I have been pondering this for the last 24 hours and in the next 24 hours or so – I hope! – the beginning, at least, of a response will be posted – as a main weblog entry, I believe.

Again, thank you for posting. Although I am grateful indeed for the responses I am getting privately, I feel these on-site responses can only enliven, enrich and support this project.

But you Roger are a long way into something much less easy and much less consumable: a rigourous, informed Catholicism (altho’, inversely, Catholicism can be very shallow). Your Catholicism is much more esoteric and much more advanced than the New Age attitudes you criticise.

I do not think the two approaches to spirituality are commensurate. I think they are two different epistemes and one is not going to speak to the other. What this implies is that the world is epistemically fractured re spirituality, and people involved in spirituality could be talking radically different languages.

This is a thing you have long been concerned to show, actually. So we come back to the problem of needing consensus for there to be change; but having to accept and live with pluralism (while the thing that oppresses us, capitalism, is a single thing of monolithic power, to which we all contribute as an epistemic – and behavioural – collective).

That is a deep problem. But I agree with you (well, things you have said before), we can’t finesse it by saying actually all religions and spiritualities are basically the same and they are all good.