They've got me again ...

... the Jesuits, that is: Varieties of Religious Experience | The Jesuit Post.

The philosopher Charles Taylor points in A Secular Age to a culture of “festivity” as making more sense for people who live in a mobile age; when we don’t feel tied to place or to tradition, we are more open to pilgrimage, to festivals, to large-scale religious “experiences” than we are to weekly attendance or local devotions. Anecdotal evidence for his argument can be found in the dichotomous way that American Catholics will turn out by the hundreds of thousands to celebrate the pope’s visit but are nowhere to be found a week later at Sunday mass, or the huge crowds of young Catholics that events like “World Youth Day” have drawn in the past decade. But does a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage, or a three-day visit to Madrid, really replace a lifetime of religious practice? And to what degree do such events actually just cater to the human need for spectacle, rather than the deeper need for real relationship with God?

Actually, they've been with me for 52 odd years. I didn't go to college. I studied under Edward Gannon, S.J.