Embracing Presence: An Understanding of Religion and Spirituality (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780578997599)

So, you say you are "spiritual but not religious"? Let's think about that for a minute.

Do you mean that you have an active spiritual life without identifying with a specific religious institution? That's fine. But suppose religion is not about institutions. Suppose religion is an essential human activity. Then what?

Imagine you are an anthropologist sent to an alien planet and assigned the task of finding what human-like institutions the inhabitants have. How would you decide whether they have religion? You'd need a filter fine enough to capture all the earthly religions from Animism to Zoroastrianism. What would that filter be? In this intellectual memoir, Collier explores the implications of his answer to that question.

Kenneth Collier was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on March 26, 1945, and was raised in Wilmington, Delaware. He earned a PhD in philosophy in 1971 and taught philosophy for several years at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. Leaving academia, he earned a Master of Divinity at Starr King School for the Ministry and was ordained to the Unitarian Universalist ministry in 1979. After serving several churches in both coasts, he retired and lives with his wife, Anne Anderson, in Santa Barbara, California.