As a pastoral theologian who has specialized in Christian spirituality for more than twenty-five years, I am deeply engaged with the role of spiritual practice. In this essay, I would like to explore the possibility that academic life, and scholarship in particular, is itself a spiritual practice. This claim may be self-evident to some; after all, the medieval university was originally staffed by religious persons who assumed that their scholarship was spiritual practice. But for others, living on this side of the Enlightenment, scholarship is simply (though profoundly) a professional calling...
