Abstract
Our contemporary moment witnesses fundamental transformations in the fields of self, society, culture, religion, politics, and spirituality. While in each of the world religions there is a growing fundamentalism, terror, and violence, in the same space there is also the vision and practice of practical, creative, and transformative spirituality which strives to cultivate and create relations and landscapes of beauty, dignity, and dialogues in self, cultures, societies, religions, and the world. Practical Spirituality and Human Development deals with the vision and work of service, spirituality, and movements for self-development and social transformations. It deals with movements of affirmative, creative, and critical spirituality in self, culture, histories, and societies. This introductory chapter describes the chapters in this book.
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Notes
- 1.
For Taylor , “This affirmation originally was a Christian-inspired move. It exalted practical agape […]” (Taylor 2011: 18). Bishop Desmond Tutu helps us understand this: “[…] Christianity is not a religion of virtue. Christianity is a religion of grace. Can we help as Church to transform our societies so that they are more people-friendly, more gentle, more caring, more compassionate, more sharing?” (Tutu 1994: 102). Asking such questions brings religions in rebellions against the constraints of domination. As Unger challenges us to realize:
The religion of the future would rebel against these constraints […] It would respond to the problem of belittlement, the diminishment of our share in the attributes of divinity. Its commanding aim would be the enhancement of life, not of power, and of power only insofar as power serves life. Life for everyone, as a condition of life for everyone. It would amount to a revolution in the religious history of humanity. (Unger: 8–9)
- 2.
Multi-topial hermeneutics builds upon the seminal work of Raimundo Panikkar on diatopical hermeneutics which the eminent social theorist Boaventura de Sousa Santos presents us thus:
The aim of diatopical hermeneutics is to maximize the awareness of the reciprocal incompleteness of cultures by engaging in a dialogue, as it were, with one foot in one culture and the other in another—hence its diatopical character. Diatopical hermeneutics is an exercise in reciprocity among cultures that consists in transforming the premises of argumentation in a given culture into intelligible and credible arguments in another. (2014: 92)
Santos here talks about putting one’s feet in cultures which resonates with my idea of footwork, footwork in landscapes of self, culture, and society as part of creative research (cf. Giri 2012). Hermeneutics does not mean only the reading of texts and cultures as texts but also foot-walking with texts and cultures as foot walks and footworks resonating with what Heidegger calls a hermeneutics of facticity (cf. Mehta 2004). It also means walking and meditating with cultures and texts as foot-working meditation while, as Thoreau (1947) would suggest, we walk like camels and ruminate while walking. This transforms hermeneutics itself into a manifold act of democratic and spiritual transformation which involves related processes of root works, route walks, root meditations, route meditations, memory work, and cultural work. Practical spirituality as a multi -topial hermeneutics involves a new trigonometry of creativity involving movements and meditations with Travel, Truth, and Translation which is explored in my following poem:Verse
Verse Three T and More Travel, Truth and Translation Travelling with Truth Translating Truth in Travel In Between the Relative and the Relational Absolute and Approximate Translating While Travelling Self, Culture and Divine Beyond the Annihilating Tyranny of the Singular A New Trinity of Prayer A New Multiple of Sadhana and Surrender.
- 3.
Bill Schardt and David Large tell us:
[…] Gospel in Brief […] comes from the period of his religious and moral writings between 1879 and 1902. It is a fusion of the four Gospels, the purpose of which is to seek an answer to the problem of how we should live. It is both philosophical and practical, rather than theological and spiritual, in its intention.
- 4.
As Schardt and Lange tell us:
[…] he started reading the Gospel in Brief on September 1st 1914 and subsequently carried it with him at all times, memorizing passages of it by heart. He became known to his comrades as the man with the gospels, constantly recommending the book to anyone who was troubled. Wittgenstein himself said that the book essentially kept him alive.
- 5.
Though it is important to remember as Bhikhu Parekh (2015) argues that though Gandhi was influenced by Tolstoy his experiments with non-violence and spirituality were uniquely his own.
References
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Parekh, Bhikhu. 2015. Debating India: Essays on Indian Political Discourse. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2014. Epistemologies from the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
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Thoreau, Henry David. 1947. “Walking.” In Portable Thoreau. New York: Viking.
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Wallis, Jim. 2000. Faith Works: Leaves from the Life of an Activist Preacher. New York: Random House.
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Giri, A.K. (2018). Practical Spirituality and Human Development: An Introduction and an Invitation. In: Giri, A. (eds) Practical Spirituality and Human Development. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0803-1_1
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