Routledge international handbook of spirituality in society and the professions

This impressive volume vigorously promotes a new paradigm for human self-understanding, one that necessarily includes a spiritual dimension. Providing more than a benchmark of current thinking and research, it will serve for many as a reliable signpost, a genuine beacon of hope, lighting and brightening the way forward. For both their vision and hard work, the publishers, editors and authors are to be thanked and congratulated. Bookended by the editorial ‘Introduction’ and final ‘Way forward’, 51 chapters are arranged under six headings: ‘Facets of spirituality’; ‘Nature’; ‘Home and community’; ‘Healing’; ‘Economy, politics, and law’; and ‘Knowledge and education’. There are 68 contributing authors, from all the globe’s six inhabited continents, making this a truly international endeavor, and proving that spirituality knows no boundaries; although this very thought gives rise to an interesting problem: ‘How to define that which is boundless’. Adrian-Maria Gellel (in the chapter on ‘Children and spirituality’) suggests: ‘We may not agree on the precise definition but there is general agreement on the main elements that inform our understanding of spirituality’ (125). Wisely, the editors offer ‘a working definition [to be] used as a point of departure’ in the book’s first sentence: ‘Spirituality is people’s multiform search for a transcendent meaning of life that connects them to all living beings and brings them in touch with God or Ultimate Reality’ (3). Spiritual writer Thomas Merton (1915–1968) put it more succinctly: ‘We are all already one’ (1973, 308). With six chapters on the subject of Nature (in Part III), it is clear that this holistic vision of seamless connectivity between people, each other and the divine, also includes an intimate – thus spiritual – bond with everything else, animate and inanimate, the entirety of the cosmos. The editors and authors are, in the main, academics – university researchers and teachers – so the book has a decidedly academic flavor and thrust but, taken as a whole, it seems much more than that. Whereas each of the chapters tends to be scholarly, cautious and well-referenced, attempting to encapsulate spirituality in a specific context, read together they announce something wonderful, a significant measure of agreement in every sphere of human endeavor covered. This is important in the world today. Here, for example, is another guiding quotation from the Introduction: ‘Numerous studies document that the more people prioritize materialistic goals, the lower their well-being and the more likely they are to engage in manipulative, competitive, and ecologically degrading behaviours’ (3). Then a further claim: