I don’t doubt that a person can be spiritual without being religious, but what I want to challenge is the opposition between those two, because it seems to me—and here I’m indebted to Huston Smith—that religion, still meaning the institution, teachings, tradition, and so forth, is the way that spirituality gets traction within history. Religions are to spirituality what schools, colleges, and universities are to education. You can become a self-educated person by avoiding all institutions of higher learning, but it’s really like inventing the wheel every generation.
