Minding the Spirit
The Study of Christian Spirituality
Minding the Spirit
The Study of Christian Spirituality
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Paperback / softback
£27.50
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 9780801880773
Number of Pages: 416
Published: 27/02/2005
Width: 17.1 cm
Height: 25.4 cm
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. Monseñor 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
This is a collection of 25 articles... Several stand out as particularly helpful in understanding how the study of spirituality has become an academic discipline. Choice 2005 Ably edited... Merits study by all persons who have a serious interest in spirituality. -- E. Glenn Hinson Christian Century 2005 I shall be referring to it frequently and recommending it to my students. -- Edward Howells The Way: Review of Christian Spirituality 2006 This book is essential for those engaged in the academic study of spirituality. -- Jill Raitt Theological Studies 2006 The book has a broad appeal to specialists in spirituality and theology, pedagogues, and graduate and upper-undergraduate level students. -- Charlotte Radler Religious Studies Review 2006 Once I began reading this text, the challenges and depth of thought drew me in. Every chapter contains quotable ideas and captures a bit of the numinous we seek! -- Jane Gaeta Trinity Seminary Review 2007 Not just clever... It goes to the heart of one of the central issues involved in the study of spirituality. -- Bruce Hindmarsh Books and Culture: A Christian Review 2007
