Report on the Second International Conference of the British Association for the Study of Spirituality

Abstract

Entitled ‘Spirituality in a Fragmented World’, this year’s conference set out to build on the foundations and insights of the first BASS conference, held in 2010 at Cumberland Lodge, Windsor Great Park, London. The theme of the first conference was ‘Spirituality in a Changing World’. It is one of the core tenets of BASS that spirituality is a vehicle for cohesion, unity and harmony where there is division, alienation and fragmentation. Like the first conference, this year’s was also ambitious in its scope. Its aim was to facilitate a genuine encounter between people starting from very different points and with different objectives, in pursuit of furthering our understandings and stimulating new directions in the study of contemporary spirituality. One of the two logos for the conference was a waterfall. This is a powerful metaphor since water is both life-giving and life-destroying; it is thus also a metaphor for human behaviour and experience, many aspects of which were examined and articulated in the five themes chosen for the conference: spirituality in health, politics, ecology, religion, and humanity and social justice. Each of the keynote speakers is well-known and respected in their field and helped us to study further the place and impact of spirituality in those fields. The conference committee was only too well aware that spirituality impinges on every area of human living and experience and so it was not easy to choose just five areas for particular study during the conference.