Subject: 📖 Announcing Religious But Not Religious: Living a Symbolic Life 📖

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Religious But Not Religious is a 
'gift for the reader'

Chiron Publications is pleased to announce the release of Religious But Not Religious: Living a Symbolic Life  by Jason E. Smith.

Smith explores the idea, expressed by C.G. Jung, that the religious sense is a natural and vital function of the human psyche. We suffer from its lack.

“Jason Smith brilliantly raises the reader’s sophistication in navigating the varied, often contentious, landscape of contemporary religious understandings," says Jungian Analyst and author James Hollis, Ph.D.  "He demonstrates that we are inherently religious creatures, and only a participation in ‘the symbolic life’ can lift a modern out of the slough of materialism to a felt experience of meaning. Smith’s insights, nuanced explanations, and engagement of the heart are a gift for the reader.”

The symbolic forms of religion mediate unconscious and ineffable experiences to the field of consciousness that infuse our lives with meaning and purpose. That is why we cannot be indifferent toward the decline of traditional religious observance so widely discussed today. The great religions house the accumulated spiritual wisdom of humankind, and their loss would be catastrophic to the human soul.

As human beings, we hunger for spiritual experience. To be “spiritual but not religious” is one possible response, but it often doesn’t go far enough. All too easily it can become a kind of do-it-yourself spirituality, which lacks the capacity to effect the kind of growth and transformation that is the true goal of all the religious traditions.

Smith argues that we need to be “religious but not religious.” We need an approach to religion that recognizes the essential importance of the individual spiritual adventure while also affirming the value of collective religious tradition. He articulates an understanding of religion as a participation in the symbolic life as opposed to a mere content of belief. By recovering our personal sensitivity for symbolic experience together with a symbolic understanding of religion, we facilitate a profound encounter with life and with the human condition through which one may be tested, tried, and transformed.

Jason E. Smith is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts. He is a past president of the C.G. Jung Institute-Boston and currently serves as a training analyst and core faculty member in its analytic training program.  Visit his website at www.jungiantherapist.net/.



"Religious but Not Religious is beautifully written and carries the reader into a reconsideration of the place of religion in modern life. An antidote to the reductionism and narcissism that plague modern culture, this book reminds us of the necessity of our connection to something larger and shows us why symbol and ritual, and the proper attitude towards both, are eternally necessary for human health." 
–Gary S. Bobroff, MA, author of Carl Jung: Knowledge in a Nutshell  
Table of Contents
  • Introduction: The Decisive Question 
  • Psychology and Religion 
  • The Religious Approach to Psyche 
  • A Relationship to the Religious Dimension 
  • Religious but Not Religious 
  • PART 1: What Is the Symbolic Life? 
  • Chapter 1 Symbols and the Symbolic 
  • The Nature of the Psyche 
  • Directed Thinking and Symbolic Thinking 
  • The Perception of Experience 
  • The Objective and the Subjective Responses 
  • Symbols versus Signs 
  • Mastery versus Meaning 
  • Individual Symbols 
  • Collective Symbols 
  • A Function of Relationship 
  • Chapter 2 Ritual: The Embodied Symbolic 
  • Deepest Values 
  • The Consolidation of Consciousness 
  • Healing and the Holy 
  • Tending the Ancestral Spirits 
  • Participation in the Divine Drama 
  • Structure and Communitas 
  • Chapter 3 Religion: The Lived Symbolic 
  • The Irrational Facts of Experience 
  • The Numinosum
  • Religion versus Creed 
  • Religiosity, Religiology, and Religionism 
  • The Awakening of Faith 
  • PART 2: Why Do We Need a Symbolic Life? 
  • Chapter 4 The State of Religion 
  • The Rise of the “Nones” 
  • The Four Functions of Religion 
  • The Psychological Function of Religion 
  • The Sociological Function of Religion 
  • The Cosmological Function of Religion 
  • The Mystical Function of Religion 
  • Chapter 5 Loss of Symbols 
  • Creative Autonomy of the Unconscious 
  • Containers for the Numinosum 
  • A Personal Illustration 
  • The Reality of the Symbol 
  • People without Stories 
  • Treatment for the Human Soul 
  • Chapter 6 Religion and Psyche 
  • The Human Machine 
  • Reasons for Living 
  • The Protective Effect of Religion 
  • Therapy for the Disorders of the Soul 
  • The Question of Meaning 
  • The Chosen God 
  • Chapter 7 The Role of Religion 
  • Endurance of Suffering 
  • A Widening of Vision 
  • The Subversion of Values
  • A Source of Life
  • PART 3: How to Cultivate a Symbolic Life 
  • Chapter 8 What Jung Teaches 
  • Qualities of Experience 
  • vi Religious but Not Religious
  • Religion 
  • Dreams 
  • Active Imagination 
  • Chapter 9 What Religion Teaches 
  • Institution as Symbol 
  • The Relationship of the Individual to the Institution 
  • The Elements of Institutional Religions 
  • A Symbolic Field 
  • Chapter 10 Experiential Consciousness 
  • Ways of Knowing 
  • Experiential Consciousness 
  • Active versus Passive Consciousness 
  • Postcritical Consciousness and the Ironic Imagination 
  • Chapter 11 Psychology as Religio 
  • Religio: Careful Observation of the Numinous 
  • Religious Attitude versus Religious Belief 
  • The God-Experience 
  • A Consecration of Oneself 
  • What We Serve 
  • Conclusion: Opening a Space for Wonder 
  • The Activity of Religious Consciousness 
  • The Empty Center 
  • Emptiness and Kenosis 
  • Notes 
  • References 
  • Acknowledgments 
  • About the Author 
Chiron Publications, PO Box 19690, 28815, Asheville, United States
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