Abstract
Contemporary renascent spirituality secures for itself a motif of materiality and physical embodiment. This embodiment pertains to renascent spirituality both as lived-life experience and particularly as contemporary academic discipline. The influential sources of an embodied spirituality are to be found in spirituality’s reflective self-understanding, the rich resources of the Christian tradition, the growing interest in lived Christian experience as such, and the post-Vatican II conciliatory spirit and momentum. Renascent spirituality not only accommodates and endorses embodiment and “worldly” materiality; it also realises a new wholeness and integration for Christian spirituality. While it might seem a commonplace to defend Christian spirituality’s embodied, incarnational reality, it is clear that spirituality has not always been so understood, even constituting a pejorative connotation at times as something essentially detached, disembodied and inferentially dualistic. Spirituality in its revived sense holds within itself and its inherited tradition the potential to critique such disembodiment while simultaneously securing the mystery and transcendent dimension of embodied Christian living.
Highlights
Contemporary Christian spirituality has emerged as a renascent phenomenon in the years following Vatican II (1962-1965)
The hypothesis being posited in this article is that Christian spirituality, both as lived-life experience and more as emerging academic discipline, evidences a distinctive worldly embodiment and materiality
If a renascent spirituality clearly gained momentum and revised definition after the landmark, conciliatory event of Vatican II, largely collapsing ascetical and mystical theology into spirituality, a preliminary postulate might be ventured at this point
Summary
Contemporary Christian spirituality has emerged as a renascent phenomenon in the years following Vatican II (1962-1965). This phenomenon can at least be partly ascribed to the post-conciliar merging of ascetic and mystical theology, and the consequent designation spirituality as the offspring thereof. For many people this has opened the floodgates of mystical and contemplative possibility in Christian experience. The hypothesis being posited in this article is that Christian spirituality, both as lived-life experience and more as emerging academic discipline, evidences a distinctive worldly embodiment and materiality.. The following section looks at a few influential definitions of spirituality (in this qualified deliberative understanding), referring briefly to what adds credence, in these definitions, to the hypothesis of spirituality’s embodiment
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