Religionless Spirituality

About the Book

Religionless Spirituality claims that neither religion nor materialistic science satisfies the ache of the human heart for meaning or significance. We have experienced wonderful progress through the advances of science. Unfortunately, our achievements in many respects have become our atrocities. Since the Enlightenment, mechanistic science has insisted that it is only through reason that we can objectively prove anything, thereby excluding all subjective experience. This is the predominant paradigm by which capitalism and materialism prevail. Modern society has almost completely adopted this model. Because of this near total embrace, the environment of the human habitat is becoming more and more threatened. Through this model we infer that infinite growth can fit into a finite world. The ego is catered to as a consequence, but our spirit grows ever more impoverished. What use is verification by the human eye if the subjective experience of sight is excluded? Science explains but tells us nothing of experience. We need a spirit of transcendence, something that lies beyond matter, to explain the human construct. This is where spirituality enters. Religion, for its own ends, has politicized spirituality and co-opted for power and control. Individually, spirituality calls us to reclaim the birthright of God’s divinity alive within each of us. True spirituality calls us to look to the power within. True spirituality belongs to each individual. We must adopt a new paradigm, decontaminate ourselves from organized religion, and see our own individual divinity.

About the Author

Patrick Mooney was born in County Laois in Ireland. He was ordained a priest at the Catholic University of America, and he subsequently devoted his vocation not only to ministering in a parish hospital and school but also to the art of writing and photography. Convinced that the Church needed a new form of stained glass windows to awaken its members to the glory and magnificence of ordinary life, he devoted much of his energy to the development of audiovisual meditation programmes on topics such as family life, child-parent relationships, poverty, the environment, the liturgical feasts of Christmas and Easter, the third world, sacramental theology, and Celtic spirituality. Most of these programmes are now available on Mooney’s website, SpiritualSpring.com. He is the author of Praise to the Lord of the Morning, published by Notre Dame University Press, and his other written work has been published by Paulist Press, Alpha Corporation, and Twenty-Third Publications. Mooney is presently involved in retreat work based on the theology of Celtic spirituality in his native Ireland.