Jan Walgrave once commented that our age constitutes a virtual conspiracy against the interior life.9 What he meant is not that there is somewhere a conscious conspiracy against proper values, the churches, and true spirituality, as paranoid conservatism likes to believe. What he meant was that, today, a number of historical circumstances are blindly flowing together and accidentally conspiring to produce a climate within which it is difficult not just to think about God or to pray, but simply to have any interior depth whatsoever. The air we breathe today is generally not conducive to
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