Introduction

Is secularism dying? Is it time to believe again, to return, like prodigal children, to our religious roots, our spiritual home? Or is the idea of the end of secularism and the return of religion itself just a fleeting revival, within an ultimately certain trajectory: the death of belief. Brought up as a practising secularist by agnostic parents who had other things on their mind than religion, I found the community of a local Baptist church in outer suburban London offering a sense of belonging through a religious community framed by what seemed a potent vision of what human life could be. (I should confess that my interest in the church was enhanced by that fact that the Baptist Minister was the father of two important people in my life: my best friend at school, and his sister, with whom I had a brief but formative relationship). These teenage experiences remained important to me, and following a degree in theology I continued to think about the meaning of things and my place among them. Although my commitment to that church was not long-lasting (a not uncommon experience for students of theology!), an interest in the religious remained, a quality which, as I hope to show, can be meaningfully applied not just to religions conventionally conceived, but can cut across the sacred and the secular.1 Through encounters with a variety of Eastern religious practices (training seriously in Tai Chi Chuan for many years), postgraduate studies in mysticism and religious experience, and working at Brockwood Park School, an alternative ‘Krishnamurti’ school, I developed a commitment to a rather amorphous and postmodern religiosity, which I can with hindsight reconstruct as an interest in the space between the secular and the confessional. Whether the post-secular is the best term for such a space remains to be seen.