Modern spirituality

“The obvious opportunity,” he said, “is to build a new religion.”

Companies like Crossfit and Soulcycle create a sense of consistent space and ritual that inculcate deep loyalty and community among their participants. Reimagine, an organization that describes itself as “the world’s leading end-of-life events platform,” hosts paid gatherings and festivals related to death and healing. Casper ter Kuille and Angie T

people who leave organized religion quickly become eager to replace the void with another system of meaning—a dimension most atheist groups have failed to consider.

hen there is a decrease in government stability, there is an increase in religiosity in both Eastern and Western cultures.

According to him, the word “natural” has become a “sort of a secular stand-in for a generalized understanding of goodness, which in religion you’d call holiness, or purity, or something like that. “Nature,” with a capital N, [has taken] the place of God. In a secular society, we don’t look to religions to tell us what to eat or how to heal ourselve

Why is faith so much more visible in open source, then? My theory: faith and open source both place high value on community and a sense of public service. Organized religion is the original distributed community, and it’s lasted thousands of years.

I’m curious about religion for many of the same reasons I’m curious about open source. They’re organizational systems that bind people tightly together, and whose norms, fascinatingly, didn’t derive from any one place, but rather from a shared consensus iterated upon by each passing generation.

I have my own version of spiritual practice; I’m just not used to acknowledging it to others. But I think it gets expressed through the “why” of the work I do every day, where I’m moved to amplify creative potential in the world, and where I’m in awe of all the strange, ineffable qualities that make us human.