Spiritual Journals Research Articles

Духовна просвіта та імперські наративи: українська минувшина у дзеркалі єпархіальних журналів другої половини ХІХ ст.

The purpose of the article is to analyze the role of Orthodox spiritual journals of the second half of the 19th century in the spread of imperial narratives about the history of Ukraine. The research is aimed at determining the mutual influence of the publications of ecclesiastical diocesan publications with the state ideology, as well as analyzing the connection of these publications with the modern propaganda of the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church against Ukraine. The methodological principles. Based on the analysis of historical literature and the source base, the article’s author used the methods of historical analysis and synthesis to examine the imperial narratives in the Orthodox spiritual journals of the period under study. The research also uses the comparative method and the method of systematic analysis to study the topics of publications of magazines of individual dioceses, as well as to determine the influence of the views of pre-revolutionary Orthodox publicists on the modern narratives of the Russian Orthodox Church regarding Ukraine. The scientific novelty of this topic is based on an attempt to analyze the variability of the thematic spectrum of historical publications issued in various diocesan journals and on revealing views on interfaith relations in the historical retrospective of Orthodox authors and determining the influence of these views on the beliefs of the hierarchs of the modern Russian Orthodox Church. Conclusions. The authors analyzed the topics of historical publications issued in the unofficial part of diocesan journals in the territory of the Russian Ukraine and the Cholm-Warsaw diocese. Interrelationships and regional differences of imperial narratives in Orthodox diocesan journals were traced. The role of diocesan information in relaying these narratives, as well as their reflection in modern Kremlin propaganda against Ukraine, is highlighted. It is asserted that the diocesan Orthodox publishing houses of the second half of the 19th century played an important role in forming the Russian imperial vision of the past of Ukrainian lands. The study revealed their role in the spread of numerous regional variants of imperial propaganda. The indirect influence of these narratives on Ukrainian national historiography is noted, and the need to distance themselves from them for a better study of the past and opposition to Russian propaganda is specified.

Love and ‘Spiritual Ecumenism’: A foundational Backdrop for Underhill’s The Spiritual Life

One foundational backdrop for Evelyn Underhill’s BBC radio talks, 'The Spiritual Life' (1937), is her posture of ‘spiritual ecumenism’ (prayer for Church unity). In 1936, Underhill had published 'Worship' and participated in various worship practices, plus prayer groups for Church unity. During these years, loving rather than critiquing Christians different to herself had become an area of growth for Underhill (outlined in her spiritual journals). Bérulle’s three types of generous love - adoration, communion and co-operation - provided Underhill’s macro structure for 'The Spiritual Life.' Through the lens of ‘spiritual ecumenism’, Underhill emphasised the centrality of love in ‘the spiritual life’ – love of God and neighbour – particularly fellow Christians. Underhill encourages us to pray for Church unity and engage in spiritual understanding rather than judgment, competition and ‘mud-slinging’. In the context of growing secularism, individualism, and Church disunity, ‘spiritual ecumenism’ has the potential to enhance the Church’s missional impact.

Self‐Portrait with Burned Weapon: The Wound That Does Not Heal

AbstractSetting aside organic metaphors of growth and maturation, architect and author Mark Dorrian addresses the ‘early work’ by attending to Lebbeus Woods's descriptively yet evocatively named Black Notebooks. Turning his mind's eye to the Notebooks as a record of the interior struggles of their author – as spiritual diaries – he takes on the symbolism of the wound that must be suffered, and finds much that sheds light on the younger Woods and on his lasting ambitions for architecture.

Doświadczenie wiary w dziennikach duchowych Jelizawiety Golicyny. Rekonesans

The Experience of Faith as Presented in Spiritual Diaries of Elisabeth Galitzin. Reconnaissance Personal diaries written in French by young women in the first half of the nineteenth century attracted attention of researchers such as Philippe Lejeune, Elena Gretchanaïa, Catherine Viollet and Irina Savkina. They all believed that very few texts which could be classified as spiritual diaries had survived in the archives of that time. An example of such a rare, well-preserved collection of diaries are ego-documents of a Russian aristocrat, Elisabeth Galitzin (1795–1843), who, after converting from Orthodoxy to Catholicism, began to record regularly her inner state and experience of the value of faith, which lasted from 1815 until her death. This article focuses on the texts preceding Galitzin’s joining the Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. They are the part of nineteenth-century works discussing the conditions and motivations for the conversions of Russian women to Catholicism. They also provide unique material for a further in-depth research into Russian spirituality during the described period.

Интертекстуальность и особенности её реализации в речевом жанре «духовный дневник» (на материале текстов протопресвитера А. Шмемана): теолингвистический аспект

The paper deals with the study of intertextual interaction between spiritual diaries as a special documentary speech genre of the church-religious functional style of the Russian literary language and the four Gospels, the most significant Christian texts. The aim of the research is to identify the features of realisation of intertextual inclusions from the Gospels in the spiritual diaries of the protopresbyter A. Schmemann. The paper found that the main techniques of intertextual connection in the materials under study are allusion, reminiscence and quotation (verbatim and modified). Scientific novelty of the work is accounted for firstly, by the fact that intertextual connections in texts of the church-religious functional style of the Russian literary language are little studied; secondly, by the identification and description of the functions that intertextuality techniques perform. As a result of the analysis, it has been proved that important meanings associated with the spiritual education of the addressee, knowledge of the true Orthodox life and unity of Orthodox people are formed in the analysed spiritual diaries with the help of allusions, reminiscences and quotations, as well as the autoreflexive, didactic, syndicative and meaning-forming functions performed by these techniques.

Religious Lexis in Russian Ecclesiastical and Religious Auto-documentary texts: Typology and Stylistic functions

The subject of the study is Christian religious vocabulary, which has several specific features and forms a special church-religious lexis style. The purpose of the presented research is to show the main features of Christian religious lexis in Russian church-religious auto-documentary tests. The importance of the work is determined by the fact that it is carried out in line with theolinguistics - an actively developing direction of modern philology. The basis of the study is published spiritual letters, spiritual diaries and spiritual memoirs of Russian Orthodox church writers of the XX - beginning of the XXI century. The analysis of those materials is based on theolinguistic, linguostylistic, typological and contextual methods, as well as the method of philological commentary. The novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time it examines in detail the types of religious lexis used in Russian ecclesiastical-religious auto-documentary texts; provides illustrations of their existence; identifies the ideological reasons for their use by church writers; shows the stylistic functions of the types of religious vocabulary; highlights the features of their use, in particular, the types of contexts in which the studied language units are used. It is established that the most common types of religious names found in Russian ecclesiastical and religious auto-documentary texts are theonyms; biblionyms; hagioanthroponyms; icononyms; ecclesionyms; names of angels; names of biblical events; names of evangelical heroes; names of Christian sacraments; linguistic units related to the corpus of Orthodox vocabulary of spiritual and moral content; names of persons associated with Christian religious activity; linguistic units denoting Christian texts; Christian georthonyms; names of religious-Christian groups of persons; linguistic units denoting concepts related to Orthodox eschatological representations; names of infernal entities; identified religious names are used in such stylistic functions as pictorial, characterological, emotive, evaluative, prescriptive, syndicative, semantic, axiological, text-forming, nominative, explanatory. The results of the study are of interest for lexicology, stylistics, ethnolinguistics, linguoculturology, theolinguistics.

Corpses and the Protestant cult of the dead

Scholars of the body and religion readily acknowledge that corpses have agency. ‘The work of the dead,’ as Thomas Laqueur puts it, includes everything from sacralizing the landscape to creating imagined communities. Scholars have been less successful, however, in documenting the continuing relations between ordinary Protestants and their departed loved ones. In their focus on cemetery designers and political leaders, historians have overlooked the spiritual journals – mostly by women – that document relations between the living and dead. This article argues that corpses were central to such relations, even for mainstream Protestants whose ministers insisted otherwise. This argument challenges the way most scholars think of Protestantism. Rather than considering it as a religion of internal beliefs and creeds, I emphasize the material and tactile foundations of Protestant belief. And rather than seeing a religion dedicated to maintaining the Reformation’s divide between the living and dead, I put relations with the dead at the heart of lived Protestantism.

The Benefits of Spiritual Diaries: A Mixed-Method Study in Korea

This mixed study examined the benefits of spiritual diaries in Korea. Quantitatively, differences in spiritual growth and psychological well-being were examined in relation to the frequency of writing spiritual diaries among 385 participating adults. The group who wrote spiritual diaries ‘5–7 times a week’ had significantly higher scores relating to spiritual growth and psychological wellbeing than other groups across the outcome variables. Qualitatively, the study also explored the benefits of writing spiritual diaries among 37 adults. Three major themes using four focus group interviews, were identified: (a) the acquisition of godly habits, (b) a closer walk with Jesus, and (c) the fullness of God’s presence. These findings are particularly important for healthcare providers who want to facilitate patient self-care.

Review: The Spiritual Journals of Warren Felt Evans: From Methodism to Mind Cure edited by Catherine L. Albanese

Review: The Spiritual Journals of Warren Felt Evans: From Methodism to Mind Cure edited by Catherine L. Albanese

Sister Ursula de Jesús’ Equal Economy of Salvation

The article examines the diary of Peruvian sister Ursula de Jesus, the first known spiritual journal produced by a black woman in colonial Spanish America. The account, written in first person and consisting of fifty-seven folios, mainly describes sister Ursula’s visions and her life inside the Lima convent where she came to be highly revered as a mystic during the seventeenth century. The recognition that this black woman gained was particularly high considering that she lived at a time when most people in the Ibero-transatlantic world associated Afro descendants with the Devil. This fact along with the richness of sister Ursula’s spiritual diary has resulted in some merited scholarly attention identifying her work as part of the emergence of a discourse on black religious exemplarity in Lima in the sixteen hundreds. The examination adds to this scholarship by presenting how sister Ursula carefully crafted her vida as a discursive space to argue for a more equal access to the economy of salvation and more solidarity between black catholic women such as herself. The theoretical tools that help guide the analysis are the concepts of economy of salvation, the link between an individual’s mystical experience and their dialectical relation to society, and the mediation in textual agency found in spiritual diaries.

“A kind of agonie in my thoughts”: writing puritan and non-conformist women’s pain in 17th-century England

The relationship between pain as a physical and emotional experience and the concept of suffering as an essential aspect of sanctification for faithful believers was a paradoxical and pressing theological...

The Confessing Subject and the Construction of Modern Catholic Selves

Historians and sociologists have argued that the practices of confession played a major role in the transition to modern, introspective individuality. Until the 1970s, tough, the literature had dealt mostly with Protestantism and Protestant modes of confession, first and foremost the practice of writing spiritual diaries and then reading and rereading them. The article looks at Catholic confessional practices and how they, too, have shaped modern notion of subjecthood. Centering on Foucault’s contribution, the article argue that Catholic confession, just like its Protestant avatar, paved a route to modernity.

The Spiritual Journals of Warren Felt Evans: From Methodism to Mind Cure

The Spiritual Journals of Warren Felt Evans: From Methodism to Mind Cure

TUSSEN DIE AARDSE JERIGO EN DIE HEMELSE JERUSALEM. RUTGER SCHUTTE (1708-1784) EN DIE PELGRIMSMOTIEF IN SUSANNA SMIT (1799-1863) SE GODSDIENSTIGE DAGBOEKE

Rutger Schutte (1708-1784), the pietistic author of popular hymnbooks, composed his spiritual verses at a time the religious culture of Pietism was approaching its zenith in the Netherlands and other European countries. In addition to his contribution to Een Nieuw Bundeltje Uitgeknipte Geestelyke Gezangen [A new collection of suitable spiritual songs] (third edition, 1721), he composed three collections of Stichtelijke Gezangen [Edifying hymns] from the early 1760s. In addition to the extensive prefaces in these collections, Schutte added long annotations, thereby creating the impression of academic depth – a style which elicited much criticism. However, Schutte’s hymns introduced a new popular culture of hymn-singing. At the time of his death his hymns had found staunch adherents in many spheres of life. This essay identifies several themes central to Schutte’s hymns: the quest for practical piety; the tension between the heavenly Jerusalem and the earthly Jericho; and the spiritual marriage bond between Jesus and the believer. These themes also surface prominently in the spiritual diaries of the Voortrekker woman Susanna Smit. The entries in her diaries from the early 1840s reflect extracts from Schutte’s hymn “The voyage to Jerusalem” in particular. Her descriptions of and reflection on the metaphor of the Christian pilgrim’s voyage to the eternal Jerusalem served as an important point of reference in her spiritual exercises.

<em>Bayonetta</em>: A Journey through Time and Space

<em>Bayonetta</em>: A Journey through Time and Space

Tussen die aardse Jerigo en die hemelse Jerusalem. Rutger Schutte (1708-1784) en die pelgrimsmotief in Susanna Smit (1799-1863) se godsdienstige dagboeke

Rutger Schutte (1708-1784), the pietistic author of popular hymnbooks, composed his spiritual verses at a time the religious culture of Pietism was approaching its zenith in the Netherlands and other European countries. In addition to his contribution to Een Nieuw Bundeltje Uitgeknipte Geestelyke Gezangen [A new collection of suitable spiritual songs] (third edition, 1721), he composed three collections of Stichtelijke Gezangen [Edifying hymns] from the early 1760s. In addition to the extensive prefaces in these collections, Schutte added long annotations, thereby creating the impression of academic depth – a style which elicited much criticism. However, Schutte’s hymns introduced a new popular culture of hymn-singing. At the time of his death his hymns had found staunch adherents in many spheres of life. This essay identifies several themes central to Schutte’s hymns: the quest for practical piety; the tension between the heavenly Jerusalem and the earthly Jericho; and the spiritual marriage bond between Jesus and the believer. These themes also surface prominently in the spiritual diaries of the Voortrekker woman Susanna Smit. The entries in her diaries from the early 1840s reflect extracts from Schutte’s hymn “The voyage to Jerusalem” in particular. Her descriptions of and reflection on the metaphor of the Christian pilgrim’s voyage to the eternal Jerusalem served as an important point of reference in her spiritual exercises.

“before midnight she had miscarried”

Reproduction and childbirth in the early modern era have sometimes been represented as a uniquely feminine experience. Similarly, studies of domestic medicine have in the past overlooked the role that men played in domestic health care practices. This article builds on recent work that resituates men within both of these discourses by considering the ways in which men understood, discussed, and responded to the threat and occurrence of miscarriage in the women they knew. It considers a range of medical literature, spiritual diaries, and letters to illustrate that men were a central feature of many women’s experiences of miscarriage.

The Spiritual Home of W. E. Gladstone: Anne Gladstone’s Bible

‘Popery is the religion of Cathedrals’, wrote J.W. Cunningham, the evangelical vicar of Harrow in his novel The Velvet Cushion (1815), ‘– Protestantism of houses’. It is a commonplace in the secondary literature that the household was the citadel of the evangelical version of Protestantism in nineteenth-century England. ‘Evangelicalism’, according to a representative comment by Ian Bradley, ‘was above all else the religion of the home.’ The head of the household conducting family prayers was the embodiment of the evangelical spirit. It is not the purpose of this essay to question that received image, but it does suggest that a clearer picture of the religious atmosphere of the evangelical home can be obtained from sources other than the manuals published for the paterfamilias to read to the assembled household. The books of family prayers tell us what was prescribed; but alternative sources show us what was practised. Spiritual journals, reflective meditations and candid correspondence can often be more revealing. Nowhere, however, is the kernel of household piety more evident than in the Bibles that some zealous believers annotated for their own benefit. The study of the Bible, as Edward Bickersteth, a leading evangelical divine, put it in his book A Scripture Help (1816), was ‘a great and important duty’. When members of evangelical families retired to the privacy of their own rooms, they might spend time in devotional reading of the Scriptures and leave a record of their reflections in the margins. Such Bibles, one of which is to be examined here, are treasuries of authentic domestic spirituality. They show something of the heartbeat of evangelical religion.

Monasticism and the Public Contemplative in Late Medieval England: Richard Methley and His Spiritual Formation

This essay explores the late medieval rhetoric of self-representation and conceptions of audience through an examination of the writings of the fifteenth-century Carthusian monk Richard Methley. Methley is considered as a “public contemplative” — a writer who offers his own contemplative experiences to a greater audience. Because these experiences, unlike visions, involved embodied ecstasies that are inseparable from the contemplative who experiences them, communicating them involved narrating the self as well as the experience. Methley’s position as a Carthusian, simultaneously solitary hermit and communal monk, allowed him to explore the possible relations between self and community. The essay demonstrates Methley’s self-conscious construction of his first-person narration by comparing and constrasting it to one of his most influential models, the fourteenth-century hermit, Richard Rolle, as well as to materials from vernacular traditions — the keeping of spiritual diaries promoted by the Devotio Moderna and the English text of The Cloud of Unknowing.

"To Work in the Field of the Lord": Roots of the Crisis in Priestly Identity

"To Work in the Field of the Lord":Roots of the Crisis in Priestly Identity Leslie Woodcock Tentler Notwithstanding a ground-breaking 1989 essay by Scott Appleby, the American diocesan clergy remain an under-researched population.1 The neglect has doubtless to do in part with a relative paucity of sources. With the exception of priest personnel files, which are frequently off-limits to researchers or available only for the distant past, diocesan archives almost never house documents pertaining to clerical life in a readily accessible place. One must rummage through the sometimes voluminous papers of local bishops to locate letters from or about parish priests, or search the sometimes equally voluminous parish files. The results of that tedious rummaging, moreover, seldom tell one anything about the inner lives of the parish clergy. Priests wrote to their bishops mainly on business, seldom conveying much in the way of personal information. The strongest emotions tend to center on grievances. If priests exchanged candid letters with confreres and friends, as some must have done, or kept diaries or spiritual journals, few such documents are currently available to researchers. The diocesan clergy are also a population about which it is not easy to generalize. Their training and career trajectories can and do vary from diocese to diocese. No one doubts, moreover, that dioceses have distinct personalities, which is bound to affect the lived experience of priesthood. But documenting those personalities is much harder than documenting the culture of a circumscribed entity like a religious order, [End Page 1] which presumably helps to explain why the historical literature on the regular clergy is richer than that on their diocesan counterparts.2 Perhaps most important, an all-male celibate clergy is inevitably implicated in the politics of sex and gender. (Think how few women have elected to write about the clergy.) My own generation of historians, I think, shied away from "doing priests" because many of us were suspicious of clerical authority, especially in the realm of sex. Rescuing the laity from anonymity was our grand passion. The recent wave of sex abuse scandals will probably have a more devastating impact, and not only because of the anger it has rightly generated. Haven't the scandals—so unexpected in their breadth, so difficult to explain—robbed us of essential confidence when it comes to engaging the clerical past? Whatever the barriers to research, however, we need to focus greater attention on the history of the diocesan clergy. Who doubts their centrality to Catholic experience in both a religious and a cultural sense? "Wherever we are, we stand for the Church," Detroit's Cardinal Edward Mooney told an ordination class in 1956.3 Nearly all Catholics would have agreed with him. The need for research is especially great with regard to the twentieth century, about which the least work to date has been done. We need to learn more about the changing circumstances in which priesthood was prepared for and practiced. We must also grapple with the closely related but more elusive question of priestly identity. To what extent was the identity inculcated during seminary years congruent with the realities experienced after ordination? Philadelphia's Cardinal Dennis Dougherty once told his priests that by virtue of their power to confect the sacraments they were "set apart as a privileged portion of God's creation, differing by the seal of holy priesthood from other men, and from angels, being exalted as far above them as our prerogatives transcend heaven and earth."4 How did such rhetoric square with the frequently mundane demands of parish ministry? At what point in the past did the cardinal's theology—separable, to a degree, from his rhetoric—cease to make sense to significant numbers of clergy? The changing contours of priestly life are discernible in every generation. In this essay, however, I want to look particularly at priests who were ordained in the immediate pre-conciliar period, roughly from 1949 until 1962. They merit attention both for their initial flourishing—seminary enrollments boomed even as new professional options were opening to Catholic youth—and for their encountering an ecclesial revolution while still in positions of relative powerlessness in the institutional Church...