Minding the Spirit : the study of Christian spirituality
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
Print Book, English, 2005
Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Md., 2005
xxvii, 382 pages : illustrations ; 26 cm
9780801880766, 9780801880773, 0801880769, 0801880777
55657441
1. The study of Christian spirituality : contours and dynamics of a discipline / by Sandra M. Schneiders
2. The letter and the spirit : spirituality as an academic discipline / by Bernard McGinn
3. Broadening the focus : context as a corrective lens in reading historical works in spirituality / by Walter H. Principe
4. A hermeneutical approach to the study of Christian spirituality / by Sandra M. Schneiders
5. Spiritual discipline, discipline of spirituality : revisiting questions of definition and method / by Mary Frohlich
6. The role of practice in the study of Christian spirituality / by Elizabeth Liebert
7. The cost of interpretation : sacred texts and ascetic practice in desert spirituality / by Douglas Burton-Christie
8. Spider as metaphor : attending to the symbol-making process in the academic discipline of spirituality / by Belden C. Lane
9. Why bodies matter : a sociological reflection on spirituality and materiality / by Meredith B. McGuire
10. The language of inner experience in Christian mysticism / by Bernard McGinn
11. The turn to spirituality? : the relationship between theology and spirituality / by J. Matthew Ashley
12. Extra arcam noe : criteria for Christian spirituality / by Lawrence S. Cunningham
13. Spirituality as a resource for theology : the Holy Spirit in Augustine / by Elizabeth A. Dreyer
14. The Mozartian moment : reflections on medieval mysticism / by Barbara Newman
15. Words that reach into the silence : mystical languages of unsaying / by Mark S. Burrows
16. Lover without a name : spirituality and constructive Christology today / by Mark McIntosh
17. Monseñor Romero, a Salvadoran and a Christian / by Jon Sobrino
18. An ecologically sensitive spirituality / by Thomas Berry
19. Reading from the underside of selfhood : Dietrich Bonhoeffer and spiritual formation / by Lisa E. Dahill
20. Lourdes : a pilgrim after all / by E. Ann Matter
21. Christian spirituality as a way of living publicly : a dialectic of the mystical and the prophetic / by Philip F. Sheldrake
22. Beauty and terror / by Don E. Saliers
23. "A wide and fleshly love" : images, imagination, and the study of Christian spirituality / by Wendy M. Wright
24. Sound spirituality : on the formative expressive power of music for Christian spirituality / by Don E. Saliers
25. "Raiding the inarticulate" : mysticism, poetics, and the unlanguageable / by Mark S. Burrows
Afterword. Emerging issues and new trajectories in the study of Christian spirituality