Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-2024
Publisher
Cambridge University Press on behalf of College Theology Society
Abstract
After tracing the history of the term “spirituality” and the discipline of spirituality up to the mid-twentieth century, this article describes the contemporary understanding of spirituality as lived religious experience and of the academic discipline which studies this subject. This phenomenology of the discipline grounds a position on the relationship between lived spirituality and theology on the one hand, and the academic disciplines of spirituality and theology on the other.
In addition to six peer-reviewed articles, the “creative teaching” feature, and an editorial essay, the Fall 1986 issue of Horizons featured an editorial symposium titled “Catholicism and Modernity” and a book review symposium on W. W. Meissner’s Psychoanalysis and Religious Experience. Walter Conn was in his sixth year as editor, and he consistently crafted issues with challenging features and ground-breaking articles.
In our third golden anniversary roundtable, the editors have chosen to feature Sandra Schneiders’s Fall 1986 article, “Theology and Spirituality: Strangers, Rivals, or Partners?.” It has become a classic and is the most cited article of the Horizons corpus. A decade before the Pew Charitable Trusts sponsored the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, and decades before that center surveyed Americans on questions about practices they would call spiritual, Schneiders was trying to identify trends and map definitions about spirituality, especially about spirituality as a field of study.
To be sure, multiple factors affect what eventually gets published in any particular issue, and so I do not know if well-planned timing on editor Conn’s part played a role or if it was simply serendipity that put the two symposia and Schneiders’s article in the same issue. Nonetheless, the symposia offer robust reflections that open a window on some aspects of practicing Catholic theology and the development of religious studies in the mid-1980s; it is interesting to read these features alongside Schneiders’s article, and I encourage readers to revisit those works.
Professor Min-Ah Cho of Georgetown University generously agreed to guide us through a consideration of Schneiders’s 1986 article and its continuing importance. Among other insights, Cho challenges us to rethink what interconnections and union with God, one another, and self mean in a human landscape reshaped by artificial intelligence, a pandemic, and ongoing social, political, and economic polarizations.
Recommended Citation
Schneiders, S.M., & Cho, M.-A. (2024). Editor’s Introduction. Horizons, 51(1), 163–194. https://doi.org/10.1017/hor.2024.4
Comments
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-ncsa/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the same Creative Commons licence is included and the original work is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use.