In a world where feelings of powerlessness and faltering forms of collective action have become standard, the current issue of Revue Projet (France) examines the conditions under which practices of interiority – silence, retreat, simplicity, meditation and prayer – can become resources for renewing democratic engagement.
As Benoît Guillou explains in his introduction, the contributions to the issue are ‘deliberately eclectic', reflecting the complexity of a spiritual space traversed by ‘fertile tensions'. Yet a common thread emerges: the exploration of a spirituality that does not shy away from the outside world but is instead willing to grapple with social and political realities.
Spirituality and activism?
As environmental disaster looms ever larger, the Earth and humanity are in urgent need not of a simple overhaul of the dominant system, but a veritable paradigm shift. And yet, Michel Maxime Egger explains, the ecological transition often flounders between two impasses: activists run themselves into the ground, while inner work struggles to transform outer reality.
Egger seeks to bridge this divide, advocating a spirituality firmly anchored in political life and ecology. Lasting ecological transformation cannot succeed through laws, technologies and public policy alone, he argues; we must also attend to people's inner lives and the deep roots of mass consumerism. ‘If nothing changes within individuals and communities, nothing will ever truly change on the outside.'
Inner transformation has its pitfalls, however. Egger warns against an apolitical or anti-political spirituality, as well as the psychologization of systemic socio-ecological problems. Against this backdrop, he foregrounds the méditant-militant (‘meditator-activist'), an ‘archetypal figure with many faces' who combines inner transformation with civic engagement. For Egger, spirituality and activism should be as inseparable as inhaling and exhaling, like yin and yang.
The final lesson? How we engage matters as much as what we engage for. Avoiding burnout requires intrinsic motivation and a spirit of cooperation.
Bridging worlds
Arthur Laurent writes of his discovery of Indigenous medical practices and the mysterious forces of plant spirits, explaining how his political activism became interwoven with shamanism.
Laurent's journey begins with a university stay in Mexico in search of intellectual renewal and a new direction for his activism. Encounters with Mazatec healing practices and a Huichol pilgrimage confront him with the ‘gaping void' separating him from Indigenous conceptions of the world.
After an unhappy return to France and a disappointing social entrepreneurship project in Peru, he takes up this path again in 2012, when interpreting for an Arhuaco delegation sparks a deeper engagement with Indigenous cultures.
Laurent realizes something crucial: ‘To interpret effectively, you must understand cultures from within'. He immerses himself in Shipibo-Conibo and Quechua traditions, training with an Indigenous healer in the Amazon and undertaking repeated retreats in the Andes. Over the years, he becomes increasingly attuned to the plant spirits and their healing power, while carefully straddling the spiritual and professional worlds.
Eventually settling in the Andes, Laurent seeks to reconcile Western and Indigenous worldviews – to ‘put the pieces back together'. The process culminates in a book co-written with his father, a doctor and self-proclaimed positivist.
Yet bridging worlds raises another dilemma: how can he amplify Indigenous voices without speaking for them? Whether interpreting for healers or communicating Indigenous knowledge to wider audiences, Laurent ultimately undertakes another balancing act: making these traditions accessible while resisting simplification or appropriation.
The renaissance of feminist spirituality
Béguinages were one enclosed communities in medieval France and Belgium, where religious lay women could lead relatively free lives outside marriage or monastic life. Today, béguinages are now making a return within the religious sphere and beyond it, particularly in older adult care.
Writing on this ‘surprising renaissance', Camille de Villeneuve asks what remains of the historical béguinage as contemporary communities increasingly shed their religious roots. Some historians question whether today's retirement-oriented communities have any claim to the name: the béguines of old were typically younger women seeking an independent religious life while supporting themselves through work.
For de Villeneuve, the secular béguinage is ‘rediscovering the spirit of its origins': creating spaces where people can look within without withdrawing from others. Its distinctive appeal lies in combining solidarity with individual freedom – ‘separate, yet together; together, yet separate. And therefore freer.' This legacy is also profoundly feminist, rooted in the autonomy, work and spiritual freedom these communities historically afforded women.
For de Villeneuve, the survival of the term béguinage, however strained, ultimately speaks to a broader desire for spirituality beyond conventional religion: a search for interiority through shared life and solidarity. In contemporary cities, she argues, such spaces can provide the everyday ‘retreat' necessary not to escape social and political life, but to participate in it more fully.
Spiritual democrats
Neither a return to tradition nor blind faith in modernity can offer a way through today's ‘polycrisis', argues Éric Vinson. Instead, he proposes ‘rising above it' through a combination of the spiritual wisdom of tradition and the best of modernity: human rights.
For Vinson, only a handful of major figures have walked this path. Jean Jaurès was one; Gandhi another. These ‘spiritual democrats' reconciled inner and outer life, the private and the political, Heaven and Earth: their civic activism was infused with the spiritual and transcendent without compromising on human rights, and they embrace non-violence except where strictly necessary.
Vinson also draws a distinction between spirituality and religion. Spirituality is a dynamic connection between everything and an ultimate reality – a transcendent, non-dogmatic source of meaning and direction – while religion is its institutionalized embodiment in society and politics. Hence: ‘Anti-democrats – Khomeini, Putin and Trump – readily deploy religion in politics, but never spirituality'.
But under what conditions can spirituality become a mobilizing force rather? Here, religion comes back into play. Rather than ‘freelance spiritual highs' that produce nothing lasting or shareable, religion offers structured spirituality capable of fostering transmissible and constructive practices.
Historically resistant to bringing spirituality into public and political life, France sorely lacks this spiritual impetus, Vinson argues – one that might yet help it break out of today's impasses and finally ‘do politics differently'.
Review by Cadenza Academic Translations
