My Blog

I’ve always been one for multi-tasking. From when my children were small and I juggled their needs with my freelance work editing scientific books and journals, to when I had a ‘dual post’ with a busy suburban parish and a Diocesan role and began to learn the wisdom of the person who told me that two half-time posts really meant one and a half times the work! It seemed all too easy to spend all my time feeling guilty because I felt I should be doing something different from what I was doing. This in itself is energy-sapping and seemed to make both things I needed to be doing a struggle as I tried to choose between them.

When Australia was first discovered it was described as Terra nullias, or empty land. This view was used to justify the settlement, genocide and land grab that happened thereafter. But the Aboriginal people were already there before the continent was ‘discovered’. They were already farming the land, it certainly wasn’t empty! But it now seems clear that the new settlers didn’t recognise the Aboriginal land use as farming,  at least partly because it was different from European farming. There weren’t enclosed fields, none of the marker posts delineating ownership that the settlers were used to. Instead there were groups of people following a well-established pattern of land use, making good use of the natural resources, trading when they needed to, and caring for the health of the land with carefully controlled seasonal burning.

When I started thinking about the differences between personal spirituality and religion, the problem I had was not finding information, but of choosing among the many and diverse areas that have published academic papers which consider ‘spirituality’, often from a very specific viewpoint (for example from hospital chaplaincy, religious institutions, occupational therapy, or even management consultancy). My initial search of the literature began with papers by well-known voices in the field, particularly Sandra Schneiders ( e.g. Schneiders, 1986) and Philip Sheldrake (e.g. Sheldrake, 2013), as well as review papers that gave an overview of a large number of other researchers and writers (e.g. Knoblauch, 2008, and Principe 1983).