What Does Spirituality Look Like?

Abstract: The concept of spirituality defies a rigorous definition, much like some fundamental concepts in mathematics and physics. However, we may gain an understanding of this vital religious concept by asking what spirituality “looks like.” In this paper, following a brief overview of the concepts of spirit and spirituality in the Bahá’í writings, we examine a letter of the Universal House of Justice that gives us a picture of what spirituality should look like today, as the Bahá’í community pursues its work of creating vibrant communities. We then explore the question of whether, and to what degree, the social sciences can investigate the phenomenon of spirituality as central to human nature, arguing that they can productively adopt spiritual reality as a background assumption, whose validity can then be evaluated.