Detecting Spirituality and Philosophizing About It

Often viewed as the deep common core of all religions, spirituality has been addressed in a direct philosophical manner only occasionally. After noting some recent philosophical literature, a questionnaire for evaluating a person's spirituality is described, and a general theory of spirituality is advanced. Spirituality is, generally, the yearning for, quest for, experience of or belief in a great reality that is largely beyond ordinary experience and that inspires one's interior, private life and one's behavior and ultimate values. This idea illuminates the main questions of the philosophy of religion, and also questions of the consistency of thought and action, essentialism, naturalism, religious liberalism, and the reproductive fallacy.