Connectedness: A Transformative Feeling and Spiritual Virtue
Agatheos : December 20, 2024 T. Ryan Byerly
The paper introduces and defends a virtue called “spiritual excellence,” which involves skillfully using a worldview—whether religious or secular—to cultivate transformative experiences of connectedness. Drawing on psychological research on awe and ego dissolution, it argues that such experiences have both instrumental and non-instrumental value. Religious worldviews offer especially fertile resources for this cultivation, though non-religious worldviews can also serve. The account integrates features from other leading accounts of living the spiritual life well and responds to objections that the trait is not a virtue.