{"title":"The Nineteenth-Century Salesian Pentecost: The Salesian Family of Don Bosco, the Oblates and Oblate Sisters of St. Francis de Sales, the Daughters of St. Francis de Sales, and the Fransalians by Joseph Boenzi, SDB et al. (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/scs.2023.a909118","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/scs.2023.a909118","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Nineteenth-Century Salesian Pentecost: The Salesian Family of Don Bosco, the Oblates and Oblate Sisters of St. Francis de Sales, the Daughters of St. Francis de Sales, and the Fransalians by Joseph Boenzi, SDB et al. Mary Frohlich, RSCJ (bio) The Nineteenth-Century Salesian Pentecost: The Salesian Family of Don Bosco, the Oblates and Oblate Sisters of St. Francis de Sales, the Daughters of St. Francis de Sales, and the Fransalians. Introduction, Editing, Translations and Commentaries by Joseph Boenzi, SDB, Joseph F. Chorpenning, OSFS, Suzanne C. Toczyski, and Wendy M. Wright. The Classics of Western Spirituality Series. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2022. $49.95 hdbk. This is one of those books that few will read from cover to cover, but many will be glad to have it available for consultation. The excellent historical introductions and selected texts bring to focus the central influence of Salesian spirituality in nineteenth-century spirituality, especially in France. Francis de Sales (1567–1622) was enormously popular in his time, but the only religious congregation that he successfully founded (in partnership with Jeanne de Chantal) was the Visitation. His desire to found a congregation of priests did not materialize in his lifetime. His writings, especially Introduction to the Devout Life and Treatise on the Love of God, proved to have enduring value and quickly became regarded as classics, thus extending his influence. This volume demonstrates how that influence blossomed afresh in the nineteenth century, incarnating elements of his original vision in concrete and extraordinarily effective ways. De Sales was known for preaching and practicing a spirituality of simplicity, humility, and gentleness. He regarded human tenderness and affection as precious manifestations of the love of God, and on that basis he promoted kindness and friendship as essential ministerial virtues. By the nineteenth century, the Jansenistic stream that had also been born in seventeenth-century France had devolved into a rigid, scrupulous, fire-and-brimstone mentality that tended to predominate in the popular mind as well as in official Church teaching and preaching. In that context, each of the figures covered in this book felt a call to counter the harshness of the prevailing spirituality with Salesian gentleness and kindness. They also were inspired by de Sales's fervent desire to use means of preaching and pastoral care that would impact people on the affective level and lead to real conversion. The founders of the Missionaries of St. Francis de Sales of Annecy, for example, reclaimed the practice of the parish mission and developed it with impressive rituals and theatrical performances to create a highly immersive form of communal experience (42). Louis Brisson, one of the founders of the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales, wanted Oblates to be fervently apostolic rather than placing themselves apart from and above the people, as was the priestly style o","PeriodicalId":42348,"journal":{"name":"Spiritus-A Journal of Christian Spirituality","volume":"78 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":"135688594","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":"\"All Things Visible and Invisible\": Conceptual Art and Contemplation","authors":"Taylor Worley","doi":"10.1353/scs.2023.a909105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/scs.2023.a909105","url":null,"abstract":"\"All Things Visible and Invisible\":Conceptual Art and Contemplation Taylor Worley (bio) In his \"Sentences on Conceptual Art,\" the artist Sol LeWitt asserts that, \"Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.\"1 While it may seem that the author was using a religious term for rhetorical effect, it should be noted that this statement actually begins his list of thirty-five discreet aphorisms on conceptual art. More than that, biographers have noted that LeWitt possessed and drew from several sources on Jewish mysticism in his personal library.2 For his part, LeWitt's exploration into more conceptual modes of art making was fueled in large part by his fascination with representing the relationship between the concept of an artwork and its physical realization. Hence, he preferred serialized sets of instructions for realizing drawings on the walls of gallery spaces, which opened the concept to a potentially unending array of diverse manifestations. His question revolved around pushing a singular idea to its fullest, most generative expression. For LeWitt, simple instructions produce beautiful results. Take, for example, his 1971 work entitled Wall Drawing #63: A wall is divided into four horizontal parts. In the top row are four equal vertical divisions, each with lines in a different direction. In the second row, six double combinations; in the third row, four triple combinations; in the bottom row, all four combinations superimposed. While titles like these are certainly precise to the point of tediousness, many people, perhaps, would be surprised to discover that the same artist is responsible for numerous visually pleasing and lovely wall drawings situated with care in major museums around the world. In this way, then, what may appear as nothing more than a novel form of iconoclasm in contemporary art is, in fact, LeWitt's attempt to reshape visual art practice in ways that might protect the mysterious space between the artist's inspiration and its physical manifestation. In other words, art's meaning constitutes more than its surface in image, symbol, or language. Indeed, there is much more of conceptual art's story that remains to be told where it concerns its \"mysticism.\" While short-lived as a distinct art movement, conceptual approaches show up in contemporary art to a significant degree today. The influence can be seen in everything from land art, installation art, performance art, social practice [End Page 229] art, video art, new media, and digital art. The artworld has absorbed conceptualism's introspective approach and its liberated stance toward materiality.3 The diffuse influence of conceptualism is, however, not an accident. In fact, the early pioneers of Conceptual Art refused the term 'conceptualism' in hopes of avoiding the formation of another, easily caricatured modernist \"-ism.\"4 By most accounts, their insistence has proved effective, and today's creative possibiliti","PeriodicalId":42348,"journal":{"name":"Spiritus-A Journal of Christian Spirituality","volume":"33 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":"135688585","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":"Modern Mystics: An Introduction by Bernard McGinn (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/scs.2023.a909121","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/scs.2023.a909121","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Modern Mystics: An Introduction by Bernard McGinn Glenn Young (bio) Modern Mystics: An Introduction. By Bernard McGinn. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2023. viii + 340 pp. $49.95. I admit to having felt some disappointment when Bernard McGinn announced that the seventh volume of his landmark study of Western Christian mysticism—The Presence of God—would bring the series to an end. That volume dealt with mysticism in the seventeenth century, a time he characterized as a crisis for mysticism that paused its further development. My disappointment was that this series, which has been so important to students of mysticism, would not go on to consider some of the compelling mystical figures who are closer to our own time. It was thus with joy that I heard the news that McGinn was writing this new book, Modern Mystics. While not technically a volume of The Presence of God, it might well be seen as a fitting coda to that series, as it addresses the development of Christian mysticism in the twentieth century. The book begins with an introductory chapter that offers a description of mysticism in general as well as a discussion of particular themes that are prominent in modern mysticism. This is followed by ten chapters, each of which addresses a twentieth-century mystic: Charles de Foucauld, Thérèse of Lisieux (who did not live into the twentieth century, though her influence was felt beyond her years), Elizabeth of the Trinity, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Edith Stein, Dag Hammarskjöld, Simone Weil, Henri Le Saux (Swami Abhishiktananda), Etty Hillesum, and Thomas Merton. Some observations about the diversity of the figures on this list are in order. While it is true that the mystics included here are predominantly Catholic, other traditions are represented. Dag Hammarskjöld's roots were in Lutheranism, and McGinn uses this as an opportunity to provide a brief survey of modern Protestant mysticism. Etty Hillesum was Jewish. And while Swami Abhishiktananda was a Catholic, he also incorporated significant elements of Hinduism into his mysticism. It is also noteworthy that the list of figures addressed is evenly divided between female and male mystics. The book ends with a brief chapter that asks what it might mean for present-day people to read mystical texts. In the book's introductory chapter, McGinn provides an in-depth discussion of his heuristic description of mysticism as \"that part, or element, of Christian belief and practice that concerns the preparation for, the consciousness of, and the effect of what the mystics themselves have described as a direct and transformative [encounter with] the presence of God\" (11). Following this, he names themes that are especially prominent in twentieth-century mysticism. These include \"visions and [End Page 358] ecstasy\" and \"suffering and dereliction\" in mystical consciousness, the relationship of \"action and contemplation (the political and the mystical),\" a \"holistic perspective\" that gives","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":"135688545","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":"Before Poetry","authors":"Joy Moore","doi":"10.1353/scs.2023.a909109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/scs.2023.a909109","url":null,"abstract":"Before Poetry Joy Moore (bio) I In the time preceding poetry A friend of mine says that eleven is the best possible age, eleven teetering toward twelve, un-self-conscious and easily animated by imagination and particular delights. That pre-teen need to fit in still slinking around the edges. I remember self-consciousness awakening in me at that age, but if I think of being eleven, what inevitably arises first, still holding sway in me, is the church bells of the Episcopal school I attended in fifth and sixth grades. The bells rang before weekly chapel, a service unfamiliar to me, Baptist child that I was, and their sound comforted me, ringing out across the courtyard where I moved awkwardly, inarticulate in middle-school insecurities. They made music of the sky for a few minutes and sang of something else beyond the fenced-in world in which I moved each day. What I remember more viscerally than their ringing is the time I was assigned to set them going: another student and I are standing in a tiny room opposite the altar, the massive rope suspended from a bell so high its brass blends into the tower's shadows. I take a turn pulling on the rope with all my eleven-year-old might, my body briefly lifting off the floor. In the momentum, in that singular glory, I pull again and again, and the bell gains its swing and sings. From those years, it isn't an index of learning but a collage of things that return to me: beakers from a science fair project, the monkey bars on my first and very lonely day at that school or how I later sat with other girls in the bathroom, giggling over stolen notes. Not who liked whom, but the tornado gray tile, the stormcloud wall of the locked stall. And especially those church bells, still ringing somewhere inside me, down the arcades of my ribs and limbs. Though I lacked reflection for this then, what I was learning was inextricably bound to being-in-the-world, my whole self encountering in the sensible world, in things themselves, the visible and invisible, audible and silent, overt and intuitively sensed. Much of this learning was subterranean and not at all the world that I was being taught to inhabit. We sat still in desks and were taught things that did somehow accumulate into working knowledge of the world. In chapel, we sat [End Page 316] in pews and listened to the priest, just as I sat each Sunday listening to my father preach. Some of it stuck. The stories themselves, for one: Joseph in a dungeon interpreting a baker's and cup-bearer's dreams, for instance. The details surrounding me, too, like the blue-cushioned pews, the pearl-beaded purse of the woman who gave me a peppermint each week, the brass offering plate with its red velvet center, and a giant wall map in my Sunday school classroom. Imagine the stories we could tell through the catalogue of things that accumulate in early memories. But for so long, my sense of this was hidden in forests of intuition, and in the daylight of days, I was taught reverence f","PeriodicalId":42348,"journal":{"name":"Spiritus-A Journal of Christian Spirituality","volume":"16 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":"135688554","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":"Life to the Whole Being: The Spiritual Memoir of a Literature Professor by Matthew Wickman (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/scs.2023.a909120","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/scs.2023.a909120","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Life to the Whole Being: The Spiritual Memoir of a Literature Professor by Matthew Wickman David B. Perrin (bio) Life to the Whole Being: The Spiritual Memoir of a Literature Professor. By Matthew Wickman. Provo, UT: BYU Maxwell Institute, 2022. 227 pp. $19.95 pbk. It is not obvious that a book such as Life to the Whole Being would be subject to a critical analysis of its research, methodology, and contribution to scholarship—all elements typically included in a book review for an academic journal such as Spiritus. As the subtitle indicates, this book is largely autobiographical—in the genre of spiritual memoir—and hardly academic in the strict sense of the word. So, why would such a book be subject to review in the academy from the perspective of the field of Christian spirituality and not, let us say, as a piece of literature perhaps best reviewed from within the fields of literary and cultural studies, the fields of expertise of the author? Read on dear reader, read on. For this is the precise question this review intends to respond to, all the while keeping in focus the book's research, methodology, and contribution to scholarship. For quite some time, research in Christian spirituality has struggled with the implicit self-implicating nature of the discipline. Can the field of Christian spirituality hold its own against the expectations of the academy that research be as objective as possible, as analytical as possible, and thus instill greater confidence in the veracity of its results—all the while acknowledging the self-implication dynamics at play in the field of Christian spirituality? The dust has largely settled on this question, and the verdict is in: Christian spirituality as a research field of study is a self-implicating endeavor. The explorer in the field of Christian spirituality is part of the reality under scrutiny. And we see this reality in full flight in Wickman's Life to the Whole Being. Not only is Wickman trying to plumb the truth and meaning of a range of topics in Christian spirituality in general but also, and perhaps more significantly, the author is searching directly for personal identity in it all. Christian spirituality is a field of study where one subjects to critical inquiry, for example, the beliefs, practices, and history of the field and, often by implication, one's own personal clarity around beliefs, practices, and history. This is the research undertaken in Life to the Whole Being. The author is the subject of his own research in the pursuit of finding clarity on his own beliefs, practices, and history, but not just for his personal edification. The research is far broader than this. The book was written as a case study that has as its ultimate goal a deepening of understanding of the truth claims of the issues studied from within the perspective of the faith-based community to which the author belongs: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. What methodology does the author use to un","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":"135688572","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}
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