For the Life of the World

Abstract

For the Life of the World Lisa E. Dahill (bio) In her novel Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie tells the story of Kambili, a fifteen-year-old Nigerian girl growing up in a context of privilege, trauma, and resistance saturated in competing embodiments of Christian spirituality.1 Her father, Eugene, is the pillar of his Catholic parish, benefactor to his ancestral village and to scores of needy supplicants, publisher of the only newspaper in Enugu to stand up against the military coup threatening Nigeria, and a model of Christian piety and rectitude. He is also vicious at home, brutalizing his wife and two children when they deviate from his intentions and estranged from his "heathen" father and relatives. In contrast, Eugene's sister, Ifeoma, a widowed professor raising her three children alone, provides both a surrogate home to Kambili and her brother, Jaja, and a model of a different spirituality, no less devoutly Catholic but open to the animism of the grandfather and to the energies of life and voice in the girl Kambili. The novel is worth reading on many levels, not least its gorgeous language; Adichie was recently named one of "Twenty [Novelists] Under Forty" to watch by The New Yorker magazine.2 But it also provides a powerful lens into the significance of our discipline, illuminating how Christian spiritualities engage real contexts and human beings to transforming—or deforming—effect. In Purple Hibiscus we see how profoundly our questions of the experience, interiority, and practice generated by a given Christian spirituality matter for the life of human beings and the world. In this novel we also glimpse how complex such questions are, requiring us as scholars of Christian spirituality to think rigorously about how we name, evaluate, or resist aspects of the spiritualities we are analyzing. An essay in Spiritus engaging Purple Hibiscus might include hermeneutical, theological, and literary analysis opening key aspects of the textually mediated spiritualities embodied by the father and aunt in the novel; the use of post-colonial theory to examine nuances of voice and culture at stake in the story, in the author's framing of it, and in the scholar's own reading and social location; the appropriation of critical lenses from the disciplines of gender and social-class analysis, family systems theory, trauma studies, Nigerian cultural/historical studies, or developmental psychology to analyze the power dynamics implicit and explicit in the father's and aunt's use of Catholic practices; an inquiry into [End Page 288] the place of non-Christian practices or beliefs within a Christian spirituality; an exploration of the use of works of literature—and fiction in particular—as source documents for the study of Christian spirituality; or a weighing of factors conducive to the discernment of elements of spirituality deemed life-giving within a particular context. I develop this example because it reveals the complexity of our focus and simultaneously the ways Spiritus has distinguished itself as an academic journal: in the rigorous and wide-ranging use of a variety of methodological disciplines, texts, genres, and viewpoints around these fundamental questions of how Christian spiritualities take form in a given context and how we continue to define, discern, and articulate these questions. Spiritus has done outstanding work as a journal of fundamental methodology of the field of Christian Spirituality; as a locus for poetry, image, reflective pieces evocative of the shimmer of beauty in and beyond our scholarship; and in the use of historical, literary, and social-critical lenses focused primarily on Roman Catholic texts and contexts. Across these ten years it has demonstrated consistently exemplary editorial quality, thanks to an excellent board, associate and advisory editors, and the rigorous and imaginative mind and heart of Douglas Burton-Christie, its primary editor all ten years. When the journal of this self-implicating discipline is doing its work, its pages too become transparent to glimpses of the Holy at work in the lives under consideration, in the experience of the scholars engaging this material and wrestling it into thoughtful written form, and—we hope—in the interior echoes or responses summoned in those reading. In years to come readers of Spiritus want these pages to open ever...