{"id":360,"date":"2015-03-01T11:59:55","date_gmt":"2015-03-01T16:59:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/practicalmattersjournal.ecdsdev.org\/?p=360"},"modified":"2015-10-21T20:57:05","modified_gmt":"2015-10-22T00:57:05","slug":"ecology-of-spirituality-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pmcleanup.ecdsdev.org\/2015\/03\/01\/ecology-of-spirituality-review\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ecology of Spirituality: Meanings, Virtues, and Practices in a Post-Religious Age"},"content":{"rendered":"
Download PDF:\u00a0RV Ellis The Ecology of Spirituality<\/a><\/h5>\n
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By Lucy Bregman
\nWaco: Baylor University Press, 2014. 198 pages. $29.95.<\/h3>\n
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There are many ways to illustrate the ubiquity of \u201cspirituality\u201d in contemporary American culture. Perhaps the most common way is to cite the numerous polls that point to the growing number of Americans who identify as \u201cspiritual but not religious.\u201d To this demographic phenomenon, Lucy Bregman adds another example at the opening of her book that is intended to illustrate the many meanings attached to the often simple-sounding notion of \u201cspirituality:\u201d in 1991 the Canadian Association of Occupational Therapists (CAOT) \u201cissued an official statement that claimed \u2018spirituality\u2019 lay at the core of their profession\u201d (4). While the reader might initially be confused as to why a religion scholar is talking about occupational therapists, the perceived randomness proves her point regarding the ubiquity of \u201cspirituality.\u201d What explanation could possibly account for such a thoroughly secular application of a term that unquestionably has its (Western) roots in monastic practices?<\/p>\n

Bregman structures The Ecology of Spirituality <\/em>as the outworking of three cleverly complimentary approaches to answering this question. In the first approach (chapters 1-3), she compares the abundance of definitions that have paralleled spirituality\u2019s progression outside of strictly \u201creligious\u201d settings. Next (chapters 4-6), she analyzes spirituality\u2019s organic and historical relationship to three intellectual disciplines (psychology, religious studies, and sociology of religion). Lastly (chapters 7-9), she investigates the nuances of how different rhetorics of \u201cspirituality\u201d have recently been employed in surprising \u201cniches\u201d (health care, the workplace, and recreation).<\/p>\n

Undoubtedly, one of the strengths of Bregman\u2019s varied approach is that it deconstructs any notion that \u201cspirituality\u201d denotes something recognizably the same across the range of its uses. For instance, in arenas influenced by psychology and health care, talk of spirituality functions as a reaction against the pharmacolization of psychology (61-72) and the materialistic reductionism of medicine (104-118) in the name of the holistic treatment of suffering persons. In contrast, in the arena of recreation \u201cspirituality\u201d tends to be associated with a \u201cconnectedness\u201d to Nature and the escape from the \u201ciron cage\u201d of Work (124-144). On the basis of such contrasts, Bregman ends up concluding that spirituality \u201cis a bundle of images, ideas, yearnings, and possibilities, drawn from a variety of sources and conflated by hopeful practitioners, professionals, and scholars to do triple or quadruple duty in multiple contexts\u201d (166).<\/p>\n

Even in view of such a judgment, the most compelling aspect of The Ecology of Spirituality <\/em>consists in Bregman\u2019s introduction of two interpretative lenses that can be applied to spiritualities <\/em>across the spectrum. The first lens names the difference between what she calls \u201ctwo-poled\u201d and \u201cone-poled\u201d spiritualities. The second lens asks to what degree any given concept of spirituality advocates the centrality of embodied practices, meaning any \u201cactivity done intentionally and with effort over time\u201d (37).<\/p>\n

A two-poled formulation of spirituality includes an outward, \u201cobjective\u201d pole that acts as an \u201cexternal object of apprehension and aspiration\u201d and<\/em> an inward, \u201csubjective\u201d pole that functions as the seat of volition and desire within the individual (15). Within such a two-poled understanding, spirituality is practiced by individuals in the lived and embodied tension between a desired ideal and the daily reality of gradually moving towards that ideal. Two-poled spiritualities tend to include attention to practices, because the path from mere aspiration to realization of an ideal is typically bridged by the incorporation of practices: to realize an ideal is to master a given practice. Accordingly, two-poled spiritualities are usually amenable to processes that include the incorporation of beginners, instructions for learning, willed surrender to role models (i.e. authorities), and the inculcation of virtues necessary for success (e.g. humility, courage, justice, perseverance, and honesty).<\/p>\n

Part of the significance of her description of two-poled spirituality is that it helps to unhinge the habit of placing \u201cspirituality\u201d and \u201creligion\u201d in a competitive relation. This is because spiritualities that are classically \u201creligious\u201d (e.g. Teresa of Avila\u2019s The Interior Castle<\/em>) and those that are self-consciously secular (e.g. Peter Van Ness\u2019s Spirituality and the Secular Quest<\/em>) can both qualify as two-poled. The former advocates the gradual refinement of an individual\u2019s motivations into those that characterize union with God via practices such as prayer, meditation, and the reception of the sacraments (32-36). The latter advocates the complementarity of individuals\u2019 \u201cmost enduring and vital selves\u201d as inwardly shaped by \u201cself-transformation and subsequent gradual development\u201d with the outward engagement of reality as a \u201cmaximally inclusive whole\u201d (15). Bregman suggests that even thoroughly recreational practices, such as golf or kayaking, might qualify as \u201cspiritual\u201d in this sense if they are \u201cpursued with the same craft, care, devotion, and intrinsic values that any traditional practice teaches and with the same intrinsic virtues of courage, honesty, and fairness\u201d (138). One could add to this any intentional attempt to grow in the type of interpersonal relational skills (128-131) that she describes as inherent to \u201cworkplace\u201d spirituality in chapter 8.<\/p>\n

In contrast, many recent definitions are \u201cone-poled\u201d because they drop any reference to an outward pole, thus reducing spirituality to its subjective pole, usually as connected to an \u201cinner inescapable human essence\u201d that enables each person to \u201cself-determine his or her life\u201d (17). From this perspective, spirituality is something primordial \u201cin\u201d each individual. Spirituality is thus not a \u201cfield for achievement [or learning]\u201d (31) because spirituality always and already \u201cis.\u201d To her scholarly credit, Bregman slowly builds the momentum of her critique of such spiritualities of \u201cexpressive individualism\u201d so that it does not distract from the plausibility of her historical genealogies. Nonetheless, by the time she arrives at her conclusion she has set the stage for a noticeable change in tone towards outright critique.<\/p>\n

The targets of her critique of \u201cone-poled\u201d spirituality are those that see in it a kind of trans-cultural, de-centralized, anti-institutional, utopian source of \u201cChange\u201d that marks, in David Griffin\u2019s words, a transcendence of all \u201cindividualism, anthropocentrism, patriarchy, mechanization, economism, consumerism, nationalism, and militarism\u201d (156). Such a view of spirituality would see the \u201cspiritual but not religious\u201d crowd, as well as the Canadian occupational therapists, as \u201cthe first wave of the spirituality revolution\u201d (155).<\/p>\n

This individualized spirituality is usually driven by the desire to integrate and offer the \u201cbest of all\u201d religions or cultures in this \u201cnew age,\u201d in which it is supposed that the \u201csum total of human knowledge is available to us\u201d (159). Bregman wonders whether, precisely by being suspicious of all <\/em>authority (162-163), we might actually end up being unconsciously defined by another authority: the endlessly commodified market. Shorn of any attention to the wisdom of recognized authorities and concrete institutional, communal, or geographical contexts, the resulting vacuum is filled by the vicious whims of the market: \u201cvanity, narrow vision, and greed\u201d (163). Thus, the wisdoms of \u201creligious traditions are reduced to jewelry and knick-knacks,\u201d and decontextualized practices are distilled into Yoga routines and books entitled, Zen in the Art of _______<\/em>, even while \u201cthe economic system thrives\u201d under the \u201cvirtuous\u201d guise of \u201cself-determination\u201d (162). In place of the gradual refinement inherent to two-poled spiritualities, what is left is only the illusion that spirituality can yield the immediate realization of a financial transaction. It is only on the other side of this critique that the relevance of one of Bregman\u2019s early evaluative remarks comes into focus: \u201cTo begin from [an] older [and two-poled] definition and context is useful not because we are nostalgic for the good old days of traditional monastic piety but because the older ideals and lifestyle had internal coherence and answered questions that more recent advocates of spirituality have difficulty answering well\u201d (32).<\/p>\n

Despite the fact that Bregman does not pursue such connections, it is noteworthy (and adds confirmation to her thesis) that her description of \u201ctwo-poled\u201d spirituality\u2014wound around the productive tension between the finitude of individuals and the universality of God or the cosmos\u2014aligns with many philosophical and theological riffs on the ancient theme of the relationship between the \u201cone and the many.\u201d For instance, it echoes Nicholas of Cusa\u2019s influential postulation of intensive\u00a0(the One) and universal (Many)\u00a0infinities as characterizing creation’s imaging of God’s own eternal infinity. Likewise, it also overlaps with Thomas Aquinas\u2019s description of human existence as an embodied, finite act that is grounded in and hastens towards the infinite act of God. Similarly, her eloquent focus on the centrality of practices holds a promising affinity to Aristotelian phronesis <\/em>and its contemporary repristinations in the work of Pierre Bourdieu and others.<\/p>\n

In noting these thematic connections, it is somewhat ironic to observe that Bregman\u2019s work is least convincing when she is attempting to reach back into intellectual history in order to support the subpoints of her thesis. For instance, her collocation of Friedrich Schleiermacher, William James, and Rudolph Otto as all promoting an \u201cextremely individualistic\u201d (85) conception of \u201creligion\u201d that sets the stage for \u201cspirituality\u201d to reinstate a focus on embodied \u201cconnection\u201d within religious studies is unconvincing and hasty. This is especially the case for anyone acquainted with Schleiermacher\u2019s focus on the communal nature of the church.<\/p>\n

In this sense, Bregman is at her best as an exacting, and rightfully devastating, critic of the many flippant and incoherent contemporary uses of the rhetoric of spirituality. Nonetheless, the above connections suggest that even in the role of a critic Bregman evidences keen intellectual intuition and constructive insight in staking out a path upon which others could productively follow and expand.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Download PDF:\u00a0RV Ellis The Ecology of Spirituality By Lucy Bregman Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014. 198 pages. $29.95. There are many ways to illustrate the ubiquity of \u201cspirituality\u201d in contemporary American culture. Perhaps the most common way is to cite<\/p>\n

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