This opening paper seeks to situate discussions about the academic status of “softer”, more practical disciplines within wider contexts. The most important and most distinctively theological of these is conditioned by the particular claims of Christian tradition about the saving revelation of a God who yet remains unseen and transcendent. Also relevant are ethical and political questions about the nature of education, and speculative questions about theoretical and practical reason.

While “praying in the Spirit” may evoke “charismatic” prayer, this paper argues that from a scriptural point of view it defines all Christian prayer as having the Holy Spirit as main subject, who leads us to pray and prays in us, by showing us to whom, how and for what we should pray. This has implications for spirituality and pneumatology. On the one hand, prayer is to be understood as much more than the extension of our human desire towards God: it means entering into the divine will, the divine life, and the relations between Father, Son and Spirit – and relating to each in a different way. This actually helps to catch the essence of charismatic prayer as well, which is precisely letting the Spirit pray in us: charisms and “enthusiasm” are an expression of this and are in their right place when they are referred to it. On the other hand, the Holy Spirit manifests itself as a unique type of divine person, which acts and speaks in and through others. The paper contends that this economical specificity needs to be re-elaborated on the level of the immanent Trinity in a novel way: the divine names of Ruah and Pneuma allow us to conceive the Spirit as the most intimate Breath which the Father breathes (spires) into the depths of the Son.

‘Who are we?’ as Christian believers, as Church, is a question that each generation of Christians, collectively and as individuals, is impelled to ask. Vatican II's teaching on the universal call to holiness marks a significant step in our journey toward addressing this question. This paper focuses on the call to holiness as deeply rooted in a sharing in the priestly ministry of Christ. The core of the paper is an exploration of the radical and unique nature of the priesthood of Christ. The paper continues by exploring the significance of the universal call to holiness as priesthood in the light of the unique nature of Christ's priesthood. The paper claims that the priesthood into which we are all baptised is at once Chrisological and ecclesiological, and suggests that, in the light of this theological reading, new answers may then arise in regard to the ever-urgent questions of Church order.

Psychologists have recently once again started using “soul-language” in their anthropological investigations. This paper will explore some of the attempts to “re-soul” psychology over the past few decades, especially in the work of Bruno Bettleheim, Otto Rank and James Hillman. Having explored the strengths and weaknesses of these positions the paper ends with an account of the self taken from the work of St Teresa Benedicta a Cruce (Edith Stein) which, it argues, enables the Christian Trinitarian perspective to resolve tensions inherent in the other psychological models.

This paper reflects on Christian formation, the growth of the disciple into the image of Christ, from two traditions, the Thomistic and Ignatian. The Thomistic tradition offers a rich theological theory of virtue, but seems to require a more convincing narrative of how ‘infused’ virtue develops in the Christian life. The Ignatian tradition offers a more experiential spirituality, but today needs to explain how spiritual experience can be lived out. It is argued that the two traditions can be seen as mutually complementary, and that, by understanding the relation of virtue to the practice of spiritual discernment, a fuller account of Christian formation is possible.

In the discourse of a number of theologians there is a perceived gap between spirituality and ‘theology proper’. This gap would not have been perceived or understood by Aquinas, Augustine or others of the long tradition of theological enquiry, since they saw union with God as the highest fruit of theological thinking. There is another gap today between the term ‘spirituality’ used in a loose and decontextualized fashion by the Mind, Body, Spirit industry and those for whom its study is part of mystical theology and its practice part of the church's mystagogia. The fact that many otherwise orthodox believers, as well as those alienated from regular church belief and practice, turn to more esoteric spiritual paths may be a sign that a return to a better-informed and theologically grounded knowledge of the mystical tradition is long overdue.