LAUSR

Today, many people identify themselves as ‘spiritual’ but not religious. There are ample reasons to treat this claim with suspicion, and yet it should not be too readily dismissed. It generally rests upon a misapprehension of what religion entails, but at the same time it can witness to a lingering and perhaps ineradicable human sense of what it really should involve. Equally, Christians cannot just will away our globalized era in which many people are presented with the apparently differing truth claims of different religions and take refuge in a generalized ‘spirituality.’ For both these reasons, the question of the human spirit is not a bad place for religious and philosophical reflection to begin today. And this observation makes the theoretical and practical legacy of the visionary Italian educationalist and founder of the Catholic lay movement Communio e Liberazione, Dom Luigi Giusanni, especially relevant to our times, particularly in his key book, Il Senso Religioso.1 For Giusanni’s peculiar charism was to be concerned with the prelude to Christian belief which is, of course, more than just a prelude—with the entire range of cultural and educative formation and the place of religion within that process. This might lead one to expect that he adopted a somewhat ‘liberal’ theological perspective, and indeed one of the impressive things about Giusanni is that he was not lightly dismissive even of Protestant liberalism, and was amply prepared to learn from it. Yet he was ultimately critical and his stance was different. For one thing, he was not at all concerned to identify a discrete area of human experience that might be thought of as ‘religious.’ To the contrary, he endeavoured to show that