This piece is part of an on-going blog series called Plurality 2.0 (watch video here). Full schedule of guest authors throughout April and May is available here.

Darleen Pryds is a professor of Christian Spirituality and Church History at the Franciscan School of Theology which is part of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. She was reared Lutheran, became an agnostic vegetarian when she entered college, returned to institutionalized Christianity via the Episcopal church in the early ‘90s, before becoming Roman Catholic in 1999. Her favorite book is Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge and looks to Larry Darryl, the book’s protagonist, as a spiritual guide. She is presently re-reading it for about the 8th time. Recently she has started volunteering at Zen Hospice in San Francisco and considers her time there the most meaningful spiritual practice in her life right now. Online she has a webpage for her academic work and a Facebook page for her public talks at Darleen Pryds, Ph.D.

The Journey of a Spiritual Agnostic

Even when I was a strident agnostic (if an agnostic can be strident), I developed an intense spirituality around being a vegetarian. The sacredness of all life formed the basis of my earth-bound spirituality. So the notion of a spirituality of atheism is not altogether foreign to me. In fact I consider just such a spirituality with a fair amount of nostalgia and yearning at times. It would be so much simpler than being Roman Catholic.

For reasons that are not easy to explain especially in a blog post, I decided to become Roman Catholic in 1999. How a feminist, vegetarian, gay-rights activist could become Catholic in the late 20th century is inherently a complex decision. And my life today as the only lay woman teaching at a Catholic graduate school can be at times uneasy. In recent months I have found myself looking back on my agnostic days with a rosy-glass memory: it seems now that my spiritual life was so simple then.

[Read more...]