Since 2001, Seton Hill University’s (SHU) chaplain and assistant English professor Rev. Stephen Honeygosky, who is also a member of the Benedictine community of monks at St. Vincent College, has been working at putting together a book that discusses a phrase that is often heard about religion – �I�m not religious, but I�m spiritual.� His new book, �Religion and Spirituality: Toward Bridging The Gap,� includes essays from various people in the religious community that discuss a split between religion and spirituality – a split where �religion� believes that if you have religion you are spiritual, and �spirituality� dismisses religion. The Setonian sat down with Honeygosky to elaborate more about his book, which will be released on November 1, 2006.
By Andrea Perkins,
Staff Writer
Since 2001, Seton Hill University’s (SHU) chaplain and assistant English professor Rev. Stephen Honeygosky, who is also a member of the Benedictine community of monks at St. Vincent College, has been working at putting together a book that discusses a phrase that is often heard about religion – �I�m not religious, but I�m spiritual.� His new book, �Religion and Spirituality: Toward Bridging The Gap,� includes essays from various people in the religious community that discuss a split between religion and spirituality – a split where �religion� believes that if you have religion you are spiritual, and �spirituality� dismisses religion. The Setonian sat down with Honeygosky to elaborate more about his book, which will be released on November 1, 2006.
Q: You wrote a book, what is it about?
Honeygosky (H): It is a book about the tension between religion and spirituality, which is increasingly evident in our culture and in the church. Signs of that are everywhere in academic journals like the Chronicle of Higher Education to more popular things like Newsweek and Time; everybody seems interested in the spiritual life, whatever that means, it has a range of meanings. Typically, people think that if they have religion that they have spirituality, that may be the case but there are some people who are saying, �I�ve been doing religion but it doesn’ttouch me or move me. It is disconnected from my experience, I need to find spirituality.�
Some people have been finding that for 25 years, and there’s this increasing tension, and what the result is that these people are taking to separate camps. The people that are doing religion are saying, �Because we have religion we already have spirituality.� The people that have taken to spirituality are saying, �Religion, oh, that doesn’ttouch or move me, did that, done that, it’s dwarfed and dwarfing.�
My concern comes in dealing with people not just in the educational frame of reference, but all the way through to when people are in their 80s, in mind, body and spirit, and these people need to be touched. We need to remember that developmental psychology applies across the entire age spectrum and that their spiritual life is as important as their emotional and sexual life.
So what do we do in between? So we talk about the developmental model for people in grade school, maybe even college and grad school, and then we pick it up again for people who are older, but what do we do with the people in between who are really struggling for a model?
My concern is people in religion who are lingering or who have already left – how do we help them see that there can be vital and vibrant spirituality within even though some things need to be corrected?
Clearly institutional and organized religion has problems – serious ones – because many people are leaving. We can help people instead of leaving try to stay within their structures and change the structures where there are problems – because there are.
How do we keep the lines of communication and genuine invitation to communion open without having to beat people up with the truth that we have….if you get my point. It’s got to be a lot more than telling people that we�re right and that we have it, and you�ve not had it.
Q: What inspired you to start this
book?
H: This business of this tension between religion and spirituality I think has a blessing in it and it is a blessing that goes back to our foundation as Americans to the puritans who came over because they were oppressed by religion they come here, why? Because they�re listening to their spiritual impulse or what I�m calling now, �the reformist impulse.� Religion isn’tgetting it, not that it’s bad – we�ve got to reform religion.
Q: How long did it take you to compile
the book?
H: I used my year’s sabbatical after working at my Penn State (University) assignment. I had a year off and I was putting the book together and working on academic things. Right before I came to Seton Hill I was pulling it together, and then my first semester here I sent it off to the press. I�ve been putting this thing into shape probably since 2001.
Q: Whom do you hope to reach with this book?
H: The press is pitching it to three different audiences.
One is an academic audience, second is to the pastoral audience for people who are in church and religion work, and third is pitched to the general trade market – for people who don’thave a lot of background in spirituality or religion and they may never have gone to college but they�re an intelligent, thinking reader.
So three different audiences, an academic one – this will be people who are in the universities and colleges, students as well as faculty and administrators, a whole range, not just for students, not just for academics. Then the pastoral audience, which would be people involved in church work, church ministry. And then just the average person in the pews, in the temple or in the mosque – they call that the general trade market – it’s a three-pronged audience that they�re going at, and I�m absolutely ecstatic. I don’twant it to just be for academic, although that’s very important to me naturally, but I also want to hit people who are interested in doing what I�m doing working with people who are interested in actually helping change this and repairing it. And people that just aren’tquite sure what religion and spirituality is but they can see and they can identify and have a voice. I think these are the poor crying out, because they are poor people, I think these are poor people in religion that are lingering if they haven’tleft already they maybe lapsed from religion, and they really wanted spirituality, but nobody was there to give it to them. There’s no heart, no feeling, no connection to experience.
People are intelligent and they�re not going to take this anymore. It’s not a society in which there is nothing that exists in church. There are all kinds of options, and if institutional religion doesn’trealize that, we will continue to lose people. They may sign on the �dotted line,� and go to Christmas and Easter service, but they won’tbe there week in and week out.
Q: How did you choose the essayists for the book?
H: My own reading and sensitivity to where the culture was, and who would be appropriate and who would fit under the umbrella for the focus that I wanted. So there were clearly some people that I could have asked but I didn’tbecause I didn’tfeel that they had quite the balance between religion and spirituality but I was looking to have scholars and pastors.
Q: The contributors – are they all Christian?
H: One is a Jew, Aurthur Schwartz, the others are all Christian. In fact the others are probably all Catholic. That makes me feel good that I could actually get Catholic people with a similar kind of sensibility…I�m not done with this – my next step is a broader kind of discussion with Buddhists and Hindu and Muslims and Jews. That’s really where I want to go – stepping out of my Catholic circle with this Jewish guy to see the appeal is to the general trademark.
Q: What do you think is the book’s strongest point?
H: Allowing the religion camp and the spiritual camps who take to the high ground to come to the low plain, where Jesus was teaching to have a real conversation for real communion. To allow people who read this book to see that they will have a home in this kind of a plain. You can be both spiritual and religious if religion is not dead.
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