Interfaith Spirituality or Interspirituality? A New Phenomenon in a Postmodern World

Abstract

John Hick’s large corpus of writings is centred on the analysis of religious pluralism and the multiple ways in which human beings of different religious and cultural traditions approach God, or what Hick describes as the ‘ultimately Real’. His defence of the rationality of religious belief includes a nuanced discussion of religious and mystical and also aesthetic experience, but it does not include an examination of different spiritualities, a subject that has raised wide debate in recent years. A perusal of the indices of Hick’s works points to the absence of entries on ‘spirituality’. It is therefore all the more surprising that the brief Epilogue of his award-winning book An Interpretation of Religion refers not only to the future growth of the pluralistic outlook and of world ecumenism, but finishes with the statement that ‘the kind of spirituality [emphasis added] that is appropriate to the contemporary pluralistic vision is one that is basically trusting and hopeful and stirred by a sense of joy in celebration of the goodness, from our human point of view, of the ultimately Real’.¹