconsideration of these issues.

In regard to my suggestion that the term “spirituality” has no one referent or definition but refers to overlapping themes, Dr. Cohen comments that my partial list of themes was “so inclusive that it would be difficult to determine what spirituality is not.” Exactly. I am expressing one view of spirituality that considers it to be an attitude toward life. From this point of view it all depends on the lenses through which one sees, experiences, and interprets life. It leads to an awareness expressed by many spiritual writers that the divine, however that may be conceived, is everywhere. The dualism of the sacred and the secular is denied. Spirituality is in the consulting room whether we recognize it or not. Concrete examples of this are given in Weiner, Cooper, and Barbre (2005).

However, there are other definitions of spirituality. Wilber (2001) points to three more in addition to spirituality as “an attitude (such as openness, trust or love)” (p. 271). Other definitions are spirituality as peak experiences or altered states, and as the highest levels of any developmental line or, alternatively, as a separate line of development. These are not incompatible definitions, but the ones I have referred to in my paper are spirituality as a line of development and as an attitude.

Part of the problem seems to me to be the use of words which, of necessity, limit, reify, and pin down the ineffable mystery that is referred with terms such as “spiritual,” “mystical,” and, yes, “religious.” However, William James's (1902) distinction