ABSTRACT
Globalisation and the emergence of New Age spirituality in Western countries, in particular, have raised the question of whether non-theistic devotion and ritual practices detached from supernatural belief can be described as religious. Religious leaders and believers increasingly describe religion in terms of “lived experience” and “reflective faith,” arguably in reaction to the pressing need to distinguish religion from what is often presented – legitimately so or not – as its terrorist caricature; to sort the religious wheat from the chaff, as it were. The first thing to note is that Nancy indexes the value and significance of the “return of religion” today to the logic of the return itself, a logic which he examines in “The Forgetting of Philosophy.” He observes that the latter depends on the interruption of a given state of equilibrium – a crisis – which is eventually overcome so that the lost equilibrium is found again.
