Let someone ask the "why" and "why now" questions about the religious and spiritual stirrings in our culture and then answer them honestly. The first response has to be: we don't know. That U.S. culture is, or that U.S. cultures are, abuzz with attention to spirituality is evident. It is easy to back up this generalization empirically.

A third of a century ago even theologians assessed the culture as being secular and likely to remain so. Harvey Cox's best-selling The Secular City and Paul van Buren's The Secular Meaning of the Gospel were typical list-leaders, as religious thinkers pondered who "secular man"-yes, man, at that time-was and how to relate to this new being in a new culture. Top theologian Paul Tillich in 1963, devoted as he was at book length to "life in the spirit," wrote that there was no point in trying to resuscitate the adjective "spiritual." It was "lost beyond hope."

Twenty years ago, however, religion emerged as a vivid political force under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. True, there had been what sociologists spoke of as "a revival of religion" in the post-war, especially the years of the Dwight Eisenhower presidency and under his encouragement. It took the form of church building, increasing attendance in church and synagogue, in Sunday and Sabbath school. But almost no one talked about spirituality, and religious ethics was not a prime subject.

Even in those Carter and Reagan years, however, the talk did not match the current debates concerning the way government ties itself to religious organizations through faith-based ventures. Politics, we learned then and keep learning, represents the controversial zone in which religious themes are most visible, but it is not always the most revealing one. Maybe the bookstores and best-seller lists are more indicative of trends. But there are fields to attend to if one wishes to learn where significant leaders and elements of the population are going with their hearts, minds, curiosities, passions, and dollars.

As decisive as any of these fields is the healthcare front, where shortly after mid-century the secular motif was becoming pervasive. Much of modern medical ethics, it is true, may have been born at mid-century among theologians like Joseph Fletcher, Paul Ramsey, and Richard McCormick. But the discipline shifted quickly from those pioneers in the seminaries and found religion-less abode in universities, clinics, and centers that did not welcome approaches other than secular to care, cure, or reflection on the good. I overstate the case a bit here, but only a bit.

Today, however, alternative medicine, holistic care, and medical ethics are grounded in some cases in religious sources and in others in rootages that show more hospitality to the spiritual and faith-based approaches than anyone would have dreamed they might only decades ago.

By now the worlds of media, entertainment, opinion polls, pop culture, and common discourse, in an America that in many dimensions has to be described still as fundamentally secular, are filled with talk about spirituality, faith, and religion. Only those religionists who would make great leaps forward in cultural lag have reason to whine about the absence of religious concerns on the public stage.

True, now as then, many undergirding elements of the culture remain reflexively secular, not open to transcendent reference. But it is now more obvious than it was a couple of decades ago, when ethicist William F. May said it, that the culture "reeks of religion."

Before attempting to say why this is going on, we do well to consider empirical warrants for this spiritual stirring.

The social scientific assessments do not turn up data consistent with each other and not all of them support conventional ways of determining the role and power of religion in a society. Measures of church and synagogue membership, attendance at worship, the clergy supply, or financial support would not by themselves give encouragement to those who speak of spiritual resurgences. Indeed, some of the spiritual impulses of our day may have arisen because of decline in some of the institutional forms of religion or may even have helped lead to such decline.

Countering such ambiguous data are records of ever-increasing spiritual book sales, the multiplying advertisements of retreats designed for "soul care," the continually increasing rosters of celebrity gurus, and the higher volume of chatter among radio and television talking heads who deal with faith-based issues and programs.

The most difficult dimension of this has to do with cultural attitudes, shifts in public priorities, changes in mentalités, in what used to be called "the climate of opinion." Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset once aptly proposed that much of history is made less by cataclysm, war, and famine, than when the sensitive crown of the human heart tilts, as from optimism to pessimism or from despair to hope. The notion of a sort of collective, culture-wide "crown of the human heart," may seem elusive and sound risky. Yet on both common sense levels of perception and among professional culture-watchers it is difficult to avoid such a concept. Its effects seem so obvious. To continue with Ortega's picture: this crown of the heart has been tilting and tipping to give more room to spirituality, faith, and religion than it has for some time.

Why? We cannot keep on postponing responses to the question. Why and why now? Distilled from the kinds of answers cultural observers of many sorts come up with, I propose these among others:

1. RELIGIOUS CONTINUITY
Concern for matters transcendent is so much a part of the human record, and so much passion has been characteristically devoted to these matters, that it is the times-even a couple of centuries long-marked "secular" that may be the aberrations and artificialities. Scholars like Huston Smith have long been arguing, as he does in his new book Religion Matters, that the hungers of the heart and the religious means of addressing them are empirical data to which science must pay attention. The edging out of spiritual concerns in many sectors of Western cultures may have been atypical, forced, temporary adjustments and not permanent readings of the heart, a set of misreadings and misapplications by elites. Such matters, long obscured or suppressed, find their way back from the margins of culture. They have done so in North America recently.

2. GLOBAL RELIGIOUS UPSURGE
The United States is influenced by and finds itself interdependent with global religious trends. Take religious accounting by itself: in the period of most rapid technological and economic development, times when the material order should dominate, there has been a concurrent surge of religious growth in numbers and intensities elsewhere. At mid century last, every seventh human was Muslim; today, every fifth one is. Christianity grows exponentially in the poor world; every twenty-four hours Christian populations-thanks to conversion efforts and population growth itself-increase by an estimated 16,000 in sub-Saharan Africa alone. Eastern religions prosper on the rim and in the subcontinent of Asia. The end of the Iron Curtain and the implosion of Soviet ideology and artifacts revealed religious survivals among millions and a landscape ready for new growth. Americans connected with those global spheres and poised to reclaim old religious ties or to claim the development of new spiritualities cannot be unaffected by all this.

3. RECEDING IDEOLOGIES
Mention of the implosion of the ideological alternatives-the ideologies marked by words ending in "-ism" (Fascism, Communism, Nazism, Maoism)-leads to a third generalization: that spiritual affects prosper when there is a vacuum, when old rivals weaken, when the old beliefs no longer satisfy, if they survive at all. Not all these barren places or soulscapes that are marked by uncertainties and that issue in expressions of spiritual thirst are remote. Thus, in heartlands of "Euro-American" cultures where "postmodern" elites question "the Enlightenment Project" there is often now less confidence expressed in science as such. Philosophers of science do not so consistently express faith in reason without also determining its social and personal contexts. The post-Enlightenment investments in "progress" as all but inevitable in the future, have turned bearish. Some visionaries-their enemies would call them nuts-think that science, reason, and all forms of progress will disappear from the screen when "spirituality" takes over. No, these are not likely to disappear from liberal republics, but they are not-to use a word applied to so many threatened domains-as hegemonous as they once were. They certainly do not hold unchallenged cultural monopolies. They both complement and are challenged by the spiritual forces and expressions.

4. MIGRATING FAITHS, DIVERSE EXPRESSIONS
Pluralism, diversity, migration, and identity-politics-still feared or despised by many who connect the idea of religious prosperity with that of cultural unity-have paradoxically worked instead to enrich the forces of faith and the winds of the spirit. Each group coming on the scene or finding a voice speaks up for itself and tells its story. Such stories-related as most are to racial, ethnic, gendered, class, esthetic, and, yes, faith-based rootage and preference-all but inevitably bring religious stories to the fore. Accents in song and story and preaching, sounds that were once believed to have been confined to southern and midwestern Bible belts, now are national. It is not out of place to speak of the "country and westernization" of American religion. Take music alone: gospel, soul, and spiritual music erupts in the public parks and amphitheaters where standard-brand religious voices had long been muffled, unwelcome, or even excluded. Now, the public sphere is amazingly graced with religious sounds.

5. RELIGION GONE PUBLIC
Religion, often invisible and unheard because it was, in folk language, "a private affair" has gone public. While the concept of "publick religion" dates back to Benjamin Franklin's coinage and call for its inclusion in 1749, it is back now, ripe for development, and is keeping company with "public theology," "the public church," and more. Religion gone public includes positive and negative dimensions for both the spiritual forces and the citizenry at large, especially in the body politic. Yet the fact that it has changed the climate is beyond question.

6. FAITH ON THE MARKET
Why and why now? "The market," answer many social scientists. That is, in a culture where everything is for sale and publics are seen as consumers, religious artifacts are commodities. Supply-side forces are at work in a time when affluence makes attractive a plethora of books, CDs, techniques, movements, retreats, therapies, and objects connected with spiritual matters. If on one day someone discerns a niche yet unfilled in the marketplace of faiths, count on entrepreneurs and inventors to produce something to fill it. They abound.

7. SEEKERS ATTRACT ATTENTION
There is much talk about spirituality and faith today because there are apparent innovations, novelties that challenge often-dismissed traditional products and forces. Church and synagogue attendance has benefited only selectively from the surge and, indeed, has sometimes suffered by comparison with innovations and in competition with newly marketed items and movements. Investors would not be advised, for now at least, to buy seminary stock. The communal and congregational expressions of faith, which exact commitments of adherents, are at least temporarily at a disadvantage. The highly individualistic endeavors by seekers and searchers on pilgrimages and journeys have means of attracting many immediately. All that can change as time passes, since the currently favored isolated and eclectic kinds of spiritual questing demonstrate limits that become obvious to many. Some of these many then seek or return to communities of faith, or they evolve into new ones. And while the traditional communities may attract and put to work the vast majority of spiritual energies, these inherited forms are less noticed by and less attractive to a "what's new"-obsessed media. They are less likely to serve as magnets for attention by curious publics than are those once considered marginal. Mormons, Muslims, and Moonies attract more scholarly and media attention than do Methodists. Buddhists are big in Hollywood where Baptists are not. The therapy-of-the-season draws reporters and cameras out of proportion to the notice given the year-in and year-out forms of spiritual care.

8. FAITH WORKS
"Faith works" is another way of accounting for the interest. That is, in the eyes and experience of millions of citizens, spiritual commitment meets pragmatic tests and satisfies in a time when not everything else does. Anti-religious people or those suspicious of faith-claims, of course, can with good reason say that the pious rig the rules of the game so that they cannot lose. For instance, believers pray for good health and then commend God for granting it when it is sustained or returns. Then many of those who experience ill health fault other than divine sources for misfortune, and take counsel to pray for the return of physical well being. The afflicted take a turn for the worse and truly suffer. So they commit themselves in earnest prayers for relief or seek divine company in the midst of suffering. Suffering continues, and they may be at the point of death, but under divine care or in spiritual contexts they do not experience abandonment. So, snort their critics, with such rules of the game no believer could lose. Using "bad faith," they think they have won. Their faith focus, believers urge, all along had been appropriate and effective. Of course, such an approach as that is timeless, discernible from as far back as there are human records. But in a time when governmental agencies, technological devices, and scientific discovery manifestly do not deliver as they had long promised they would, many lose patience with them and turn to the spiritual. Let their critics call them superstitious, devotees of magic, and foolish hopers. The adherents can turn around and certify that their investment in the spirit pays off-and they will thereupon write best-sellers to convince others to adopt their techniques.

9. SPEAKING UP ABOUT FAITH
Elites in American life include people who are more ready than they were in the immediate past to make their religious commitments and discernments public. Those observers of culture who in a spirit of nostalgia or with a loss of perspective see the present conditions as representing a fall from how things were in the good old days did not live back then or they have not explored how things were. The American academy, the university world, was more indifferent to and antagonistic toward most forms of religious expression in, for example, the 1930s than it is in the new century. It took special kinds of courage to speak up for old faiths or new spiritualities on the campuses of such times. Today there may still be what Dr. David Larson calls "The Anti-Tenure Factor" in many faculties if candidates for academic advancement are too explicit about their faith ventures or theological interests. There may be? There is. But just as often, where the language of faith is appropriate and relevant, it is heard. There has been a rebirth of public philosophy that integrates theological concern. Religious caucuses are at home in many academic societies. Where any of the above occurs or is apparent, more people than before with spiritual interests are emboldened to speak up, to include concerns of faith in their researches, and to be up front about religion in the dynamics of national life.

10. RELIGIOUS DIMENSIONS TO POLICY
Many subjects of national debate in politics, the arts, entertainment, the media, and the like, are formally and openly grounded in religious concerns. It is impossible to address them effectively without reckoning with these concerns and the dimensions that back them. Name the controverted subjects that draw most heat-try abortion, homosexuality, faith-based initiatives, vouchers, euthanasia, the death penalty, sex education, school prayer, stem-cell research-and you have only touched a few of the neural points. As these get drawn into the legislative and judicial spheres, it is impossible to speak meaningfully or to produce action or counteraction unless one is schooled in the religious claims and arguments. Not to be thus schooled and not to be adept at using what one has learned in categories marked religious or faith-based leaves one at a disadvantage.

11. PROXIMITY TO RESURGENT FAITHS
Select areas of growth and of institutional prosperity have been so widely noted that those who experience religious life in contexts of indifference or decline have had to reappraise their understandings of cultural dynamics. Thus, mass attendance has declined in Catholicism; synagogue participation has not included great numbers of Jews; mainstream Protestantism has languished relatively. Many of those who were at least nominally connected with such or who were physically in their neighborhoods thought religion was declining almost everywhere. But the prosperity of Southern Baptists, Pentecostals, Evangelicals, and Latter-day Saints now also outside their Bible Belt or Mormon Kingdom milieus, or Muslims, has forced those long distant from surging forces to reckon with the newly-near and to reconsider their out-of-hand dismissal of these faiths.

12. FAITH OVER FLAG
Nationalisms often appeared to be the "real" religions in the West, through depressions, world wars, and especially the Cold War. Changes in global economics have more recently provided checks on or challenges to nationalism. Some leaders in societies that tended to revere and absolutize the nation at mid-century and after, now see reasons to abandon such endeavors. Chauvinists, imperialists, and uncritical civil religionists may still promote exclusivistic patriotism. One thinks of the nervous nationalists who would force a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in schools or pass an amendment to the Constitution that would prohibit burning of the national flag. They prosper-but they also breed reaction. Weaken the nation-state, offer more centers of loyalty as both domestic and international markets do, and you will have found another reason why some put spirituality in the place of nationalism.

13. FAITH TAKES ON BIG CAUSES
Many religionists make the case effectively, judging by the size and preoccupations of their audiences, that they are particularly responsive to concerns that demand ever greater attention. These include care of the environment; concern for what is at the heart of efforts to enhance human dignity, and any number of ethical causes. As they involve their contemporaries in these endeavors, more find that the symbol systems associated with the spiritual, the faith-based, and the religious hold more promise than the generation before them thought there might be.

14. RELIGIOUS VOICES IN PUBLIC DEBATE
Religious voices are finding both frontal and subtler ways to address cultural discontents than they had explored or exploited in the recent past. In the frontal case, what has come to be called the religious right represents a quickening among believers whose immediate ancestors had been typed as politically passive. Observers dismissed them as people who did their spiritual acting and transacting, as it were, in private. As for subtlety: whether in matters of health, ethics, politics, environmental concerns, or understandings of human relations, sophisticated proponents of spiritual concerns have pointed out that secular rationality does not deserve to be the only voice to be heard. They would supplement or complement such rationality with impulses that often get tied to spiritual forces and energies. These impulses or resources might include intuition, memory, community, tradition, hope, and affection. One hears testimony based in each of them in ethics consultations, partisan political plotting, movements to protect the environment, and community life.

15. REVITALIZING CULTURE
Cultures seem to need revitalization movements and moments if they are to remain or become newly dynamic. Anthony F. C. Wallace, a cultural anthropologist, has had influence on some-I am thinking of historian William G. McLoughlin, for instance-who would account for awakenings and revivals or for the spirit and the spiritual. In Wallace's and McLoughlin's proposal and observation, many individuals in society at a certain stage experience stress and cultural distortion. In the American case, the tendency by many to reduce human enterprises and explanations to something that seemed to be merely or purely secular could well have been a contributor to this sense of impoverishment and deprivation during the previous cultural unfolding. People in reaction and on other grounds tend at such times to appeal to suprahuman or supernatural forces, often to God. Cultural leaders then may themselves attempt to boost their energy with charges of "the old-time religion." They make room for and test tried-and-true forms that had looked inert. And their citizen followers will at that stage welcome their prophetic voices, finding in them exemplars who can help others find "mazeways" of thought and behavior. Finally, enough of them do locate such mazeways and, thus, convince themselves and observers that cultural revitalization is occurring. Chroniclers of the recent cultural trends may not use exactly the terms Wallace used, but they point to many indicators that match what he led readers to expect.

16. NEW MEDIUM FOR THE MESSAGE
New instruments develop to promote spiritual stirrings, which in turn lead to their further development. In the current phase of the electronic revolution, radio, television, and the Internet serve as instruments to rapidly communicate what is going on beyond the immediate neighborhood and horizon. They can help suggest what is "the thing to do" and can, thus, contribute to the faddish and the fashionable, in this case also insofar as they relate to religious and spiritual phenomena.

17. FANTASY . . .
The anti-religious secularist, employing the hermeneutics of suspicion, would say that all the fuss about spirituality, faith, and religion occurs because people are gullible fantasists who lack the courage or ability to depend upon their reason and inner potential, so they rely on God and gods and soul. Such secularists are reductionists, who insist that religion is "nothing but … [this or that]" as proposed by Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, or analysts of brain functions.

18. . . . DIVINE ACTIVITY . . .
And the pious might reduce all the answers that suggest why these stirrings are present to the theme: it is all a sign of divine activity. If the secularists blame non-God, these would credit God, and not look for further explanations.

19. . . . OR REASON TO PAY ATTENTION
And the anti-reductionists today would disassociate themselves from both of these, calling on the Spirit or the spiritual to buy them time and space to help them discern further why cultural climates like the present one emerge, and what these changes tell about human nature, culture, and society. They would say, as I stated at the outset: you ask why all this is going on, and we answer, "We don't know. But we will stay attentive to the signals on the horizon and the testimony of hearts and lives."

CONCLUSION
It would be folly to project too many of these partial explanations into the future. Just as the current climate came, it could go. But for now the changes have quickened both those oriented to faith and those critical of it to pay attention as never before. Whoever wishes to produce effects, to innovate, to criticize, for example in matters that concern the Park Ridge Center, matters of health, faith, and ethics, ignores them at their peril. Even if, when asked why all this is occurring, they have to remain modest and say, at least in many respects, "we don't know."