ABSTRACT
A religious naturalist seeks to synthesize his/her interpretive, spiritual, and moral responses to the natural world into a coherent whole, a synthesis that functions as his/her version of religious naturalism, where the vocabulary, metaphors, and meanings that emerge from that search are not expected to conform to some external received credo. A group of religious naturalists who regularly attended the Star Island Conferences of the Institution on Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS) during the 1990s successfully petitioned the IRAS leadership to create a Religious Naturalism Interest Group with an attendant email tie-in. Church membership has traditionally entailed a significant commitment of time and expense. Surveys of those who have "left the church" usually include responses to the effect that a person did not have enough time for it, or did not choose to spend money that way. An unexpected difficulty that people have encountered is a reluctance to join online groups.
