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Scholars of the patristic era have paid more attention to the dogmatic tradition in their period than to the development of Christian mystical theology. This book aims to redress the balance. Recognizing that the intellectual form of this tradition was decisively influenced by Platonic ideas of the soul’s relationship to God, the book begins with an examination of Plato and Platonism. The discussion of the Fathers which follows shows how the mystical tradition is at the heart of their thought and how the dogmatic tradition both moulds and is the reflection of mystical insights and concerns. This new edition of a classic study of the diverse influences upon Christian spirituality includes a new Epilogue which brings the text completely up to date.

What was once taboo — faith at work — is increasingly accepted in corporate America. From secretaries to CEOs, growing numbers of businesspeople today want to bring their faith to work. Yet they wrestle with how to do this effectively and appropriately in a pluralistic corporate setting. For help they turn not to their clergy, but to their peers and to a burgeoning cottage industry on spirituality at work. They attend conferences and seminars, participate in Bible study and prayer groups, and read books, blogs, and eNewsletters. They see their faith as a resource for ethical guidance and to help find meaning and purpose in their work. This book looks at how this Faith at Work movement developed and considers its potential value for business and society. Done well, the integration of faith and work has positive implications at the personal level, as well as for corporate ethics and the broader economic sphere. At the same time, increasing expressions of religion and spiritual practices at work also present the threat of divisiveness and discrimination.

Western medicine has conventionally separated music, science, and religion into distinct entities, yet traditional cultures throughout the world have always viewed music as a bridge that connects and balances the physical with the spiritual to promote health and healing. As people in even the most technologically advanced nations across the globe struggle with obtaining affordable and reliable healthcare, more and more people are now turning to these ancient cultural practices of holistic and ICAM healing (integrative, complementary, and alternative medicine). This book convincingly demonstrates the relevance of medical ethnomusicology in light of the globally spreading ICAM approaches to health and healing. Revealing the Western separation of healing from spiritual and musical practices as a culturally determined phenomenon, the book confirms their underlying unity. In a place poetically known as the Roof of the World, the culture found within the towering Pamir Mountains of Badakhshan Tajikistan serves as the paradigm of ICAM healing practices. The book’s research and immersion into the Badakhshani culture provides a well-balanced “insider” perspective while maintaining an “observer’s” view, as it effectively bridges the widespread gaps between ethnomusicology, health science, and music therapy.

Americans support science as well as religion—but these two things are often at odds. In the wake of recent controversies about teaching intelligent design and the ethics of embryonic-stem- cell research, greater understanding between scientists and the general religious public is critical. What is needed is a balanced assessment of the middle ground that can exist between science and religion. Science vs. Religion: What Do Scientists Really Think? is the definitive statement on this timely, politically charged subject. After thousands of hours spent talking to the nation’s leading scientists, Elaine Howard Ecklund argues that the American public has widespread misconceptions about scientists’ views of religion. Few scientists are committed secularists. Only a small minority actively reject and work against religion. And many are themselves religious. The majority are whom she calls spiritual pioneers, who desire to link their spirituality with a greater mission for the work they do as scientists. In the current climate, even scientists who are not religious recognize that they must engage with religion as they are pressed by their students to respond to faith in the classroom—what Ecklund calls environmental push. Based on a survey and interviews with scientists at more than 20 elite U.S. universities, Ecklund’s book argues that other scientists must step up to the table of dialogue and that American believers must embrace science again. Both science and religion are at stake if any less is done.

Hugh of St. Victor (c.1096–1141) left a large and influential corpus of works on all aspects of theology, as well as the liberal arts broadly defined. This book introduces Hugh within his community in twelfth-century Paris and summarizes his major works according to his own threefold conception. First comes the pedagogical foundation (Didascalicon), including the historical sense of sacred scripture, then the (allegorical) framework of scriptural doctrine (especially creation and restoration in De sacramentis), and finally the tropological or spiritual finale of personal appropriation of the biblical message (the ark treatises and the Soliloquy). Hugh’s encyclopedic interests include grammar and geometry, philosophy and all of theology, history and eschatology, Job and Mary, the sacraments broadly and narrowly defined, spirituality, and the Dionysian Celestial Hierarchy. How he held all this together in his thought and corpus is a challenge to modern (and postmodern) readers.

This book explores the history and present status of unchurched spirituality in the U.S. Nearly 20% of all Americans consider themselves interested in spiritual issues even though they never step inside a church or synagogue. Most would describe themselves as spiritual at a personal level, but in some way alienated from organized religion. Today's alternative spirituality is the outgrowth of long‐standing traditions in American religious life. Colonial Americans were astonishingly eclectic in their religious pursuits, availing themselves of sundry magical and occult religious philosophies. In the nineteenth century, a number of metaphysical systems (e.g., Transcendentalism, Swedenborgianism, mesmerism, and spiritualism) penetrated deep into the spiritual vocabulary of middle‐class Americans who were eager to synthesize science and religion into a single vision of the universe. By the early twentieth century, there was already something of an “American tradition” of unchurched spirituality. Diverse interests including alternative medicine, parapsychology, the hidden powers of the unconscious mind, and Asian religions all contributed to the spiritual journeys of those who looked for religious inspiration outside America's established churches. The book concludes by demonstrating that far from the kooky and self‐absorbed dilettantes they are often made out to be, America's unchurched spiritual seekers embrace a mature and dynamic set of beliefs.

Maximus the Confessor (580-662) is increasingly regarded as a theologian of towering ecumenical importance. This book engages the full vista of Maximus’ profound incarnational and cosmic theology with the question: What happens to the body when human beings are deified? The answer unfolds in five chapters under the rubrics of epistemology, cosmology, christology, ecclesiology and spirituality. Each specifies an integral dimension in the Confessor’s theological vision and its central motif, viz. God the Word wills always to be embodied in all things. By virtue of their respective teleological orientation to Christ the incarnate Word, creation, history and the life of virtue each functions as a pedagogical strategy by which the transcendent God simultaneously conceals and reveals himself with the aim of leading all creation, including matter and the body, into deifying union with himself by grace. Ultimately it is the deification of Christ’s body that constitutes the paradigmatic and definitive renewal of fallen creation.

Sickness and suffering are nearly universal human concerns, and many of the world's great religious traditions are devoted, in part, to teaching their adherents how to live faithfully in the midst of these unhappy realities. A recent spate of scholarly and popular literature suggests that religious activity – what frequently is referred to as spirituality – is a potentially effective means of achieving better health. This contemporary rapprochement between religion and medicine, however, has little in common with the Christian tradition and its concern for the well‐being of the human creature. The God whose presence is displayed to the world in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is not one who may be domesticated by human belief, but who calls into existence a community of friends who care for one another as a sign of God's care for the world.

It is common knowledge that for most alcoholics and addicts recovery programmes like AA seem to hold out the best hope of conquering addiction. Most of us also know that such programmes usually stress reliance on some sort of “higher power.” This book shows that in fact spiritual development is the central factor in the recovery of a significant percentage of substance abusers, and that spirituality is the lynchpin of many if not most recovery programmes in America. The author of this book visited many treatment centres and interviewed hundreds of recovering alcoholics and addicts, counsellors, and family members, many of whose voices are heard within it. His purpose was to find out just how spirituality figures in the individual's recovery and how it is deployed by the treatment programmes. This book explores the differences among a wide range of programmes: twelve-step, Christian, Muslim, Native American, and those based in Eastern religions.

This book is the first study that presents, in a single volume, the whole of St Maximus the Confessor's thought in the light of unity and diversity. The principle of simultaneous union and distinction forms the core of Maximus’ thought, pervading every area of his theology, and it can be summarized thus: things united remain distinct and without confusion in an inseparable union. The study is divided into five parts. Part I introduces the logical tools and metaphors of Maximian thought. Parts II and III examine the way in which Maximus views unity and difference in the Trinity and in Christ. The distinction between the universal and the particular, expressed in terms of essence (or nature) and hypostasis (or person), proves fundamental for a correct interpretation. Maximus’ dyophysite Christology includes topics on natural difference and number, composite hypostasis, enhypostaton, will, and activity, and it culminates in the notions of ‘union without confusion’ and ‘perichoresis’. Part IV highlights questions of unity and difference in the universe, Scripture, and the Church. God is the principle of unity behind the multiplicity and there is a dynamic in a perspective of eschatological fulfilment, from and through the multiplicity of the visible things to the unity of the invisible. Part V discusses Maximus’ spirituality of the twofold love for God and neighbour, and how this influences the unity (or disunity) of humanity.

For most of my life, I have been dismissive of both spirituality and religion. I say this to make clear the perspective and the starting point of this book, this search. No doubt, many of my readers will think of me as simpleminded, trying to recover what I should have learned had I been rightly raised in the matrix of religion, ritual, and belief. Others, my friends from the field of science and most of my political friends, will think that I am benighted, or perhaps something of a sell out, for giving up my lifelong down‐to‐earth scientific, and admittedly hyperrational way of thinking about things. But if the very idea of spirituality seemed to me to be contaminated by sectarian religion and by uncritical and antiscientific thinking, my view of life, which manifested in my becoming a philosopher (it did not come from philosophy) pointed to something else. Spirituality is not just organized religion. Nor is it antiscience, unnatural or supernatural. There is a naturalized spirituality that I have always had a glimpse of, and this is what I want to pursue in this book.

This book challenges the notion that modernity in China and India are derivative imitations of the West, arguing that these societies have transformed their ancient traditions in unique and distinctive ways. The book begins with nineteenth-century imperial history, exploring how Western concepts of spirituality, secularity, religion, and magic were used to translate the traditions of India and China. The book traces how modern Western notions of religion and magic were incorporated into the respective nation-building projects of Chinese and Indian nationalist intellectuals, yet how modernity in China and India is by no means uniform. While religion is a centerpiece of Indian nationalism, it is viewed in China as an obstacle to progress that must be marginalized and controlled. The book moves deftly from Kandinsky's understanding of spirituality in art to Indian yoga and Chinese qi gong, from modern theories of secularism to histories of Christian conversion, from Orientalist constructions of religion to Chinese campaigns against magic and superstition, and from Muslim Kashmir to Muslim Xinjiang.

Karl Rahner SJ, (1904–84), perhaps the most influential figure in 20th-century Roman Catholic theology, believed that the most significant influence on his work was Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises. This book casts significant new light on Rahner's achievement by presenting it against the background of the rediscovery of Ignatian spirituality in the middle decades of the 20th century. It offers a fresh and contemporary theological interpretation of Ignatian retreat-giving, illuminating the creative new departures this ministry has taken in the last thirty years, as well as contributing to the lively current debate regarding the relationship between spirituality and speculative theology.

The classical texts of Christianity and Zen Buddhism contain resources with potent appeal to contemporary spirituality. The ‘apophatic’, or ‘negative’, may offer a means to integrate the conservation of traditional religious practices and beliefs with an openness to experience beyond the limits of doctrine and of rational thought. This book argues for a new understanding of what is meant by apophatic theology, supported by extensive analysis of the texts of Dionysius the Areopagite, St Maximus the Confessor, and Zen Master Dogen. It demonstrates how an apophatic spirituality might inform personal and communal spiritual development, and sketches out the contribution it can offer to modern debate on theology and postmodernism, entropy, and interfaith dialogue, and to development of an active theological commitment to humanity.