The Spirituality Revolution and the Process of Reconfessionalisation in the West

Abstract

The author aims to clarify varieties and functions of Christian spirituality in the West in our time. It interprets the explosion of “spirituality” as both a cause of, and a response to, the process of “reconfessionalisation” that is affecting major churches or “confessions”, notably the Roman Catholic church and Eastern Christian churches. The article examines first the concepts of “confession”, “reconfessionalisation”, and “deconfessionalisation”, arguing that the latter two trends tend to “deconfessionalise” loyalties. In respect to “spirituality” (defined as any individual's personal process of selecting and rejecting resources from one or more religious traditions), the article differentiates “macrospirituality” as institutional from “microspirituality” as personal, viewing them as dual dimensions of a “Spirituality Revolution” that can be seen as democratising the imperative of personal choosing which French existential philosophy celebrated. The article concludes by examining how individual quests are giving rise to variants such as “interspirituality”, “proto-spirituality”, and the “spirituality of mass calamity”, all of which are growing in appeal.