Spiritus-A Journal of Christian Spirituality最新文献

{"title":"'AJ's Orbicularis Oris Stitch: A Novel and Simple Technique of Reconstructing Central Arch Mandibular Defects in Resource-Constrained Set Up'.","authors":"Ajinkya Pawar, Priyank Rathod, Vikas Warikoo, Mohit Sharma, Abhijeet Salunke, Shashank Pandya, Shivam Pandya, Jebin Aaron, Salahudheen Thottiyen, Sonal Trivedi, Kanika Kapur, Vivek Bande, Nikunj Patel, Poojitha Yalla, Gautami Joshi","doi":"10.1007/s12070-023-04044-1","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s12070-023-04044-1","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Lip and oral cavity SCC account for 2nd highest incidence of cancers and 3rd most common cause of mortality from cancer in India. Reconstruction of defects of central arch invading cancers results in poor cosmetic and functional outcomes if free flaps are not used. 30 patients with Oral SCC in the age group 20-75 years requiring central arch segmental mandibulectomy were included. Reconstruction was done with pedicled bipaddled PMMC flap with 'AJ's orbicularis oris stitch' using Fiber wire. Patients were divided into 4 groups according to extent of lip and skin loss post excision of primary tumour. Patients were evaluated with subjective scores for drooling, oral competence and cosmesis. There were 4, 12, 9 and 5 patients in Group A, B, C and D respectively. Mean subjective scores using our technique for drooling, oral competence and cosmesis were 3.75/4,3.75/4 and 3.5/4 for group A, 3.45/4, 3.36/4 and 3.09/4 for group B, 2.8/4, 2.6/4 and 2.3/4 for group C defects and 2.5/4, 3/4 and 2.5/4 for group D defects respectively. Over all scores for all patients were 3.2/4, 3.14/4 and 2.84/4 for drooling, oral competence and cosmesis. This simple, quick and inexpensive technique of reconstruction of central mandibular arch defects can drastically improve cosmetic and functional outcomes in a resource restrained set up. However, long term results and comparison studies are required for standardisation of the technique.</p>","PeriodicalId":42348,"journal":{"name":"Spiritus-A Journal of Christian Spirituality","volume":"13 1","pages":"3703-3710"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10645984/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88554272","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Rhythms of Silence and Space: Contemplation and Architectural Proportion in Dom Hans van der Laan","authors":"C. M. Howell","doi":"10.1353/scs.2023.a909104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/scs.2023.a909104","url":null,"abstract":"Rhythms of Silence and Space:Contemplation and Architectural Proportion in Dom Hans van der Laan C. M. Howell (bio) The St. Benedictusberg Abbey at Vaals in the Netherlands is first glimpsed in its perch atop a hill on a relatively desolate stretch of road. Two round towers dominate its south elevation, appearing more as imitations of a Renaissance palace than a residence of the Benedictine order. The towers appear both too grand and too miniscule at the same time, spaced too far apart as they encroach on the building between them. This view is lost as the single lane dives downhill through a forest. When the abbey reemerges, this time presenting its west façade, there is a dramatic architectural shift. A chapel added in 1962, some four decades after the original building, now greets visitors. The conical towers are blocked by this monolithic rectangular mass. Its surface is only disturbed by the small repetitive windows, mainly in a clerestory under the eave. The vague allusion to fantasy has become a single, concrete expression. Its presence is tranquil—one unified in conversation with reason's conviction. The change between the two views is disorientating, forcing a pause to search for the entrance. The abbey is a tale of two buildings—the former by the ecclesial architect Dominkus Böhm, and the latter designed by Dom Hans van der Laan (1904–91), an influential modern architect and devout Benedictine monk. The view from the back pew of the chapel rests in the shadow of comfort. The eye chases the architectural lines, searching for the genius behind the work. The building is simple and squared. It is wholly comprised by a series of rectangular forms, precisely arranged along their vertical and horizontal axes. The crisp lines of columns and portals come to definition as the melodies and harmonies of the monks fill the space. Their meter is certain. Their song actively restrained. Light replicates the ordered meter of chant. Its own is a rhythm being determined by the spacing of window and wall. Its path leads the eye to the altar—the centerpiece of the chapel—refocusing attention with every passing cloud. From this view, the only worry is of disturbing the stillness. The topic of architecture and spirituality generally conjures up ancient images quite distant from van der Laan's modernism.1 These are of great stone cathedrals and elegant marble temples, abounding with extravagant ornament that stirs wonder. A nostalgia operates alongside these images, romanticizing a view of the past on the one hand and preemptively critiquing modern design on the other. [End Page 211] Click for larger view View full resolution St. Benedictusberg Abbey at Vaals via Charles Howell Less commonly acknowledged is that questions of spirituality are equally present in modern discussions of architecture. In fact, the question of the human spirit's place in the built world was in many ways the foundation of modern architecture. Technological advancement exerts a partic","PeriodicalId":42348,"journal":{"name":"Spiritus-A Journal of Christian Spirituality","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135688607","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"O Gracious Light","authors":"Garret Keizer","doi":"10.1353/scs.2023.a909115","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/scs.2023.a909115","url":null,"abstract":"O Gracious Light Garret Keizer (bio) We say the Phos Hilaronevery Friday nightafter Kathy lights the candlesright before we eat. What a happy, heady senseof defiance flared in me this time,so many outlandish statementsfor such a little prayer! Old words struck like steelagainst a flinty heart—you can say them many timesbefore you say them. [End Page 343] Garret Keizer Garret Keizer is the author of The World Pushes Back, which won the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize in 2018, and eight books of prose, including Getting Schooled, Privacy, and The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want. A contributing editor of Harper's Magazine and Virginia Quarterly Review, he lives in northeastern Vermont. www.garretkeizer.com Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press","PeriodicalId":42348,"journal":{"name":"Spiritus-A Journal of Christian Spirituality","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135688556","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Thousands and Thousands of Lovers: Sense of Community among the Nuns of Helfta by Anna Harrison (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/scs.2023.a909119","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/scs.2023.a909119","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Thousands and Thousands of Lovers: Sense of Community among the Nuns of Helfta by Anna Harrison Andrew K. Lee (bio) Thousands and Thousands of Lovers: Sense of Community among the Nuns of Helfta. By Anna Harrison. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2022. 494 pp. $49.95. Thousands and Thousands of Lovers (hereafter Thousands) is a comprehensive close reading of the Helfta literature that brings that community to life and immerses the reader in the Helfta nuns' communal spirituality. While scholarly attention on the Helfta community has often focused on a few individual luminaries (such as Gertrude the Great and Mechtild of Hackeborn) and their mystical visions, Harrison argues that the Helfta literature suggests a much more communal orientation, and that the shared spirituality of the Helfta nuns—indeed, of many spiritual writers in the later Middle Ages—has been woefully understudied. Harrison seeks to rectify this in Thousands through a meticulous study of Gertrude's The Herald of God's Loving-Kindness and Spiritual Exercises, Mechtild's Book of Special Grace, and other works that emerged from the Helfta community. Following an introduction that sets the Helfta writers and their community within the context of thirteenth-century northern European religion and spirituality, Harrison draws out numerous aspects of community in the Helfta literature, arranging them neatly in three sections that represent ever-expanding circles of inclusion and relationship. Part One, \"The Nuns,\" by far the longest section at four chapters, analyzes the relationships among the nuns themselves in various arenas of their shared life. Chapter one unpacks the ways in which the writing of the Helfta literature was itself a communal process. Though these works have been attributed to individual authors, multiple women contributed to their composition. In the case of Special Grace, anonymous nuns recorded Mechtild's visions and teachings for several months without her knowledge, an indication of how deeply communal these texts were. Chapter two surveys the relationships among the nuns in the monastery. Harrison observes that the Helfta literature depicts Gertrude and Mechtild as deeply involved in the lives of their sisters. The picture of the monastery that emerges is of a place filled with continual conversation about Christ and the spiritual life as well as visions for and about others. In chapter three, Harrison analyzes the ways in which the monastery dealt with illness, death, and grief. The Helfta literature repeatedly shows the nuns caring for the sick and the dying in their community. Harrison also notes that the sense of community at Helfta extended to the dead; some of the visions were of the recently departed, and the living and the dead continued to be involved in and to influence one another's lives. Chapter four, the last chapter in the first section, discusses the Helfta liturgy. This is a critical point in Harrison's argument as she suggests t","PeriodicalId":42348,"journal":{"name":"Spiritus-A Journal of Christian Spirituality","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135688575","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Alpheton Church Coda: West Suffolk","authors":"G. C. Waldrep","doi":"10.1353/scs.2023.a909111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/scs.2023.a909111","url":null,"abstract":"Alpheton Church CodaWest Suffolk G. C. Waldrep (bio) I am trying to be very clear here:the construction we call window.Do you want me to argue with it?With glass? With light?With representation? With God?I am God's argument, as I amlight's argument, its client.This troubles me to the precise extentI feel it, the argument that I am,that is God's, that is light's,moving through me.Prayer, theophany, hope, despair;joy, terror (in their star turns).I want to remove my thumbfrom the scale, which is a problemsince they're identical: thumb, scale.It's tomorrow now, a bit to the south.I walk along the railway scar;I imagine nothing. One can bethankful & devastated at the sametime. The hymns that arisefrom this process are blind hymnsthat sing themselves, for instanceacross a plowed fieldpunctuated by spring warblers,their jots & tittles, their commas& semicolons. Friend breath,welcome: you are so kind to join mehere. You were my pedagogue,(once) my chaperone.Friend breath, meet friend pain.This is your duet. While you performI will stand very still [End Page 332] & let a honeybee taste me. It settleson my forearm, & then againstmy cheek. In some sense, to someslight degree, it remembers.I am, once again, wearing the shirt& hat of dead men, whose daughtersI did not marry. The glass in itssettled panes, its ancient, cold-flowfurrows. Meanwhile, faith.It's not an argument. It's a song,only you don'tperform it, it performs you.The argument that is you, brushingagainst you, on its way throughyou to you, the you where you are. [End Page 333] G. C. Waldrep G. C. Waldrep has published a number of poetry collections, including feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, The Earliest Witnesses (Tupelo/Carcanet, 2021), and The Opening Ritual (Tupelo, forthcoming 2024). He lives in Lewisburg, PA, where he teaches at Bucknell University. Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press","PeriodicalId":42348,"journal":{"name":"Spiritus-A Journal of Christian Spirituality","volume":"93 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135688583","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/scs.2023.a909122","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/scs.2023.a909122","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42348,"journal":{"name":"Spiritus-A Journal of Christian Spirituality","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135688595","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Art and Faith: A Theology of Making by Makoto Fujimura (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/scs.2023.a909117","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/scs.2023.a909117","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Art and Faith: A Theology of Making by Makoto Fujimura Nathan Didlake (bio) Art and Faith: A Theology of Making. By Makoto Fujimura. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. 184 pp. $26.00 hdbk. Art and Faith by Makoto Fujimura is an applied theology that dares to ask Christians how Jesus's Kingdom impacts their work to create. Its pacing breathes like a guided contemplation with Fujimura—at a coffee shop, on a plane, or in between brushstrokes at his studio. If God is the Creator who gratuitously gives love to all of creation, how must Christians act? This book is a call to action: Christians must reflect the Eternal God and create. The world should be filled with new generative work that lives the reality that all things are being made new. Many of these works espousing a \"vision for the arts\" call artistic endeavors into alignment with some prescribed functional theology. Here, the arts explore truth, but they exist deferentially to theologies and dogma. In this vision, systematicians become prophets—and artists their illustrators. Fujimura argues the opposite. Artists are modern prophets, society's border stalkers possessing a unique calling. They see the world from the fringes and uniquely see the unseen and share the unshared. They are meant to reflect the Maker by making and, as such, participate in God's generative, effusive love. To Fujimura, generative expression reveals God and heals a broken world. He reasons that joining God's generative work reflects God and cares for culture, since we believe the resurrected Jesus sent the Holy Spirit into the world. If Jesus has done these things, if this is actually true, then the arts must do this double work of making God manifest and nurturing culture. Fujimura calls the latter task \"culture care\": [C]ulture care is the vision to manifest the \"Spirit-filled life\" into the heart of culture. … What I offer as culture care is a consideration of the work of the Spirit in culture. In other words, we ask not just how you or I may be doing as a follower of Christ; we also ask audaciously, \"How is our culture doing?\" (23) Do Christians look at their cultures to \"see how they're doing?\" How well are we planting the fruit of the Spirit in the public square? This is a profound question, but it leads us to ask: Can the Kingdom of God be here and for the public good? Fujimura believes as much, and he addresses the arts as one of the primary ways to bring God's generative good to the world. How does the artist perform this generative work? One can describe darkness with words; or one can mold, sculpt, sing, rhyme, and paint in a way that reaches into the darkness, calls it out, and pulls people out of it. The artist is uniquely called (and gifted) to do this. Artists have a unique ability to see truth and to express it in a way that subverts and redeems culture. Fujimura's illustration of the ancient Japanese Kintsugi method illustrates this well. In the Kintsugi tradition, broken teacups ar","PeriodicalId":42348,"journal":{"name":"Spiritus-A Journal of Christian Spirituality","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135688553","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Literary Engagement and the Contemplative Disposition","authors":"Dennis Kinlaw","doi":"10.1353/scs.2023.a909103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/scs.2023.a909103","url":null,"abstract":"Literary Engagement and the Contemplative Disposition Dennis Kinlaw (bio) In his 2010 essay \"Reading in a Digital Age,\" literary critic Sven Birkets surveys media consumption and internet usage's devastating effects on the human attention span in general and literary engagement in particular.1 Awash in a torrent of information streams, readers have largely abandoned their capacity for immersive engagement to adopt more practical modes of textual consumption: grazing, clicking, skimming, and layering windows on computer screens, primarily. What appears at first another paean to less technologically saturated times, exactly the type of piece one might skim on a screen, takes on new depths when Birkets pivots from the general paranoia such technology produces to address his primary concern: contemplation. \"My real worry has less to do with the overthrow of human intelligence by Google-powered artificial intelligence and more with the rapid erosion of certain ways of thinking,\" Birkets writes, concluding, \"I find myself especially fixated on the idea that contemplative thought is endangered.\" As a \"non-instrumental\" mode of thinking that elevates reflection as an end in itself, contemplation emerges as uniquely imperiled in an age that favors rapid information over reflective self-formation. Contemplation, it seems, is the real casualty at the heart of our attention crisis. Cloaked in a quietude seemingly lost in contemporary culture, literature emerges less as a temporary respite from the shallows of contemporary life than as an aesthetic outpost whereby readers are equipped with the cognitive skills required for contemplative thought. Reading works of fiction, this essay intends to argue, resuscitates a self-modifying form of attention at the heart of the contemplative tradition. While writing from outside this tradition, Birkets recognizes as much when he describes the novel as a \"a mode of contemplation, its purpose being to create for the author and reader a terrain, an arena of liberation, where mind can be different.\"2 As scholars across disciplines develop compelling evidence for the mental,3 emotional,4 and social benefits5 of literary engagement, how might works of fiction also be examined for their capacity to provide readers a type of contemplative calisthenics? Furthermore, to what extent are the imaginative and perceptual demands reading requires [End Page 192] analogous to and often indistinguishable from the spiritual disciplines intrinsic to the contemplative tradition? Motivated by these questions, this essay sets out to explore how literary engagement fosters and forms the cognitive and spiritual resources prioritized in the contemplative tradition. Understood as a \"way of seeing things\" characterized by self-surrender and attuned to the \"hidden nonfinite\" depths latent in the finite world we live within, contemplation requires an altered outlook whereby one's self-interested and ends-oriented approach to reality is radically refra","PeriodicalId":42348,"journal":{"name":"Spiritus-A Journal of Christian Spirituality","volume":"104 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135688570","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gustav Mahler's Third Symphony: Growth within Fulfillment","authors":"David B. Greene","doi":"10.1353/scs.2023.a909106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/scs.2023.a909106","url":null,"abstract":"Gustav Mahler's Third Symphony:Growth within Fulfillment David B. Greene (bio) Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), best known for his nine symphonies and works for voice and orchestra, was born in Kaliště, Bohemia. He moved to Vienna in 1875 to study piano and composition. Taking up opera conducting as a livelihood, he held posts in Leipzig, Budapest, Hamburg, Vienna, and New York. During summers he wrote music in the serenity of Austrian lakes and mountains. Although his conducting was highly acclaimed, audiences found his own compositions difficult to understand. The orchestration, partly shaped by his experience as a conductor, was unusual, the works were too long, and he introduced ironic overstatements that audiences misunderstood as sincere expressions in poor taste. Moreover, each of his symphonies works toward a mode of coherence that is unique to itself, and audiences, expecting him to adhere to Beethoven's or Brahms's principles of consistency, simply couldn't follow them. Precisely these innovations have made his music highly influential for contemporary composers and refreshingly challenging for modern audiences. They are also intimately connected with his particular approach to spiritual life. Today, most conductors include at least one Mahler symphony in every season. The BBC poll of 151 conductors voted Mahler's Second, Third, and Ninth among the ten greatest symphonies of all time. More than most pieces in the symphonic canon, Mahler's Third prompts listeners to murmur as they leave the concert, \"I didn't know music could do that.\" From its first note onward, Mahler's Third Symphony (1896) takes listeners to a strange place. The sound itself—eight boisterous horns in unison—doesn't belong in a concert hall, or anywhere indoors. Mahler calls it a \"reveille.\" The sheer sound, together with its melody, issues a mysterious summons. Julian Johnson writes that the horns' massive call \"summons a voice out of silence, a presence out of emptiness, a form out of formlessness.\"1 Contradictorily (and typical of Mahler's style), the tune is also familiar—reminiscent of a German student song calling friends to get up and move. The ordinary demystifies the silence, and the emptiness mystifies the ordinary. Five movements later, the slow last movement takes the same motif and transforms it into a hymn that answers the horn call and the summonses—and [End Page 250] struggles, contradictions, and anguish—of the four intervening movements. The sense of completion is, however, challenged by biting reminiscences of prior negativities. In the end, fulfillment transcends these by returning to and growing the fulfillment. But even then, the music presses ahead and grows further. This growth, however, is not to a new level of fulfillment but within fulfillment itself. It is as though the movement succeeded in miraculously and impossibly joining growth (which implies moving forward) with fulfillment (which connotes being at peace). Growth within fulfillment is cent","PeriodicalId":42348,"journal":{"name":"Spiritus-A Journal of Christian Spirituality","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135688574","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Spiritual Senses and the Problem of Transcendence","authors":"Gunnar Gjermundsen","doi":"10.1353/scs.2023.a909108","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/scs.2023.a909108","url":null,"abstract":"The Spiritual Senses and the Problem of Transcendence Gunnar Gjermundsen (bio) The Christian spiritual tradition has from its ancient roots been animated by an impulse toward transcendence: to reach her ultimate fulfillment and salvation, the soul is called to purify herself from ensnarement in sensory phenomena and the vicissitudes of the body in order to move beyond this fallen world to a suprasensible divine reality. Theologically, the impulse was over the centuries scaffolded in metaphysical binaries like sensory and intelligible, matter and spirit—and later, the natural and the supernatural. In the late modern era, this pattern became problematized. From inside the Christian tradition, theologians like Anders Nygren construed the impulse as an expression of an un-Christian eros of Platonic and Neoplatonic origin, foreign to Christ's central message of selfless, universal love.1 From outside the church, Nietzsche criticized what he saw as a life-denying attitude of ressentiment and otherworldliness in its ethos, while Marx famously denounced Christian visions of a transcendent after-life as \"opium\" to distract from needed societal change in the here and now.2 Today, these critiques would seem to have been confirmed by history. Despite murmurs of a post-secular age, the intersubjective consensus worldview of postmodernity is still so encased in secular materialism that talk of a dimension of reality beyond the purely physical is usually not taken seriously in academic and scientific discourse. This results in what I shall here define as the \"problem of transcendence\": how to give a satisfying answer to the modern critiques of the traditional Christian view of transcendence—with its highly ambivalent attitude to the body, the senses, materiality and the here and now—while at the same time not capitulating to the current secular denial of transcendence. One of the most promising avenues to approaching this problem springs from the same source as the Christian contemplative tradition itself—namely, the ancient patristic teachings on the spiritual senses. Here we find a wealth of material describing direct contact with the divine in a perceptual or quasi-perceptual manner, divinely transcendent, yet sensorially embodied at the same time, overcoming the traditional theological binaries. Spiritual practice has in this tradition given rise to a kind of first-person empiricism that may be guided by dogma but is not reducible to it. Attention to the spiritual senses [End Page 295] has become renewed among scholars in recent years.3 Yet, in this scholarship not much attention has so far been paid to the ways that the senses mature and transform along the contemplative path, a maturation that includes both changes in the soul's worldview, as well as the spiritual pedagogy that goes along with it. The present essay argues that adopting such a maturational or developmental perspective provides a new key to answering the critiques of Christianity's view of ","PeriodicalId":42348,"journal":{"name":"Spiritus-A Journal of Christian Spirituality","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135688584","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}