Spirituality, secularity and religion in psychiatric practice

King & Leavey offer some helpful reflections on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, as a basis for better understanding the relationship between spirituality and psychiatry. In A Secular Age, Taylor, a leading philosopher and Templeton Prize winner, charts the currents by which we may understand secularity to have become what it is in Western society today. However, King & Leavey interpret his sophisticated, lengthy and nuanced account in such a way as to make it appear that transcendence has been lost forever and that spirituality is left with a limited sphere of legitimacy, confined largely to finding meaning in life. Their conclusions about its significance for psychiatric practice are accordingly limited and ambiguous.