In this volume, David McPherson has gathered a diverse group of philosophers to address what role the concept of spirituality ought to play in our account of good human lives. The volume should be of great interest to those working in both religious and secular ethics. For those working within a particular religious tradition, the volume deals with concepts of obvious importance, such as piety, transcendence, spiritual practice, prayer, religion, and the spiritual and spirituality more broadly. For those working within a secular vein, the volume addresses aspects of human life that have long been recognized across cultures as very important, if not essential, to our account of the good life, which secular theorists either tend to ignore or are very hard pressed to explain. At the very least, this volume helps both parties to address in a more serious way the increasing identification of secular persons with the spiritual, all the while distancing themselves from religion. It deserves to be widely read and carefully considered.

The essays in the volume are susceptible to multiple categorizations, but for the purposes of this review can be carved into the following broad categories: (1) how the good of spirituality is theorized within specific religious traditions; (2) how to define and place the spiritual dimension of human life generally; (3) how secularism might make room for spirituality.

Within the first broad category, the volume contains insightful essays working with Catholic, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, and Confucian sources. Mark R. Wynn writes about how the senses can contribute to the realization of spiritual goods in his essay on the infused moral virtue of temperance in Aquinas. Samuel Fleischacker addresses how the Jewish practice of keeping Sabbath is a prime example of a demanding spiritual practice that can bring about a positive transformation of self and enable us to flourish as human persons. Mukhtar H. Ali explores Islamic ideas about prayer, invocation, and supplication that are grounded in an account of creation as divine speech and the Qur'an as the word of God. Richard White writes about compassion in Buddhism and identifies it as the origin of Buddhist spirituality. May Sim poses questions about the boundaries of moral philosophy and religion anchored in an exploration of the Confucian notion of heaven. Finally, Karen Stohr's ‘Aristotelian Friendship and Ignatian Companionship’ stands out in this group as a particularly compelling and powerful example of the spiritual dimension of a basic good recognized in secular contexts: human friendship. Stohr's essay provides a beautiful and moving account of how Aristotelian ideas about friendship are transformed by Ignatian spiritual practices.

Of most general interest are the essays that address spirituality generally, and raise questions about whether spirituality is essential to the good human life. The first in this series is John Cottingham's essay, ‘Philosophy, Religion, and Spirituality’. Cottingham focuses on spiritual experiences, by which he seems to mean epiphanic experiences that can be characterized as self-transcendent. Whatever we say of such experiences, Cottingham argues that we must recognize that they respond to our deepest desires and aspirations as human persons, and that they point us to something much greater than the self that is the source of what is valuable and meaningful in our lives. He then argues that the self-transcendent aspect of these experiences, which secularists want to take seriously, either points to an objective reality and value outside the self or it is a subjective illusion. If we take these experiences to be entirely subjective, however, we rob them of their putative objective value. For if ‘spirituality’ is just another way to feel good, if it discloses nothing important about the way things are, then whatever transformation it can be said to bring about in us, it is ultimately shallow. A deep transformation of self would require a confrontation with something real outside the self that makes normative claims upon it. The possibility of such genuine transformation, which is implied by the secularist's value of ‘spirituality’, brings us closer to a theistic worldview than the secularist wants to admit.

In her contribution, ‘The Problem of Impiety’, Cora Diamond straddles both the first and third categories; her essay raises thorny questions for secular moral theorists about impiety that concern deeper questions about how to place the spiritual within our conception of reality. Diamond points out that, in the past, a whole range of actions would have been understood as absolutely impermissible and even outrageous, but the illicit character of such acts would have been grounded in some kind of divine prohibition or divinely inspired respect for nature. But if we think we have no recourse to divine authority, are we left having to permit impious acts? If impiety still has a place in our practical thought, what is its possible ground?

Diamond canvasses various solutions to the problem of impiety, some more promising than others. She ultimately suggests that we have a choice between a Humean response that casts a cold, calculative eye upon such acts in order to weigh the potential risks and benefits that would result from their performance. Opposed to this is an approach that treats some aspects of the world as objectively ‘reverence worthy’ and therefore off limits to human use. Diamond argues that the choice here is ultimately metaphysical, as the two different responses rest on different conceptions of reality, and that such understanding is not merely metaphysical – it will have deep and inescapable moral implications.

Robert C. Roberts picks up on these same themes but develops them in a different way in his contribution, ‘The Virtue of Piety’. First, he anchors his discussion of piety as the ancients and medieval did, in reverence for parents and the divine. He begins by looking to Greek sources, and characterizes their concept of piety as ‘an attitude, characterized by a special kind of caring, toward his progenitor as his progenitor’. (48) Filial piety values fatherhood and sonship as ‘primal ordered goods’ which are ‘fundamental to the structure of things human’; it demands that one revere one's parents and give them what is due as parents, regardless of whether they are good or bad parents. He then traces this way of thinking through the Hebrew tradition by connecting this reverence for the parental role with the fourth commandment. He further connects this commandment to worship of God, and points out that Aquinas's view is that it belongs to piety to pay worship and duty to God precisely as our Father, the generative source of all things. Filial piety and religious piety are in this way analogical. ‘Each “parent” honored by the pious is recognized to possess a kind of dignity that the pious perceive, and this dignity is due to the order that God has ordained and established.’ (56)

On his account of religious piety, it forbids us to violate ‘the glories of creation’. (57) Here Roberts argues, against Diamond, that a mature piety places this perception of God's glory, not command, at the heart of the sort of prohibitions that interest her. It is the order of creation written into the parent/child relationship, and the order of creation more generally, that is worthy of our honor and respect, but this honor and respects seems to hang on our recognition that this order has a transcendent source. While Roberts applauds Diamond's attempts to leave room for ‘mystical perceptions’ of what must be treated as reverence worthy, he also cautions that her own essay shows the extent to which the endeavor is ‘awkward and uncomfortable’ in a secular context. (58)

David McPherson's essay, ‘Homo Religiosus: Does Spirituality Have a Place in Neo-Aristotelian Ethics?’ takes up the neglect of spirituality in the Neo-Aristotelian tradition. McPherson defines spirituality as ‘a practical life-orientation that is shaped by what is taken to be a self-transcending source of meaning, which involves strong normative demands, including demands of the sacred or the reverence worthy.’ (64) Spirituality, which in its best form involves institutionalized and organized practices with other in communal life, is ultimately concerned with having a meaningful life, where the sense of meaning is shaped by some sense of what is transcendent and sacred. Transcendence is what is set apart from ordinary modes of human experience. Sacred goods are constitutive of a spiritual fullness the value of which transcends that of ordinary modes of human flourishing.

McPherson argues that it is an essential part of human nature to be drawn to the spiritual – the sacred and transcendent. We seek ‘sacred goods’ because, as meaning seeking animals, we must develop some sense of how our lives fit into the grand scheme of things and whether there is a cosmic or ultimate meaning and purpose for human life. And he seems to think that such strong goods requires an affirmation that human life does in fact have an ultimate meaning, and purpose. McPherson further detects a deep human need, especially in the face of great suffering and evil, to be oriented toward an ultimate object of love, devotion, reverence, awe, and even worship. If this is correct – though it is more at the level of suggestion than argument – then piety is an essential virtue in human life, since piety concerns those acts that put one in a proper relationship of feeling and action towards that which is objectively reverence-worthy.

Fiona Ellis's essay, ‘Desire and the Spiritual Life’, tries to give an account of desire that is adequate to the spiritual dimensions of human life, which she assumes is a basic aspect of human flourishing. Drawing on work by Talbot Brewer, she argues (convincingly, to my mind) that the notion of appetite cannot do this work, because many of our desires do not function to satisfy the self, but are oriented ‘toward something whose value is not a function of its capacity to deliver such, and that serves to elicit the desire in the first place.’ (90) Such desires draw us out of ourselves towards that which we perceive as good. The commonplace notion of a propositional attitude is inadequate to capture these spiritual desires, since that requires that we be able to come up with some value neutral propositional content, towards which we take the attitude of wanting to make it true. But spiritual desires very often involve a depth that exceed our explicit articulation and simply cannot be reduced to some state of affairs that the subject can be said to want to produce. Furthermore, the focus on states of affairs puts us off the scent. For the objects of these desires themselves are what draws our ‘evaluative focus’, they draw us away from ourselves towards something greater and worthy of our attention. As desiring beings, Ellis argues that we are ‘engaged in an ongoing quest to articulate and to embody an adequate conception of the good’. (91) Such desires free us from focus on the self, and are fundamental to any properly spiritual life.

The volume closes with a brief meditation by John Houston, titled ‘Agnostic spirituality’, on the prospects for the spiritual life of the agnostic. Like its opening essay, it draws on the figure of Socrates and his beliefs about philosophical inquiry as a kind of spiritual discipline of sorts. Houston argues that the agnostic has his own distinctive sort of faith and hope without belief. Although the Socratic agnostic cannot confidently assert that God exists or that the universe is not totally indifferent to him, he can still hold out hope that this is the case. Because he so hopes, he lives and acts in a way that keeps him ‘keen in the search for the hidden God in the face of the evil of this world’. (227) Such faith and hope allow the agnostic to access goods of great importance that cannot be appropriated in any other manner.