Introducing an Everyday Spirituality

The meaning of spirituality has expanded tremendously in contemporary Western societies. Gone are the days when we might have felt some certainty about precisely what somebody was laying claim to when they said they were ‘spiritual’. There has been a drifting apart of the spiritual from the institutional structures of religion, to the extent that the spiritual appears to have transcended the religion that once contained it (see, for example, Heelas and Woodhead, 2005; Partridge, 2005; Houtman and Aupers, 2007). Simultaneously, there has been a proliferation in the number of places and spaces we might hear the language of spirituality being employed. ‘Thus, whenever someone uses the word “spiritual” to me I have to ask, “What do you mean by ‘spiritual’?” ’ (Rowe, 2001: 41). Some may feel that because of the diverse ways in which the language of spirituality has been appropriated in the contemporary world it no longer holds intrinsic value. It might be considered futile therefore to attempt to find an authentic meaning for the term ‘spirituality’, as it appears a constantly contested, socially constructed idea. Nonetheless, this shifting intangibility has prompted a rash of popular and academic texts exploring what it means to be spiritual in the twenty-first century. Spirituality is being re-evaluated in terms of how people are engaging with it, or finding it, but also in terms of how we, as academics, talk about it.