Neal DeRoo

About My Work

The idea that social and political forces influence our individual experiences of the world has come to be taken for granted in many contemporary discussions, such as those concerning racism and sexism. But what are these basic forces that shape how we experience the world, how do they work in our experience, and can we do anything to shape the forces that are shaping us? Building on the work of Dooyeweerd and Reformational Philosophy as well as on the phenomenological tradition of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and others, my research shows that the primary forces shaping our experience of the world are not simply social or political, but are spiritual: our experience is constituted within contexts that are already laden with a sense that is not simply given to the world by people, but which acts as a kind of orienting impulse shaping both the world and how we experience it. This spiritual dimension of experience has been largely forgotten in both secular and religious circles: the former thinks empirical observation is all there ‘really’ is, while the latter tends to treat spirituality as an immaterial and otherworldly dimension almost entirely separate from empirical reality. My work tries to account instead for how spirituality is constantly at work in constituting our experience and the implications that has for how we live our lives. In general, I am interested in thinking about which spiritual forces (like consumerism) are dominant in our contemporary society, how they impact our lives and institutions (from politics to pop culture to the church), and how addressing these spiritual roots is necessary for tackling our most vexing social and political issues (like climate change, sexism, and racism). My conviction is that it is only in getting to the (spiritual) root of these questions that we can truly understand the world we are living in, and philosophy therefore has a crucial (and often overlooked) role to play in contemporary life. Philosophy, done well, emerges as perhaps the most practical of all the academic disciplines.