Even before September 11, 2001 religion and spirituality were gaining increasing attention and discussion both in Australia (Tacey 2000, 2003) and in other parts of the world (Anderson 2004; McGrath 2002; Martin 2002). Since then there has been a rapid increase in publications dealing with religion and spirituality, particularly those discussing Islam, Buddhism and global movements in the realm of the religious. This change has taken many by surprise. After all, according to the dominant sociological view of the last half of the twentieth century, religion, along with the state, was supposed to wither away as the successes of modern, secular rationalism in the form of science overcame the vicissitudes of life: poverty, illness and indeed death itself, thus making the religious, the mystical and the spiritual unnecessary. Death, plagues, genocides and the failure of attempts to bring about global peace, harmony and justice have radically undermined the underlying optimism of those assumptions. Secular humanism has not proven as satisfying as many thought it would be. The best evidence of this is the rise of other philosophies and world views, including religions and spiritualities, alongside a discernible reawakening of more traditional forms of the religious life. However, the return of the religious and spiritual is not merely a return to times past. This reawakening is taking place in a different sociocultural environment: a world characterised by the global movement of ideas, capital and people; and a world to which some are happy to apply the term ‘postmodernity’; that is, a world that is radically different to modernity.