Spiritual Intelligence

This morning Randy Tieszen brought this wonderful interview to my attention, remarking that it showed an increasing interest in spirituality and spiritual intelligence in our age. It is an exchange with Charles Taylor who has just won the Templton Prize for contribution to religion in 2007. The whole interview is worth reading, but here is an exceprt.

JTF: In your 2007 Templeton Prize statement you spoke of "the deafness of many philosophers, social scientists, and historians to the spiritual dimensions." What do you think accounts for this deafness? Where is that deafness coming from?


CT: Well, we can go back and back and back ... the immediate cause is that people bought into a very simple narrative of secularization. Modernity – however you want to define it, be it economic growth or urbanization or science and technology, or the whole package – makes religion shrink. But that's not sufficient to explain it intellectually. For a long time people tried to explain the Reformation in economic terms, which is the same kind of deafness. So they buy very deeply into this narrative and I think we all live by narratives. And always have

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