Summary concepts and applications

¶ … Catholic Spirituality

Cunningham, L.S. & Egan, K.J. (1996). Christian Spirituality. Paulist Press.

The Christian faith is one which can attribute its revelations in equal parts to the biblical scriptures which carry forward its written narrative and the community which forms around this narrative. Such is to say that the Word of God which is said to inhabit the static pages of bible is quite a vital thing in the living and breathing communities that gather on the common ground of their faith. This is the central premise of the 1996 text by Cunningham & Egan entitled Christian Spirituality. In the selection entitled "Hearers and Doers of the Word," the authors describe the phenomenon of the community which gravitates toward the Catholic Church.

According to Cunningham & Egan, what distinguishes Catholic spirituality from other traditions is that the scriptures are to be understanding in the context of the communities they serve. Even with its emphasis on the heavenly and the historical, the Bible possesses a dramatic relevance to our everyday affairs. Cunningham & Egan quote a contemporary theologian who surmised that "the depths and richness of God in Christ is being slowly brought into actuality by the interaction of the Christ-Event, carried forward in tradition, with the ever expanding and deepening human experience in history. Surely we have a wider and more profound appreciation of the meaning of Christ for human history two thousand years after his coming than did the first generations of Christians." (Cunningham & Egan, p. 30).

This is the core assertion at the heart of the selection from Cunningham & Egan. Namely, Catholicism is not only distinguished by its history but by how this sense of history brings such great clarity to the present. In our reflection of Jesus and the scriptures, we are given a doctrine by which to live and a narrative explaining why we should abide this doctrine.

Greeley, a.M. (2001). Sacred Place, Sacred Time, exc. From the Catholic Imagination. University of California Press.

In 2001, Andrew Greely published the Catholic Imagination and with it, the excerpt that we consider here. Entitled "Sacred Place, Sacred Time," this carries a similar theme to the work by Cunningham & Egan, making particular reference to the visible presence of God in the surrounding works and creations of the men who worship him. In a compelling description of the city of Koln, the Greely selection lays out the assessment that even in a secular context where survival has been a dominant theme through generations of warfare, spirituality is in stark evidence to the beholder.