Dennis Doyle of Dayton U. has a subtly pained piece up at Commonweal about the younger people around him – including his own son – who have drifted to the "I’m spiritual, but not religious" route.

The paradigm is a common one, sprung from many sources: a general anti-institutional sensibility; the failure of religious institutions; young people’s disillusionment with those around them who push religion but may be decidedly unspiritual; religious insitutions themselves which have settled into an identity as a social community in which any specific spiritual core has either been forgotten, or is taken for granted to the point that it is unarticulated.

In a Catholic context, this means that the intense, startling, challenging and ultimately liberating presence of Jesus is buried. A distraction from the real business of shoring up our institutional life through our committees, activities and parish building funds.

So what is the answer? Doyle struggles wtih this and, consistent with his job as a theologian, gets rather technical and teases through various theories, his willingness to look critically at past models tinged with worry lest a new path edge too close to "conservative" or "exclusive."

Doyle makes an important point, offered to his young friends: don’t let your search for truth be guided and framed by the culture:

So the final part of my response to Laura and Joe would address the complex relationship between faith and truth. Many of the issues my nephew and his wife raise reflect the basic presuppositions of their largely secular world, and I need to question some of them. For example, there is a modern tendency to treat religion as though it were merely a support system for an ethic that relies on belief and ritual as part of its motivation. There is also a sense that religion, while perhaps not without some social benefit, is nonetheless a purely subjective matter, since it deals with truths and values that cannot be proved scientifically. Science is objectively demonstrable and based on universal principles. Religion is particular and belongs to the private sphere alone.

I want Joe and Laura to understand why these cultural presuppositions are questionable. The matter of truth cannot be handed over carte blanche to science; on the contrary, acknowledging the truth of other human activities and modes of understanding is critically important. That molecules are composed of atoms and that Christ is present in the Eucharist are truth claims of very different orders, of course, but that does not diminish the validity of either. In a deep sense, truth is comprehensive and one, even though the means by which we come to know certain things may vary.

Within all the various realms of cultural meaning, the most basic human activity is our attempt to understand. Part of our search for meaning consists in seeking the truth about all things, through a human quest that by its nature remains open to error and revision. I want to encourage Joe and Laura to continue to seek the truth, but not to allow the culture to limit how they do so. In science, we attempt to understand and to verify the truth of the realities we observe in nature. In faith, as in love, we sometimes accept as true things that are beyond our immediate understanding, because we sense they have their own validity and integrity.

I think, however, I would end up going in a different direction than Doyle does in the end:

Of course, various truth claims made within the context of a religious tradition can neither be fully understood nor empirically verified. But my own basic life commitment to Christ, to God, to the Christian community, to the human community, and to God’s creation ought to be apparent in how I live it out, even as the imperfections of how I do so are also apparent. I would urge Joe and Laura to recognize the truth discovered in the laboratory of people’s everyday lives. When my nephew says that he is envious of people who are religious, I sense that although he stands outside a tradition and cannot see his way clear to embrace it or an alternative, at some deep level he still stands inside it, even while rejecting it. The reality is that his own heritage and identity are not simply posed there, in front of him, to be examined and then either accepted or rejected. They are also behind him, to either side of him, and within him. It is like the ocean, in which one swims, that connects the swimmer with others in that ocean. He is going to have to fight the undertow much longer if he plans to emerge completely free of it on the sandy shore. My advice instead is to find a way to, well, go with the flow.

What is missing from this is a clear focus on Jesus Christ.  Discussing these points is complex, and it is not as simple as "Read a Gospel, go to Mass and then you’ll get it." Not at all. But it seems to me that in this piece, as in much of our conversations on this, we are wandering around a central question:

Who do you say that I am?

That, to me, is where Christian faith begins: Who is this man? What am I to make of his life, his death, and what they say is his resurrection? Who were these people who said all of this about him? What did these people do about what they had witnessed? Can I be in touch with all of that today, in my life? Can I really just turn my back on these witnesses and on the man on the cross whom they claimed was Lord?

And if I can’t ignore him…if he won’t go away, if the question nags…let me be brave, let me take the risk, take a pause on my never-ending spiritual journey…and listen.