Ignatian Spirituality in a Secular Age

In the comments upon both his paper and a second delivered by Placide Gaboury of the University of Sudbury, the importance of the development of interior life as a condition of survival for contemporary believers was clarified with reference to the cultural situation that demands it and to the difficulties the experience of the absence of God presents. [...] While it may be the case for the poet that the use of the imagination is appropriate and necessary for the construction of the work of art, it was not always evident in the theological writing, to the modern era, that the imagination is the proper activity for the religious believer in the effort to make present the past. [...] While the history of modern philosophy may show a championing of rational clarity and a loss of the transcendent dimension of human life through the development of the subject-object dichotomy, still what may be justifiably criticized is an undue emphasis on the poetic to the detriment of the ordinary use of language, or a resolution into wordless consciousness to the detriment of the discursive c [...] It is not a matter of the consultation of the self with the self: as in the example given above about discovering the meaning of feelings that seem to overpower one, there is discovery, and a gaining of freedom for the self, in the encounter with and determination by the so-called external world. [...] The history of philosophy subsequent to Hegel gives evidence of the modern mind's tendency to abandon the difficulty of this unity for the seeming security of a one-sided emphasis on subject or object to the neglect of the other element in the dialectic of knowledge.