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Minding the Spirit: The Study of Christian Spirituality

2005; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/scs.2006.0007

1535-3117

Edward Howells,

Christian Theology and Mission

Reviewed by: Minding the Spirit: The Study of Christian Spirituality Edward Howells (bio) Minding the Spirit: The Study of Christian Spirituality. Edited by Elizabeth Dreyer and Mark S. Burrows. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. xxvii + 382 pp. $60.00 hdbk./ $19.95 pb. This book brings together twenty-five essays published in the Christian Spirituality Bulletin and its successor, Spiritus: a Journal of Christian Spirituality, between 1993 and 2004. It serves as a summary of the development of the field of the academic study of Christian spirituality since the founding of Society for the Study [End Page 223] of Christian Spirituality in 1992. It is an interesting moment to take stock. All the essays collected here are concerned, directly or indirectly, with what "spirituality" is and what it means to study it in the academy. The Society arose mainly in response to a change that had been occurring for about a generation, as the study of spirituality moved gradually from institutions of spiritual formation, such as monasteries, churches and seminaries, to the universities. Scholars in universities found that they could now study spirituality, teach courses and write articles on it, without incurring academic opprobrium. But the meaning of "spirituality" seemed to have changed, and no one quite knew how. The achievement of this volume is to show us the current state of this question. The book is divided into five parts, the first two examining matters of definition and method. Here we have a number of essays already used by teachers in the field, usefully assembled, such as Sandra M. Schneiders' "The Study of Christian Spirituality: Contours and Dynamics of a Discipline," Bernard McGinn's "The Letter and the Spirit: Spirituality as an Academic Discipline," which contains a masterful history of the field of spirituality, and Walter Principe's "Broadening the Focus: Context as Corrective Lens in Reading Historical Works in Spirituality." In Part Two, the attention shifts to the issue of "self-implication" in the study of spirituality, an important discussion to which I shall return later in this review. Part Three concerns more specific approaches and areas, such as J. Matthew Ashley on the relationship of theology and spirituality, Lawrence S. Cunningham on the role of Christian tradition, and Mark S. Burrows on the role of language. Part Four is headed "Spirituality and Healing" and includes issues of liberation theology, ecology, and health. Part Five is given to spirituality and aesthetics, with essays on visual art, music, and poetry. As a collection of essays, the coverage is neither systematic nor comprehensive, but there is coherence in the fact that the authors are, explicitly or implicitly, part of a single conversation, engaged in the task of defining and refining the academic study of spirituality. Questions of definition and method enter into all the essays. The collection also includes fascinating material drawn more directly from the authors' research, such as—to give only a brief selection—Bernard McGinn (in a second essay) on the late medieval language of interiority, Elizabeth A. Dreyer's discussion of the place of the Holy Spirit in Augustine, and Barbara Newman's analysis of the balance of human and divine elements in twelfth century mysticism. Similarly, Philip Sheldrake brings his research on urban spaces to a rich discussion of the public and communal nature of spirituality. Inevitably in a collection of essays, there are some important gaps in the overall coverage. In spite of the insistence at the beginning of the book on the need for the study of spirituality to be multidisciplinary and to include the human sciences, especially psychology, there is no example of this. The communal dimension of spirituality is insufficiently explored, with brief discussions in Philip Sheldrake's essay and an essay by Jon Sobrino on Oscar Romero. On the theoretical side, there are two important unresolved matters—first, the role of theology in spirituality, and second, the understanding of "experience" as the formal object of study. On the first issue, there is a considerable gap between the view put forth by Sandra Schneiders, which separates theology and spirituality on matters of content and method, and the statement in the introduction to Part Three, that "spirituality is unavoidably...