Ten Years

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the journal Spiritus—a modest milestone, but one worth pausing over, if only to consider where we have been and where we are going. The Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality (SSCS) was founded in 1991 and soon after that the Christian Spirituality Bulletin came into existence. The present journal grew out of that earlier effort and has continued to give expression to the fundamental ideals of the SSCS: to publish thoughtful, critical scholarship in Christian spirituality that deepens our understanding of this ever-expanding field of inquiry. Looking back on the statement of purpose from the inaugural issue in 2001 (which continues to appear in each issue of the journal), it is sobering to consider how expansive and inclusive those ideals were and still are. Have we lived up to them? Perhaps we have done so in some measure. But considering that one of the underlying goals of both the SSCS and Spiritus is to expand and deepen our understanding of a field that is itself relatively young and still developing its own distinctive language, methods and ethos, it is perhaps to be expected that ten years in the life of a journal would serve simply as a beginning to that work. Still, it is enough time to offer a glimpse of some of the key questions that are emerging in the field and to reflect on the meaning of these questions as we look to the future.

Among the most consistently pressing questions has been how to retrieve historical traditions of spiritual thought and practice in terms that honor the historical particularity of those traditions while also facilitating their reinterpretation for contemporary use. The impulse to retrieve the wisdom of these traditions is often rooted in a profound existential hunger, a sense that somehow they possess the capacity to help us address our own deepest questions. But how to access that wisdom? How to read and interpret these ancient traditions in a way that allows them to speak again, to heal and renew the Spirit—all the while retaining their own distinctive character and integrity? Scholarship in Christian spirituality is not always aimed explicitly at such renewal; but it can and often does contribute significantly to it. The Symposium on Ignatian spirituality in the current issue of Spiritus reflects this ongoing concern, while also revealing the particular challenges involved in retrieving and reinterpreting historical traditions of spiritual practice.

The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola are widely recognized as being one of the most important and enduring expressions of Christian spiritual thought and practice. The renewed attention to the Exercises in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—among Jesuits as well as among a wide range of other religious and lay persons—suggests something about their continued capacity to speak to our most pressing spiritual questions. Still, while some of our questions no doubt remain similar to those that originally gave rise to the Exercises, others have changed dramatically. Thus, for example, the question of how, if at all, the Exercises can speak to the conditions of crushing poverty and social injustice that have come to mark our experience in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has taken on new urgency. Can the spiritual vision of the Exercises help us address and respond to these realities honestly and courageously? These were among the most pressing questions for the Jesuit Ignacio Ellacuría as he prepared his lectures on the Exercises at the University of Central America in El Salvador in 1974. Translated into English here for the first time (and introduced) by Matt Ashley, these lecture notes reflect the pathos and profound challenge of that particular historical moment in El Salvador. But they also reveal a challenge that is still very much with us, namely how a particular tradition of spiritual practice can be (re)read as liberating. A related question occupies the center of William Reiser's essay, namely whether the Spiritual Exercises, which are after all rooted in a very particular understanding of God, can be translated into a wider cultural and religious context in which...