Luminous Moments: The Contemporary Sacred

Luminous Moments is an idea, a way of seeing, an imaginative practice of openness to the everyday and the random. In the early twenty-first century, human beings seek new ways of constructing and comprehending ultimate meanings. For many, the revival of evolutionary thinking, along with the centenary of Darwin, is creating a new faith. Long live the prophets Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens! For others, the earth in all its beauty and its present agonies is where they seek to understand their existence. The institutions of church, mosque, temple or shrine still hold out the promise of ultimate meaning, ultimate understanding. But all around us-in popular music, film, graffiti, literature, and in the conversations we hold around these cultural forms-the sacred pervades, illuminates, teases and beckons us. Luminous Moments considers how we might open ourselves to these new forms of sacred awareness. This is what poets, musicians, artists and thinkers lead us to apprehend: that the sacred dimensions of our lives are mobile, non-judgmental, continually promising to open us out beyond ourselves. The pervasiveness of the sacred is the promise of new cultural and moral possibilities.