Christian Spirituality Studies is a blog for sharing the research and teaching of members of the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality (SSCS) with other members and non-members. All materials made available by SSCS members are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. and can be shared with other members upon request. Material can be removed at any time if requested by the author. SSCS members who wish to post information about a recent publication or conference paper can contact the blog moderator, Jonas Barciauskas.
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- Syllabus: Contemporary Expressions in Spirituality
- Essay: Henri de Lubac (1896-1991) and Contemporary Mystical Theology, by Andrew Prevot
- Syllabus: History of Christian Spirituality
- Dissertation: Friendship with the Saints: A Practical Theological Reading of Teresa of Avila as a Spiritual Companion, by Tara Soughers
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Dear Friends, for the past couple of weeks I led a seminar at the Lumen Christi Institute in Chicago on Jean Gerson and Thomas a Kempis, and while preparing my talk on the Imitation a thought came to me. What if one SSCS session each year at AAR were given to the recovery of a classic text in Christian spirituality? Other affiliated groups have author-critic panels which bring various perspectives to bear on new research, with the author there to respond to comments. The latter would not be possible in this case, but the former—interpreters focused on a single text or author from a range of viewpoints—would certainly be possible and, I believe, beneficial for both our teaching and study of the tradition.
In our discussion we imagined ourselves making a proposal for the Imitation of Christ, identifying the positives (historical importance, shortage of recent scholarship, etc.) as well as the drawbacks to restoring the Imitation to the canon of texts with which students of Western piety should be familiar. We then began to name other works we thought had been unfairly ignored, and warmed to the idea of an annual recovery session under SSCS auspices. I promised the group that I would present this idea to the membership this week. What would your “lost favorites” be?