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  • Community
  • Douglas E. Christie

Peter Maurin, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, once said that we should try to create a society in which it is easier for people to be good. Implicit in this idea is a vision of community in which care and regard for one another, especially the most marginalized among us, is a bedrock principle. It is a vision of community that transcends narrow ideological positions and invests everything in the fundamental obligation to love one another. How utterly unrealizable such an idea seems in the fractious world we inhabit in this historical moment. And it is. Of course this was also true in the 1930s when Maurin and Dorothy Day, building on the Emmanuel Mounier’s personalist philosophy, embarked on the grand experiment that became the Catholic Worker Movement. Still, they devoted themselves heart and soul to the work of creating a society in which it is easier for people to be good: one of our most durable and compelling visions of what community is and can be.

Many years ago, recently graduated from college, I visited the New York Catholic Worker. Dorothy Day was still alive but was by then living as a kind of recluse in one of the houses in the Bowery. Still, I had the chance to witness firsthand the simple beauty (and sometimes barely controlled chaos) of this particular vision of community. A few years later, when I was invited to participate in helping get a Catholic Worker House off the ground in Oakland, California, I gladly accepted. The work was often complicated and difficult, but the simple vitality of this way of living was undeniable. My own life path eventually took me in another direction, into the work of scholarship and teaching and away from Oakland. But the force of this particular vision of community has remained with me and has shaped my life and thinking in unexpected ways. This journal has been one of the most important expressions of that vision.

Before Spiritus came into being in 2001, there was the Christian Spirituality Bulletin, a somewhat more modest, home-grown journal that ran for approximately ten years. At the time of its inception, the small but burgeoning community of scholars in the field of Christian spirituality did not have a regular forum for the exchange of ideas. It did have a community of sorts, with scholars from various disciplines meeting intermittently at the American Academy [End Page vii] of Religion, the College Theology Society and the Catholic Theological Society of America. There was a growing sense of shared purpose, a common language, and an awareness that careful, critical study of Christian spiritual experience required its own particular approach or style. It was in many ways an unusual little community of scholars; we were possessed of a peculiar and tenacious vision, a sense that what we were interested in was distinctive and not fully capable of being mapped onto the already-existing scholarly landscape. We needed a place to work out our ideas, to experiment, to push against the edges of our thinking, to engage in critical dialogue with one another. Also to offer our support and encouragement to one another.

It is in this sense that I think it is fair to say that the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality and its journals, The Christian Spirituality Bulletin and Spiritus, came into being as a response to a felt need for community. There was also a sense in those early days that the work of the Society’s members and its journals was being undertaken on behalf of the larger community. Not always explicitly and not always directly. But implicitly, yes. And this sensibility has continued to mark the work of much of the scholarship that appears in the pages of this journal.

So: research, critical thought, and scholarship in Christian spirituality, undertaken on a diverse range of subjects and concerns with their own inherent value, but also with an eye toward the urgent questions with which the larger human community is struggling. For example: in the face of contemporary secular or scientific thought, is it intellectually defensible or coherent to argue for such a thing...

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