Spiritual Cultivation for a Secular Society

Abstract

The project of building a rationalistic self and secular society was an important part of the project of modernity, and this project is now confronted with an epochal crisis. The modernist conception of secular self, society and public sphere is now under siege, locally as well as globally, which in turn calls for a broadened conception of self, civil society and secularism. Taking the debates about the crisis of secularism in contemporary India as its main point of discussion, this paper examines the reshaping of secularism as not an a priori denigration of religion but as an ethos of pluralism, non-violence, kenosis and self-emptying which involves a simultaneous critique of religious tradition and secular state. Such a reshaping of secularism, the paper argues, calls for an appropriate spiritual cultivation of self and society.