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Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality
Journal Prestige (SJR): 0.125

Number of Followers: 8

Full-text available via subscription

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ISSN (Print) 1533-1709 - ISSN (Online) 1535-3117
Published by Project MUSE

[305 journals]

Introduction to SSCS Presidential Address 2021
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  Abstract: How are we to teach spirituality' Most people who pick up this issue of Spiritus ask themselves this question any time they enter a space where they are faced with the gift and challenge of doing just that. Teaching spirituality is not a "lifestyle", it is not even a comprehensive "way of life". It is, as Barbara Quinn convincingly describes the art and practice of teaching spirituality, a desire to find the roads by which we "lead the students into the heart and soul of a text, a person, a tradition, a practice."1 Teaching spirituality is, for teacher as well as for student, an exploration of desire. It is the artful process of finding answers that sow seeds of evergreen questions leading to what Dr. Quinn calls ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-04-09T00:00:00-05:00
Leading to the Edge of Mystery: The Gift and the Challenge of Teaching
Spirituality
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  Abstract: In 2001 and for the next 10 years I served as the founding director of the Center for Christian Spirituality at the University of San Diego (USD). The charge to create a new center was alternately exhilarating and daunting. After surveying countless people at USD I identified four areas of focus that would serve as the framework for developing the Center: personal enrichment, social justice, spirituality and professional life, and spirituality as an academic discipline. The latter was of particular concern to me having frequently heard comments about the nature of spirituality as "soft," "feel good," and "lacking rigor." I set out on a mission to help members of the University to think otherwise. After laying the ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-04-09T00:00:00-05:00
Shared Spaces Conference: Reflections on the Study of Spirituality and
Spiritual Formation
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  Abstract: Father Ron Rolheiser once commented that spirituality is a universal language, one that brings Christians together to discuss our relationship and desire to walk with God and one another, one that transcends potential theological differences. This sentiment describes the rich ecumenical fellowship and scholarship that was enjoyed at the "Shared Spaces and Shifting Contexts: A Conference on the Study of Spirituality and Spiritual Formation" event at the Oblate School of Theology in November 2021.The intent of this conference was to enhance the symbiotic relationship between those who work in the academic field of Christian spirituality and those in the field of spiritual formation. While there are important ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-04-09T00:00:00-05:00
Patterns of the Wind: Reflections on Christian Spirituality Over the Past
Century
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  Abstract: The Western Canadian prairies are a windswept land. Canadian novelist W. O. Mitchell has written a "story of a boy and the wind." The narrative is pervaded by the wind's presence, from the Springtime, when the townsfolk are "waiting for the unfailing visitation of wind, gentle at first, barely stroking the long grasses and giving them life." All the way to late Autumn, when "the wind turns in silent frenzy upon itself … breathing up topsoil and tumbleweed skeletons to carry them on its spinning way over the prairie, out and out to the far line of the sky."3The title of Mitchell's book poses a simple, rhetorical question: Who Has Seen the Wind' Of course, no one is able actually to see the wind. Yet how could anyone ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-04-09T00:00:00-05:00
Theology and Spirituality: Pondering Anew Their Complex Interrelationship
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  Abstract: In 1986, Sandra Schneiders wrote an essay entitled "Theology and Spiritualty: Strangers, Rivals or Partners'" as a contribution to the discussion of the relationship of theology and spirituality.2 Much of that conversation occurred under the auspices of the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality, especially in its early years. It has been twenty-eight years since the first issue of the inaugural journal of the Society, Christian Spirituality Bulletin3 and twenty-one years since the first edition of its successor, Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality,4 and the circumstances in the culture, church, and academy have changed, in some cases, radically. So, at the invitation of the Society's planning ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-04-09T00:00:00-05:00
Many Tongues, Many Formational Practices: Christian Spirituality/Formation
across Global Christian Contexts
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  Abstract: As the title of this essay indicates, we will cover a fairly expansive set of reflections – as expansive, we could say, as between the "west and the rest." While I am writing from a distinctly North Atlantic location, I am wanting to address the myriad of perspectives that constitute what we understand to be world Christianity. As we are all aware, there has been a discernable shift of the center of gravity for world Christianity from the European and Northern parts of the world to the so-called southern parts of the world, resulting in there being more Christians now outside of Europe and North America than inside.1 When we attempt to talk about Christianity in this global reconfiguration, notions of "west and ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-04-09T00:00:00-05:00
The Explosion of God's Heart: Entering the Inner Life of the Paschal
Mystery
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  Abstract: Last October, Belden Lane lost his son Jon after an unexpected and incomprehensible 9-month bout with cancer. As Belden let me know, the following Perspective shares something of his wrestling with God as a result of Jon's inexplicable death. The piece deals with the implications of Trinitarian theology, focusing on God's deep personal investment in the suffering of creation. This focus pinpoints how one's image of God can make a profound change in the face of the dark mystery of suffering.Belden's idea of "the explosion of God's heart" is, of course, communicated through the power of words. Still, this reflection from Belden reflects something of what it means for Sacred Mystery to dwell among us even in the mists ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-04-09T00:00:00-05:00
Between Poetry and Prayer: The Mystagogy of "Primary Wonder"
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  Abstract: There are times, early in the morning when I arise or late at night before I retire, that I find myself nostalgic, pining for days when belief was easier. In actuality, I do not think belief has ever been easy, though it may have been easier to take it for granted in earlier eras. Sometimes, though, I wish I could feel something of the ardor of the great saints—a Therese Lisieux, a Julian of Norwich, a Thomas Aquinas. Every now again, usually in the midst of my annual retreat, do I experience intimations or stirrings that, if not launching me into states of ecstasy, do reassure me that in prayer I am not simply talking to myself. On one occasion, not long after entering the Society of Jesus, I flung myself down ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-04-09T00:00:00-05:00
Not Praying to An Idol: Kant and Kierkegaard on Prayer
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  Abstract: According to Nelly Viallanex, one of Soren Kierkegaard's motives in writing about prayer is to keep people from praying to an idol. "Prayer is supposed to establish a relationship with the true God and not with an idol that would usurp the name."1 I would also say this is true of Immanuel Kant's writings about prayer. Both seem to be aware of what we might call the "philosophical problem" of prayer:God is infinite, eternal, limitless, perfect, and uncorruptible, hence sui generis.We are historically finite and limited both by what our cognitive abilities enable us to know, unaware of our myriad biases.Because of number one, we cannot know the being of God.Because of number two, we are not cognitively or ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-04-09T00:00:00-05:00
Strange Woman: Mariological Reflections on the Camino de Santiago
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  Abstract: By recognizing our uncanny strangeness we shall neither suffer from it nor enjoy it from the outside. The foreigner is within me, hence we are all foreigners. If I am a foreigner, there are no foreigners.She was beautiful. And cold. She wore a golden surplice, its wide pendulous cuffs trimmed with vermillion, its hem Marian blue. The crown resting on her head seemed to bathe her anthracite face with an alien light.2 In her right hand she held a scepter loosely, lazing upon her shoulder as if her sovereignty were beyond dispute or deposition. In her left hand rested the infant Jesus. He shared the expression of his mother: diffident and humble. He was carved from the same swarthy wood. Both mother and child were ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-04-09T00:00:00-05:00
Rain
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  Abstract: Courtesy of Katia M via ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-04-09T00:00:00-05:00
Quaking Aspen
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  Abstract: —Populus tremuloides; Sequoia National ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-04-09T00:00:00-05:00
Prologue, Book Review Editor
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  Abstract: Spiritus has come to recognize that there are certain resonant themes arising with urgency in our current historical context that pose poignant questions to spirituality scholars and that demand our guild's greater attention. For instance, the COVID-19 pandemic invites us to raise questions about ethical practices of medicine, the limits of freedom and government, practices of neighborliness, and ecclesial worship amid extremity. Further, it has forced us to name the inequities that this virus has laid bare as communities of color and nations in the Global South have disproportionately been negatively affected. The effects of COVID-19 call on spirituality for models, critique, practices, projects, and theologies of ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-04-09T00:00:00-05:00
Knowing Christ Crucified: The Witness of African American Religious
Experience by M. Shawn Copeland (review)
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  Abstract: Today's current political and racial divisiveness sheds light on the Black experience and the ways that Black people have encountered oppression and suffered under the weight of white supremacy. How Black people survived amid such horrors as enslavement, lynching, police brutality, and killings, and the continuing systematic racism within society, church, and academia has been the subject of many recent books. Over ten years ago came the publication of M. Shawn's Copeland ground-breaking contribution to womanist thought and theology entitled Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being. In that book, Copeland looked at the experience of Black women and developed her own theological anthropology which centered the ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-04-09T00:00:00-05:00
Against the Hounds of Hell: A Life of Howard Thurman by Peter Eisenstadt,
and: Howard Thurman and the Disinherited: A Religious Biography by Paul
Harvey (review)
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  Abstract: Howard Thurman was one of the most significant religious figures of the twentieth century, but scholars of Christian spirituality have yet to engage his life and work very extensively. After an initial wave of scholarship about Thurman in the years after his death (1981), attention to him waned during the 1990s and 2000s. Beginning in 2009 with the publication of the first of five volumes in The Papers of Howard Washington Thurman project, with Walter Fluker as senior editor, Thurman has re-emerged as a subject of interest in both popular and scholarly consciousness. In addition to the Papers, three volumes of Thurman's previously unpublished sermons have appeared since 2018, a number of articles and books have ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-04-09T00:00:00-05:00
Anchored in the Current: Discovering Howard Thurman as Educator, Activist,
Guide, and Prophet ed. by Gregory C. Ellison II (review)
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  Abstract: Anchored in the Current is a powerful collection of seventeen essays and poems written by friends, colleagues, and contemporaries of the twentieth century spiritual visionary, Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman. The book is edited by Gregory C. Ellison II, who is a notable educator, scholar, and activist in his own right, and is organized in four primary sections: vocation, education, activism, and spirituality. Each of the sections provide a distinct glance into the multifaceted life and ministry that Thurman lived out and offered for the sake of the world.In this soul-nourishing work, Ellison guides readers in an inner exploration to discover more deeply what Thurman referred to as "the anchor" in hopes that it might ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-04-09T00:00:00-05:00
Subversive Witness: Scripture's Call to Leverage Privilege by Dominique
DuBois Gilliard (review)
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  Abstract: In Psalm 119:105, the psalmist writes to God, "Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path." Dominique DuBois Gilliard's Subversive Witness: Scripture's Call to Leverage Privilege helps the light of God's word shine more brightly in a world at risk of succumbing to its own misunderstanding and misuse of privilege. Within the book's first few pages, Gilliard establishes that privilege is not only very real, but it is also biblical. He highlights the subversive witness of biblical figures who leveraged privilege for the good of God's creation and reminds Christians today that Jesus's gospel urges followers to do the same. To this end, Gilliard provides a two-pronged strategy for leveraging privilege to ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-04-09T00:00:00-05:00
Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora by Michael A. Gomez
(review)
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  Abstract: A timely refresh of a hegemonically radical classic, the second edition of Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora maintains its value as a foundational and reliable text on the worldwide African diaspora. Michael A. Gomez is a foremost scholar of history with unparalleled expertise in the study of Africa, the Middle East, and Islam. Gomez's research, critical examination, and presentation of the worldwide African diaspora has reframed and transformed the discourse on African American cultures. This reframing is germane to me as an emerging scholar examining the human search for transcendence by challenging the dominance of Western European concepts and approaches to contemplation and proposing the ... Read More
  PubDate: 2022-04-09T00:00:00-05:00