Hi, this is Against Everyone with Connor Habib, a podcast featuring my conversations with countercultural figures and presenting complex, spiritual, philosophical, and political ideas in an engaging and accessible way.

Well, friends, now we are in the midst of 2022, and I know so many of us are seeking peace and meaning.

But one of the primary sources of meaning, religion, can feel outdated or even cruel and anti-peace,

if judged by its historical pathways of violence.

And I know that that means a lot of people have turned to what they would call

spirituality. And yet, I also know that spirituality can sometimes just feel like religion without

any of the work, any of the things that make religion so potent and valuable. And if we are religious, we may feel that the spirituality isn't there, that we're only

sort of touched by, I don't know, community events, just doing a sort of social justice work

or tending to people.

And all those things can have meaning and value for us.

But is it the spiritual meaning that we're seeking when we're religious?

And I think a lot of us also, who are not religious, find the longing to connect with

religious traditions that may have

fascinated us or comforted us, or even just interested us at other points in our lives.

If you are somebody who's walked away from the church, like a lot of people here in Ireland,

who grew up Catholic have walked away from the church, but they find in their lives a sort of

feeling of, I don't know, it's like an absence. They want something there. They want the ritual.

They want the connection with the bigger picture, the cosmic picture even, that they know is

available to them, but they don't

want that messenger of the church to give it to them.

So I'm going to spend the next few episodes connecting us with one religious stream, Christianity.

So I just did the series on How to Live, and now I'm going to do a series on

...