this issue
previous article in this issuenext article in this issue

Document Details :

Title: Toward a Kenotic Model of Spiritual Subjectivity
Author(s): BAIRD, Marie
Journal: Studies in Spirituality
Volume: 26    Date: 2016   
Pages: 45-58
DOI: 10.2143/SIS.26.0.3180804

Abstract :
This essay contends that the developmental models upon which many Western psychologies of religion rest – and their seemingly ‘obvious’ focus on intentional consciousness as primary – fail to consider (at least two) postmodern challenges. What is needed is a new model of spiritual subjectivity that takes seriously the ‘kenotic’ impulses implicit in the dethroning of an intentionality assumed to be primary and the ascendancy of secularizing forces that help to form such a subject in the first instance. Focusing first on Emmanuel Levinas’s ‘relation to the Infinite’ as the enactment of ethical subjectivity, and then on Gianni Vattimo’s analysis of a secularizing culture that enables a robust spirituality given the death of the ‘metaphysical’ God, we will be able to formulate a ‘kenotic’ model of spiritual subjectivity without foundations that enacts itself in charitable responsibility for the other.

Download article