Photo: Cover artwork of 'The Language of Spirituality' by Alan York.
The Language of Spirituality: A universalist Quaker looks at religion, science, and spirituality
By Alan York
This is a fascinating, short book on spirituality and religious language. As the first part, ‘The Allegory of God’, makes clear, the author holds that all religious language is allegorical, existing ‘to enable humans to talk and think about the spirituality they experienced’. Equally fascinating is part two, ‘Mind, Brain and Spirit’, which expounds the later theories of the physicist Roger Penrose and the anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff. These suggest that ‘the Quantum structures’ which facilitate consciousness ‘are the very structures of the material of which all the stuff of the universe is made’. But as the author adds, this tells us little about the nature of subjective experience itself, or thus about spirituality.
