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This chapter takes a look at efforts to promote spiritual discipline. It identifies the meanings that are associated with spiritual discipline starting from the 1980s. The chapter first discusses the techniques of personal management, and reveals that during the 1950s, social critics believed that Americans were becoming undisciplined. Personal discipline became the key to curb the excesses of the 1960s and it became embedded in asymmetric relationships. This chapter also takes a look at the conservative moral agenda advanced by religious leaders and the changes that occurred in people's understanding of discipline.

The majority of Muslim philosophers were Persian speakers, but they wrote their works in Arabic so that all Muslim scholars would be able to benefit. Kâshânâ (Bâbâ Afdal) was an exception to this general rule because he wrote mainly in Persian for his own students, who were not well trained in the Islamic sciences. He considered philosophy a spiritual discipline whose goal was to transform the soul, actualize the intelligence that lies at the root of the cosmos, and achieve perfect virtue. His careful attention to the Persian language produced not only remarkably beautiful prose but also deep insights into the concrete meanings of Arabic technical terms that had become too abstract to convey their original meanings. He wrote six books, translated five treatises from Arabic into Persian, abridged the introduction of Ghazâlî's Kîmiyâ‐yi sa`âdat, addressed six letters to disciples, composed 30 essays, and authored a good deal of poetry, mostly quatrains.

This chapter discusses the three basic alterations on work that urbanization and secularization produce. First, they separate the place of work from the place of residence; second, they transform work more and more into bureaucratic patterns of organization; and third, they emancipate work from the religious character it has retained from the period when it was interpreted as a spiritual discipline. All of these modifications of work have been viewed with alarm and criticized, frequently by religious people. Attempts have been made to reintroduce familial elements into the life of the modern corporation; objections have been voiced to the organization with its characteristic impersonality; laments have been expressed over the disappearance of a sense of vocation in work.

Spirituality is a movement away from suffering, and towards a way of life that liberates us from the self-defeating patterns of the conventional social ego. To further this movement we need a new understanding of ourselves and practices to transform that understanding from a momentary flash of insight to deeply engrained habits. The sequence of pain, new understanding, practices, and developing virtues is often called the “spiritual path.” Here spirituality is a long, difficult, uneven, and unpredictable process. This chapter describes some of the characteristic features of this journey: the contextual nature of spiritual virtues, the dangers of “spiritual materialism,” some paradoxes which arise, how the comparatively unimportant role of verbal creeds combines with the absolutely important place of spiritual discipline, spirituality's connections to and separations from mysticism and morality, how spirituality manifests itself in a wide variety of styles, and the inevitability of suffering

This chapter presents an account of a major theme of life of the Yurok tribes: wealth. It suggests that capitalist wealth and Yurok wealth are two quite different things, and that Yurok sacred wealth, especially in the form of dance regalia, is both functionally communal and, interpretatively, emblematic of life-force itself, rather than being essentially material. This life force, “spirit,” is ultimately identified with “that which exists,” also, “the world.” Wealth is the measure of spiritual wisdom, in the ideal model, but greed and selfishness drive wealth away. Finally, the chapter emphasizes that the highest forms of wealth, dance regalia, come to and stay with people who are dedicated to “fixing the world” through, particularly, the great dances. Wealth, therefore, does not indicate an individual's personal salvation, but his or her fitness, through spiritual discipline, to contribute to the good of creation itself.

This chapter describes how as per Buddhist ideology, all beings are equal, in the sense that they share the same basic nature, whether they are friends or enemies. Sharing the same basic nature is more important than status as friend or enemy, which is impermanent in any case. Though duality and the difference between friends and enemies, between those who are right and those who are wrong, can feel very real, Buddhist analytical meditation always shows that such feelings, though temporarily real, are ultimately illusory. Many Buddhists would probably argue that Buddhist ethics are directed toward individual choices and behaviors, whereas politics involves struggles for power and material wealth between groups of people. This chapter explores how Buddhism has two things to contribute to those involved in feminism. One is the immediate need for the skillful means of developing and maintaining equanimity and peacefulness in the face of opposition, oppression, and conflict. The second great gift of Buddhism to political processes is its ability to develop staying power in those who practice its spiritual disciplines.

This chapter examines how the Christian virtue of humility is applicable to issues in personal and social ethics. It demonstrates several ways in which humility can be robustly action-guiding. The chapter also explores some of the ways in which humility is relevant to many of the classic spiritual disciplines, such as prayer, fasting, solitude, silence, and service. Next, it considers humility’s relevance to issues concerning religious pluralism and tolerance. It concludes with a discussion of the variety of ways in which humility is essential for a flourishing family life and its status as a virtue in the context of sport.

This chapter shows how contemporary conceptions of sloth as laziness diverge from acedia, a vice that Desert Fathers Evagrius of Pontus and John Cassian defined as a lack of enduring commitment to one’s religious vocation. Thomas Aquinas likewise understood sloth as threatening one’s relationship with God, defining it as a sorrowful aversion to our participation in the divine nature (caritas, the virtue of charity). Slothful people typically resist this relational identity and its vocational demands for transformation by escapism (restlessness) or by apathy (false rest). According to the Christian tradition, therefore, sloth is aversion to the demands of love, not to effort per se. Thus, the busy activity and diligence esteemed by contemporary culture can count among sloth’s classic symptoms, no less than torpor and resignation. The film, Groundhog Day, illustrates slothful aversion to love’s demands and its remedy, the spiritual discipline of stability (stabilitas loci)