Thursday night’s Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater program at the Wang Theatre devoted itself to the inspirational themes of praise, pity, and faith. Given the shaky status of art in the culture these days, maybe connecting to the spiritual can help relegitimize serious dance and choreography. But only a few theatrical dances have focused these yearnings perfectly, which is why Alvin Ailey’s Revelations is still a tremendous work and still moves audiences after 40 years.

Ailey’s successor as artistic director, Judith Jamison, choreographed Here . . . Now in tribute to the late track star Florence Griffith-Joyner; the piece was commissioned by the 2002 Winter Olympics. It opens with a goddess figure, Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell in a trailing white silk robe, slowly gliding across the space. Fisher-Harrell then joins a sextet of athletic dancers and leaves them at the end. Aside from this symbolism, the dance, a suite of fairly generic duets, groups, and solos, doesn’t have any particular reference to Griffith-Joyner. It could be happening in a nightclub or a health club, but the dancers look less like the tight-lipped competitors you see on TV sports than like the models who sell the sneakers.

Here . . . Now is a ballet actually, with a showy, eclectic vocabulary, though the women don’t go all the way up on pointe. The dancers do a few warm-up moves, fling huge extensions into the middle of jogging, jeté up a curving ramp, slither over one another’s backs. The men clasp hands in a trio of solidarity; the women do the same; individuals get carried aloft by their teammates in heroic poses. There’s a kooky duet (Dwana Adiaha Smallwood and Clifton Brown) and a tense, oppositional duet (Bahiyah Sayyed-Gaines and Glenn A. Sims), and Fisher-Harrell dances with Matthew Rushing after their bright-colored track attire has transfigured into flesh colors.

Here . . . Now has a commissioned modern-jazz score by Wynton Marsalis and dramatic scenic design by Al Crawford. The ramp occupying center stage is rimmed with neon that glows pink in one section, green in another. Huge expressionistic shadows loomed above one part of the torturous duet for Sayyed-Gaines and Sims, and the last scene was danced against a projection that looked like multi-colored shards of glass exploding across the cyclorama.

Fisher-Harrell appeared again as a priestess figure in white at the beginning of Ronald K. Brown’s Grace, and she led the ensemble of dancers to what I guess was some kind of redemption. Brown’s work is even less specific than Jamison’s. In Fisher-Harrell’s opening solo, to Duke Ellington’s " Come Sunday, " she’d stand very still, then burst into a phrase of big, disjointed jumping and flailing, then become calm again. This spasmodic dance, alternating perhaps between introspection and joy, was taken up by the 11 other dancers at the end, after they’d stridden through again and again with pounding, ecstatic dances that got the audience yelling. Some of them wore red costumes, some white. This might not have meant anything, except they were all in white by the end, so I guess it did.

I thought Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s Shelter (1988) was impressive for the tremendous power of the six female dancers (Renee Robinson, Olivia Bowman, Laura Rossini, Hope Boykin, Tina Monica Williams, and Venus Hall). The texts, by Laurie Carlos and Hattie Gossett, exhorted us to empathize with homeless people, and a lot of the piece consisted of angry, desolate miming. The women thrashed and punched the air, ran if they were being chased, stumbled, fell together in a heap.

The piece felt a little out of date to me. Maybe our humanitarian priorities have shifted. Maybe our responses have gotten coarser. When the women crouched and clustered together, pointing out over the audience as a voice warned, " It can happen to you, " the audience applauded as if it had just seen a clever coup de théâtre.

But then Junior " Gabu " Wedderburn’s music gathered steam around an African-drumming bass, and the women danced in groups and solos with fast-stepping rhythms and high kicks, shoulder shakes and pivoting directionality. It wasn’t African dance per se but a driven, fully active movement with every shiver and exclamatory gesture underlined by the drums. I couldn’t tell whether the music was illustrating the dance or the other way around.

The Alvin Aileys have always kept close to the heart. Even when you think it’s the trendiness and the spectacle that have won you over, you have to respect this company.