Ignatian Spirituality in a Secular Age

P.J. Kemp was a journalist living in Brigham, Quebec.

The subject of spirituality in a secular age was deemed a good choice for a symposium sponsored by Regis College to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola naturally became a focal point of these discussions.

The resulting essays, collected in this volume, reflect the academic background of the scholars. Since St. Ignatius was founder of the Jesuits, that order may feel compelled to reassert the idea that such exercises are relevant to modern times. The Spiritual Exercises itself was written in the 1500s and may have been relevant to its own time. That it is still relevant is not convincingly argued in Ignatian Spirituality in a Secular Age.

Still, Michael J. Buckley offers a comment on freedom that gives this otherwise uninspiring book some spark: “To remove free choice is to remove the radical selfhood that accepts or rejects the movement of God; it is to destroy the human person under the guise of exalting the action of God. This… is essentially diabolical.”