"The reawakened interest in religion is clearly far from having
reached..."

The reawakened interest in religion is clearly far from having reached its
peak, in either its explicitly religious or its less definable spiritual
manifestations. On the contrary. The phenomenon is the product of
historical forces that steadily gather momentum. Their common effect is to
erode the certainty, bequeathed to the world by the twentieth century,
that material existence represents ultimate reality.

The most obvious cause of these re-evaluations has been the bankruptcy of
the materialist enterprise itself. For well over a hundred years, the idea
of progress was identified with economic development and with its capacity
to motivate and shape social improvement. Those differences of opinion
that existed did not challenge this world view, but only conceptions as to
how its goals might best be attained. Its most extreme form, the iron
dogma of "scientific materialism", sought to reinterpret every aspect of
history and human behaviour in its own narrow terms. Whatever humanitarian
ideals may have inspired some of its early proponents, the universal
consequence was to produce regimes of totalitarian control prepared to use
any means of coercion in regulating the lives of hapless populations
subjected to them. The goal held up as justification of such abuses was
the creation of a new kind of society that would ensure not only freedom
from want but fulfilment for the human spirit. At the end, after eight
decades of mounting folly and brutality, the movement collapsed as a
credible guide to the world's future.

Other systems of social experimentation, while repudiating recourse to
inhumane methods, nevertheless derived their moral and intellectual thrust
from the same limited conception of reality. The view took root that,
since people were essentially self-interested actors in matters pertaining
to their economic well-being, the building of just and prosperous
societies could be ensured by one or another scheme of what was described
as modernization. The closing decades of the twentieth century, however,
sagged under a mounting burden of evidence to the contrary: the breakdown
of family life, soaring crime, dysfunctional educational systems, and a
catalogue of other social pathologies that bring to mind the sombre words
of Baha'u'llah's warning about the impending condition of human society:
"Such shall be its plight, that to disclose