On Wednesday, the Center for the Study of Spirituality (CFSS) at Saint Mary’s College hosted a lecture titled “What is Spirituality, and How Do We Study It?” led by Daniel Horan, director of the Center. Horan recently left the priesthood, rescinding his vows to the Franciscan order last week. Guests attended the conference in person in the Carroll Auditorium as well as online. The lecture is part of a celebration of the CFSS’s 40 years of establishment at the College, with a two-week-long series of events featuring various special guest speakers.
Julia Feder, assistant director of CFSS and professor of religious studies, began the event by discussing CFSS’s history and the center’s goals.
“Founded in 1984 by Dr. Keith Egan, with support from the Sisters of the Holy Cross and Saint Mary's College, the Center for the Study of Spirituality offers programs that promote the engagement between faith and reason and the connection between mind, body and spirit. As an academic center, it is a hub for scholarly and public engagement, which draws on intellectual resources in the Catholic and broader Christian tradition,” Feder said.
During his talk, Horan discussed spirituality and how it relates to religion. He focused mainly on what spirituality is and how the term has come to be more accepted over time in the Catholic community and in non-religious contexts.
Horan said spirituality is “actually a fairly simple innovation, at least as it pertains to matters of religious experience.”
He also discussed the differences in the Catholic Encyclopedia’s use of spirituality from 1912 to 1915, where there were zero mentions of spirituality to “just a few decades later, in 1970 when the revised edition of the new Catholic Encyclopedia was published, you would find at least eight articles [with] the heads of which included spirituality as subject matter.”
Horan also provided anecdotes to explain how spirituality has developed as an academic discipline, including one where a colleague of his friend stated “theology is to spirituality as cheese is to Cheese Whiz.”
During the final section of the lecture, audience members were invited to ask questions and engage in a dialogue with Horan. The questions drew upon Horan’s work and opinions about spirituality and how it can be more widely accepted by religious spaces in non-religious contexts.
One participant asked what people mean when they say they are spiritual but not religious.
Horan said he believes people “might mean something different in their experience”, but they “fundamentally mean that they are uncomfortable identifying with institutional religious groups.”
Horan said that for people in religious institutions concerned about this, "I would say, why is it that the stories you tell, the doctrine you articulate, the rules you establish and the communities you build don’t align with that experience of the divine, these people who identify as spiritual but not religious?”
He said this is a learning experience for religious communities to be a part of, rather than something to entirely reject, especially for the future of Christian spirituality.
Another participant commented on her experience with a homeless person and how that encounter shaped how she considers herself to be a spiritual person.
“Within the Christian tradition, one of those key elements of spirituality was transformation, that it’s not enough to stop with, like you said, me and Jesus, or be in a silo, or that this is just for me to feel good, right? But instead, in order for it to be Christian spirituality, it should change us toward and for something, and that toward is community and others, and for is at least as the gospel leaves it in the breaking of the kingdom of God,” Horan said.
The next event in the series of programs celebrating the CFSS’s 40 years of establishment is a lecture titled “Courageous Hope in Precarious Times” featuring guest speaker Fr. Bryan Massingale. This event will be held Nov. 12 at 7 p.m., both in-person at Carroll Auditorium and live-streamed through online registration.
