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She had been hosted by an academic family whose mother was also the minister of a novel spiritual community. Their family's time of meditation focused on the spiritual value of life-mediating crystals placed upon the mantelpiece over the fireplace.

"And I thought we were weird!" remarked my daughter, then 11 years old.

Attitudes toward the spiritual have changed considerably in the past few decades, away from a "scientific" dismissal of the nonmaterial toward an easy acceptance of all things mysterious. Rudolph Bultmann's long-accepted dictum is no longer self-evident in the climate of today's changing attitudes: "We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medicine and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament."

Bultmann assumed that in the "modern" period, Christians would be making a sacrifice of the intelligence were they to accept the miracles, signs, and wonders in the pages of their founding document: he pleaded that the value of the New Testament message lay elsewhere, and so tried to reformulate Christianity from a specially crafted existentialist perspective.

Bultmann's initial assumption lives on in some quarters, as some polemical writers and thinkers refuse to leave the "modern" paradigm for a more relaxed "postmodernism." An example might be the renowned (or, in some eyes, notorious) John Shelby Spong, erstwhile Episcopal bishop of Newark, who refuses to "sacrifice scholarship and truth to protect the weak and religiously insecure." Spong feels for the plight of "brilliantly educated men and women who find in the church. … a superstition too obvious to be entertained with seriousness."

But Bultmann and even Spong have a curiously old-fashioned ring to them today. For it is clear that, whatever objections to Christianity may be found in our age, fewer and fewer critics harp upon the so-called contradictions between faith and science. An uneasy détente seems to have been forged, as "wholistic" thinking has come into vogue.

In fact, we are no longer surprised to read in medical journals and in more popular magazines about serious experiments on the effect of prayer or the laying on of hands alongside more traditional medicine. In Canada, a few provincial governments approve and fund the use of alternative therapies, including methods directed toward the spirit, in the healing of cancer patients.

Similarly, efficiency is no longer the only concern in the workplace, and seminars or workshops on "spirituality" make constant inroads. Even teachers and federal government officials go "on retreat," rather than "professional development weekends," with their workmates.

In Quebec, these past two years have seen two seemingly contradictory developments, illustrated at my youngest daughter's elementary school. The Quebec government has abolished the distinction between Protestant and Roman Catholic boards, renaming them as English and French; but for the first time in her life, my daughter has been offered a religious and moral values program with three options—Protestant, Catholic, and other.

Religious distinctions have seemingly paled in importance on the macro level, as mirrored in the new organization of the school boards, but on the individual school level, those distinctions have been surprisingly reinstated within the curriculum itself.

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April 2 2001, Vol. 45, No. 5