The Iberian Province and Edelvives promote reflection on Christian spirituality and new spirituality
The School of Spirituality of the Iberian Province, together with the In and Out project of the Edelvives Foundation, present the Effeta Notebooks. It is a project that aims to encourage reflection on the current religious situation of people with Christian concerns. In a pluralistic society, open to debate and contrast, we believe it is necessary to contribute, in all simplicity, our Christian and Marist word on subjects that we feel are of concern to us as a community.
The Notebooks are the product of shared reflection, initiated and co-ordinated by the School of Spirituality but which includes many other people around us. We believe in listening together in order to listen more clearly to the Spirit and, for this reason, the Notebooks are not and do not want to be official documents or great theological treatises, but rather they want to gather the intuitions and clues that, together, we feel can help us to journey, personally and as a community. Therefore, they will always be working documents, open, written with rigour and, at the same time, in a language that is accessible to all those who are interested in them. The text has a body of bibliographical notes that should not make reading difficult, but rather provide possibilities for those who are interested in programmes for further reflection.
The Notebooks are a project sustained over time and with an annual frequency, because they want to help to incorporate listening to the signs of the times and spiritual reflection on reality into our daily Christian life. To be a Christian today is to be, as Pope Francis invites us, a Church going out, in dialogue, listening, a Church on the way towards the Kingdom of God-Love.
The booklet that opens the series is entitled Christian Spirituality and New Spirituality. A dialogue. This booklet arises from the question perceived in our communities and our environment, on how to face, from our Christian identity, the programme of the new spiritualities, sometimes called oceanic, which are present in our cultural environment. Our programme is situated in our ecclesial and Marist tradition: we propose avenues of dialogue with these spiritualities, aware of the richness of our Christian identity and in the certainty that diversity is a gift and an opportunity.
The School of Spirituality continues to work to promote spaces of encounter and shared reflection and is working on the next booklets on themes such as religious indifference or an image of the person that integrates current philosophical, psychological, educational and theological languages.
The booklets are available online
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José María Pérez-Soba, School of Spirituality of the Iberian Province