The birth of an academic discipline is a rare event. Even more extraordinary is academia's acknowledgment that spirituality has scholarly as well as personal dimensions. Inquiry and dialogue are the essence of this new discipline, as it paves the way toward a deeper understanding of what it means to be human within the Christian faith. The twenty-five essays in this volume, originally published in either the Christian Spirituality Bulletin or Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality, offer groundbreaking explorations of Christian spirituality. Arranged under five broad headings, these essays create an insightful dialogue on the questions, methods, and critical approaches implemented by the discipline's top scholars. Topics addressed include the particular intellectual and methodological challenges presented by spirituality as an academic discipline, the self-implicating nature of the study of spirituality, historical perspectives, theological implications, healing as a function of spirituality, and the relationship between aesthetics and spirituality-art and spirit.
Scholars working on either broad or focused themes in spirituality will benefit from this clear and accessible presentation of the salient aspects of the discipline. In their insight and historical and methodological content, these essays provide valuable tools for students and teachers of spirituality and related fields, in their insight and historical and methodological content. This volume speaks to all who practice and study spirituality from any religious or secular perspective, encouraging reflective and open dialogue with one of humanity's major religious traditions. Contributors: J. Matthew Ashley, Thomas Berry, Mark S. Burrows, Douglas Burton-Christie, Lawrence S. Cunningham, Lisa E. Dahill, Elizabeth A. Dreyer, Mary Frohlich, Belden C. Lane, Elizabeth Liebert, E. Ann Matter, Bernard McGinn, Meredith B. McGuire, Mark McIntosh, Barbara Newman, Walter H. Principe, Don E. Saliers, Sandra M. Schneiders, Philip F. Sheldrake, Jon Sobrino, Wendy M. Wright
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Beginnings
Part I: Spirituality as an Academic Discipline: Foundations and Methods
Chapter 1. The Study of Christian Spirituality: Contours and Dynamics of a Discipline
Chapter 2. The Letter and the Spirit: Spirituality as an Academic Discipline
Chapter 3. Broadening the Focus: Context as a Corrective Lens in Reading Historical Works in Spirituality
Chapter 4. A Hermeneutical Approach to the Study of Christian Spirituality
Part II: The Self-Implicating Nature of the Study of Spirituality
Chapter 5. Spiritual Discipline, Discipline of Spirituality: Revisiting Questions of Definition and Method
Chapter 6. The Role of Practice in the Study of Christian Spirituality
Chapter 7. The Cost of Interpretation: Sacred Texts and Ascetic Practice in Desert Spirituality
Chapter 8. Spider as Metaphor: Attending to the Symbol-Making Process in the Academic Discipline of Spirituality
Chapter 9. Why Bodies Matter: A Sociological Reflection on Spirituality and Materiality
Chapter 10. The Language of Inner Experience in Christian Mysticism
Part III: Interpreting the Tradition: Historical and Theological Perspectives
Chapter 11. The Turn to Spirituality? The Relationship between Theology and Spirituality
Chapter 12. Extra Arcam Noe: Criteria for Christian Spirituality
Chapter 13. Spirituality as a Resource for Theology: The Holy Spirit in Augustine
Chapter 14. The Mozartian Moment: Reflections on Medieval Mysticism
Chapter 15. Words that Reach into the Silence: Mystical Languages of Unsaying
Chapter 16. Lover without a Name: Spirituality and Constructive Christology Today
Part IV: Spirituality and Healing
Chapter 17. Monseņor Romero, a Salvadoran and a Christian
Chapter 18. An Ecologically Sensitive Spirituality
Chapter 19. Reading from the Underside of Selfhood: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Spiritual Formation
Chapter 20. Lourdes: A Pilgrim After All
Chapter 21. Christian Spirituality as a Way of Living Publicly: A Dialectic of the Mystical and Prophetic
Part V: Spirituality and Aesthetics
Chapter 22. Beauty and Terror
Chapter 23. "A Wide and Fleshly Love": Images, Imagination, and the Study of Christian Spirituality
Chapter 24. Sound Spirituality: On the Formative Expressive Power of Music for Christian Spirituality
Chapter 25. "Raiding the Inarticulate": Mysticism, Poetics, and the Unlanguageable
Afterword: Emerging Issues and New Trajectories in the Study of Christian Spirituality
Further Reading
Contributors
