Building a more SPIRITUAL civilization

The Sentinel Is Devoted to discerning and nurturing the advance of spirituality in human civilization. So our cover title this week is in fact a subtext for every story this magazine publishes. Usually, however, we take on civilization's progress in smaller bites. It comes with the territory of a weekly news cycle.

Magazine editor Nancy Roof's discussion of a more spiritual civilization moved us to take a longer view this week. Call it "think long-term, act in the immediate."

Despite the usual list of sobering events listed on our issue planning whiteboard, the advancing spiritual civilization is the big story of this moment. Then, in the spirit of Socrates's wise warning about the "unexamined life," a civilization in the of transformation shouldn't go unexamined just because we can't foresee society's coming shape and scope.

To help us think through some of the fundamental shifts of thought underway, we've turned to writers whose main credential is the fact that they are themselves, in their own modest ways, living the transformation to a more spiritual world. They're moving from fearfulness to a love-based courage, from self-centered to unselfed lives. They're witnessing governments shift gradually from the law of rulers to the rule of law. They're seeing the necessity of ethics in every relationship. And in everything from the way they work and raise their children to the healthcare they choose, they are moving from the material to the spiritual.

One thing you will not find in these writers' reports is utopian visions of a new civilization characterized by advanced technology. Nor do they project the kind of nightmare scenarios of civilization gone bad that are the forte of some science fiction writers and movie producers.

These authors write from experience about experiential spirituality. As is typical of the Sentinel, you'll find their stories concerned with what one individual can do to better others' lives, and thereby alter the course of civilization.

It's the elevating and refining influence of experiential spirituality that is fueling the move toward a more spiritual civilization. And what perhaps ten years ago was a hardly visible ripple of change has become a universal movement to understand and live by the divine laws of being.

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