The Coming Interspiritual Age (Review)

The Coming Interspiritual Age, Kurt Johnson and David Robert Ord (Namaste Publishing, 2012)

The authors have written a compendium of large scope about the growing movement toward understanding that all religious traditions have common core experiences and concerns, and that there is much to be learned from sharing across traditions (interspirituality). Much of the book is about the evolution of all spirituality, starting with the Big Bang (!), and includes valuable historical perspective on how we (globally) have arrived where we are today.

I have been very interested in interspirituality for a number of years, and I am familiar enough with the movement to recognize that this is an excellent resource for students (and teachers) of spirituality. It is well written, although several agendas show through: interspirituality is couched as the only possible way of avoiding dire consequences of materialism (graphically depicted); it appears to me to be portrayed by the authors as separate from the historical traditions of the major religions; it links interspirituality very closely with the integralist movement toward unity of consciousness (based much on the work of Ken Wilbur), which I believe does a disservice to the possibilities of interspirituality. None of these in and of itself is a reason not to read the book, but these do demonstrate to me some limitations of this work.

I have several concerns about gaps in their scholarship.  There is no index, and given the number of sources they cite throughout the pages, this makes it much harder to assess their scholarship or find references without much difficulty.  (There is a bibliography of writings, but it does not include the many statistical studies that they cite.) But my biggest concerns are about gaps in their treatment that I found very jarring. 

There is a minimal treatment of the “rise of the feminine voice,” with too much emphasis on motherhood for my taste.  While they end their assessment of the feminine voice (less than 5 pages) on what might be considered a positive note (“the feminine is also the voice of unity, which is crucial for a realized consciousness,” p. 322), overall this is a fairly patriarchal assessment of the value of the much-neglected feminine aspect of humanity.

I found myself hunting assiduously for any reference to the growing numbers of “spiritual but not religious” seekers, but found not one.  Since this term was first proposed as early as 2001, perhaps earlier, and is a growing component of spiritual seeking, this is a serious lack.  There is also NO mention of the “emerging/emergent church” movement, which is globally responding to dissatisfaction with institutional Christianity.  Given the scope of the book, these merited at least mention as part of “where we are now.”  The complete neglect of these two growing responses to the felt needs, an important part of the contemporary spiritual landscape, made me very concerned with the objectives of the authors.  It is not just in crossing the boundaries of religious traditions that interspirituality has its value, but in what we can learn from interspirituality that illuminates our traditions. This has been a powerful effect of interspirituality on me personally, and on others whom I know, and I was disappointed in its exclusion.

This book has value, and is worth exploring, with these caveats in mind.

I received a review copy of this book from Speakeasy.