What do we mean when we talk about our Spirituality?
Here are some thoughts on and definitions of spirituality. Which do you think best applies to how you think of your spirituality? and which do you think you would like to incorporate into your experience/expression of spirituality?
- “Spirituality refers to those experiences and practices that draw us outside of ourselves to the transcendent.”
~Anita De Luna, “Popular Religion and Spirituality”
in The Handbook of Latina/o Theologies - “Spirituality describes those attitudes, beliefs, practices which animate peoples lives and help them to reach out.”
~Gordon Wakefield, Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality - “Spirituality concerns how people subjectively appropriate traditional beliefs about God, the human person creation, and their interrelationship, and then express these in worship, basic values, and lifestyle.”
~Philip Sheldrake, Spirituality and Theology,
Christian Living and the Doctrine of God
- “Spirituality studies not principles to be applied nor general classes or typical cases but concrete individuals, persons, works, events...There is no such thing as generic spirituality or spirituality in general. Every spirituality is necessarily historically concrete and therefore involves some thematically explicit commitments, some actual and distinct symbol system, some traditional language, in short a theoretical-linguistic framework which is integral to it and without which it cannot be meaningfully discussed at all”
~Sandra Schneiders, Theology and Spirituality: Strangers, Rivals, or Partners?
- “Spirituality is specific in its expression. It is subjectively appropriated and...it is historically and culturally contextualized. Spirituality is dynamic and active and emerges out of experiences and practices from our daily lives or, as Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz and others call it, spirituality is Lo Cotidiano, the daily experience.”
~Anita De Luna, “Popular Religion and Spirituality”
in The Handbook of Latina/o Theologies
