“The sacred is the effect of a momentary uniting of individuals into a jointly acting collective.” These moments act as liminal spaces where inner experience is externalized, reshaped, and received in a shared field of attention by turning feeling into form, and form into meaning.

“The sacred is the effect of a momentary uniting of individuals into a jointly acting collective.”

This paradox—deep longing for spiritual encounter, paired with weak interpretive infrastructure—calls for a renewed theological imagination.

As Taylor observes, many now experience this cultural shift as both gain and loss: unprecedented freedom to craft meaning, yet a spiritual landscape marked by fragmentation, drift, and what he calls “fragile conditions of belief”