Religion vs. Spirituality: A Contemporary Conundrum

The problem with which this essay is concerned is perhaps peculiar to contemporary first world western culture. It is, like many of our cultural problems such as inclusivity, addictions, and family breakdown, ironically a product, to a large extent, of our unprecedented abundance, leisure, and freedom. The problem is the relationship between religion and spirituality

Religious Life

Religious life is a generic term for a variety of forms of Christian life that originated, as a radical response to the gospel, in the rst century and continue to develop in the present, predominantly among Roman *Catholics and *Eastern Orthodox but also, especially recently, among Protestants and Anglicans. The Protestant community of *Taize in France has fostered ecumenical exchange

Spirituality and the God Question

The tenth anniversary of this excellent journal is not only a good occasion to celebrate its present stature and the tireless, talented leadership of its founder and editor Douglas Burton–Christie but, at least for some of us, to recall with affection and appreciation the initial venture, Christian Spirituality Bulletin: The Journal of the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality, which began in 1993 and became Spiritus, A Journal of Christian Spirituality in 2000. And it also provides the opportunity to raise a question for the present and the future which is perhaps subtly revealed in the continuity and discontinuity of the respective titles of the two phases of the publication. The continuity is in the words “Christian Spirituality.” But there is a slight shading of difference in that the current journal no longer limits itself to its role as the official organ of the SSCS. The Society itself has increasingly expanded its interaction with all aspects of spirituality and it has broadened its concerns beyond the academy and its participants. The question I want to raise has to do with how this expansion and broadening has affected, might affect, and perhaps should or should not affect the notion of Christian spirituality as the focus of the Society and the journal

Did Jesus Exclude Women from Priesthood?

This sentence purports to give the principle upon which the fundamental affirmation of the Declaration rests, namely, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith judges it necessary to recall that the Church , in fidelity to the example of the Lord, does not consider herself authorized to admit women to priestly ordination 1 (emphasis mine). Section 4 of the Declaration, and specifically the sentence being commented upon here, maintains that the reason why the Church is not only unwilling at this time to ordain women but is now, and will always remain, unable to ordain women to the priesthood is that Jesus acted in some way during his earthly life which divinely established the priesthood as exclusively male. This assertion raises two serious questions, one of theory and one of fact

Christian Spirituality in the Gospel of John

One of the most fruitful realizations that has emerged from contemporary Scripture studies is that the Bible contains not one but several theologies. The plurality of approaches to God, community, and salvation goes back to the Old Testament itself. And the New Testament offers several quite diverse interpretations of the person of Jesus, the Church he founded, and the eschatological destiny of the world and the race the he announced. The growing appreciation of theological diversity in the Bible itself has not only reassured the more creative members of the scholarly community in their search for contemporary interpretations of revelation, but has provided for the reflective Christian in the pew a much richer and more varied approach to the life of faith

Impact of Classics of Western Spirituality on the Discipline of Christian Spirituality

First became aware of the need for something like the Classics of Western Spirituality (CWS) in the late 1960\u27s and early 1970\u27s when I was working on my licentiate thesis in Paris. My subject was the understanding of consecrated virginity in the first four centuries of Christianity. I was motivated to study this subject by two hunches, both confirmed by my subsequent research: first, that the spirituality of Catholic Religious Life, both monastic and ministerial, as it developed in the Christian tradition, was actually rooted historically and mystically in the commitment of the consecrated virgins in the first three centuries rather than in the later ascetical tradition of the eremitical movement of the third and fourth centuries; second, that our only access to that early spirituality of consecrated virginity was the texts of the Fathers of the Church, a surprising number of whom had written whole treatises de virginibus (on virgins) and de virginitatis (on virginity)

Scripture: Tool of Patriarchy or Resource for Transformation?

If feminism is a major resource for the transformation of humanity and history in the direction of wholeness and hope, it is also a serious challenge to organized religion and e specially to Christianity because it calls into question the traditional theology of God and of human beings. But beneath these theological questions lies an even more fundamental issue, namely the question of biblical revelation. Th equestion, in its starkest terms, is whether or not the Bible teaches the maleness of God and the inferiority of women. In other words, is patriarchy divinely revealed and therefore divinely sanctioned? It would seem that, if it is, there is no future for self-affirming women in Christianity because the Bible is regarded by Christians as somehow a bearer of divine revelation. Some women, of course, have accepted and interiorized what seems to be the biblical verdict on their status, namely that male headship in family and church is divinely mandated, that women\u27 s subordination is of divine institution, and that God is ultimately, if not actually male, at least the warrant for regarding the male as the normative human being. In biblical fundamentalist communities there is virtually no alternative to accepting these conclusions and their practical implications

Conclusion to Buying the Field: Catholic Religious Life in Mission to the World

The end of this volume is also the end of a project which has taken almost twelve years to complete, namely, an examination, interdisciplinary analysis, and spirituality oriented theological interpretation of Catholic Religious Life as it has emerged and is continuing to develop from the renewal of Vatican II, and is now manifesting itself with ever-increasing confidence as a renewed and transformed reality in the Church. This renewing lifeform is both deeply continuous with its two-thousand-year history and startlingly different from anything anyone alive today knew as Religious Life until close to the last quarter of the twentieth century. The conciliar renewal has transformed Religious Life which is, in turn, transforming the conciliar renewal from a dream of the heart to an incarnation of hope, not only in Religious Life itself but in the Church as a whole. When I entitled the work Religious Life in a New Millennium I had no idea it would be more than one volume in length and never suspected it would take more than the first decade of the new millennium to complete. But as this final volume goes to press I discern the breath of the Spirit of God in what has often seemed me rely interminable human impediments to finishing the project. If the work had not been able (indeed forced) to take account of the developments of the last decade it would be far less adequate as a treatment of con temporary Religious Life and probably much less usable for the immediate future. The last few years in particular have seen a weaving together, partly under adverse ecclesiastical pressure on American women Religious,1 but mainly through the increasingly confident appropriation by Religious of what they have been living and becoming since the Council, of many experimental strands into a strong fabric whose pattern is increasingly clear and hopeful. There is today a new sense among many Religious of identity, solidarity, and enthusiasm for the future that feels like the end of the beginning of renewal and the beginning of a transformed maturity in the history of this life. This writing project began at the turn of the millennium with the publication of the first volume in 2000 and it will be completed, fittingly enough, with the publication of this third volume in 2013, during the golden jubilee of the Second Vatican Council

The Gospels and the Reader

From at least the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century the prevailing understanding of history and of texts and their meaning was almost exclusively object-centred. The reader of the text seldom came into view, and if she or he did, the exegesis was suspect. History was understood as a free-standing state of affairs which existed \u27in the past\u27 independently of the reader. Texts were free-standing semantic containers in which a single, stable meaning was intentionally embedded by the author. The meaning in the biblical texts was presumed to be primarily information about history. Thus, the task of the biblical scholar was primarily if not exclusively to extract from the text what it had to say about history. The primary concern was, at first, to discover \u27what really happened\u27 in the past; for instance, who Jesus really was and what he really said and did. Gradually, as source criticism gave rise to redaction criticism in gospel scholarship, the interest shifted to what each evangelist contributed to the presentation of this historical material and how that contribution both influenced the data about Jesus and his message (e.g., through selection and emphases) and gave the reader access to another sphere of historical data, viz., the Sitz im Leben or the community context in which the oral tradition about Jesus was transmuted through practice into text. However, the interest still focused on the information that was embedded in the text, either explicitly or implicitly. The ideal was still historical objectivity, but now less focused on \u27what really happened\u27 and more on \u27what the author intended to say\u27 about what really happened