New Religious Mode

HIGHLIGHTS

Audio Summary and Infograph

The New Religious Mode (NRM) re-contextualizes traditional religious language in a secular context, grounding in everyday experience, the classical categories of Christian traditional language: The Corporates (Poverty, Chastity, Obedience), The Journeys(Knowing, Being, Doing) and The Solitaries ( Meditation, Contemplation, Prayer),. The individual charts for each state of the journey are tools to help bring self-consciousness to our interior reality, to illuminate our consciousness, and to be a symbol of the fact that everyone is on a journey.

The NRM is an early framework in which the EI explored, mapped and celebrated the interior lives of people. Research was done to prepare people for life in the midst of increasing global crises, which shattered the composure of human beings sensitive to life in a new global reality. The NRM dynamics and practices are seen in “the great monastic movements in history” who were not going aside from the world. They saw society going one way to its destruction and they decided it had to go another way. They threw their lives into the breach of history to create a style of life that would do that. Nothing has ever bent the course of history except a style of life. They were missional. Religious orders like the Dominicans, the Benedictines, and the Jesuits had fantastic secular causes that brought them into being. It was there that their vows of poverty, chastity and obedience were formed. Each vow pointed to a stumbling block that would keep the mission from coming off. This understanding can also be found in other cultures and religions across the centuries.