A.J. Nickerson on Modern Spirituality

The latest Cambridge Paper from the Jubilee Centre is available online here (from where a pdf can be downloaded here), this one by A.J. Nickerson:

A.J. Nickerson, ‘Modern Spirituality: Learning from the Poets’, Cambridge Papers 30, 4 (December 2021).

Here is the summary:

‘The last decade has seen striking growth in the popularity of alternative spiritual practices requiring neither doctrinal explanation nor institutional affiliation. This essay offers a brief account of such contemporary beliefs before asking what it is like to negotiate the tension between the assumptions of secularity and the impulses towards extra-ordinary forms of experience. Some of the richest accounts of modern spirituality come from the 1930s, and this paper examines some of the period’s profoundest poetic explorations of belief before considering T.S. Eliot’s analysis of the modern situation in the light of Christian revelation.’