Roughly, there are two ways you might go about achieving a sense of connectedness with something (or everything) else. The first is intellectual - you go about giving an assay of the relations between yourself and other things. The second is practical or phenomenological - you adopt or experience a certain kind of attitude toward living in relation to other things.
Of course neither of these types of connectionism (I'll call it) is conceptually bound up with "religion" in any standard sense: Science seeks intellectual connectedness at least as much as theology (notionally) does; and contemplation of the empirical heavens can elicit as much a felt connection to our vast cosmos as a church service can elicit that felt connection to "God." Moreover, even on religion's own terms, seeking a connection with something larger, more powerful than yourself can't in and of itself be a virtue; one might, after all, seek to commune with very great evil.
What matters, then, is not whether connectionism is "religious," but whether its object is real, authentic, normative, commendable. Answering that question entails a quest not only for "what matters" (Jackson), but also for what doesn't.
* The books reviewed are: Mike King, POSTSECULARISM: The hidden challenge to extremism; Terry Eagleton, REASON, FAITH, AND REVOLUTION: Reflections on the God debate; John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, GOD IS BACK: How the global rise of faith is changing the world; Paul Froese, THE PLOT TO KILL GOD: Findings from the Soviet experiment in secularization; Michael Jackson, THE PALM AT THE END OF THE MIND: Relatedness, religiosity, and the real.
(Via 3 Quarks Daily.)
