Language

French

Main themes

The course intends to explore some testimonies of contemporary Christian spirituality, emanating from singular mystical personalities or spiritual 'new movements'. It wishes to analyze the recurrent contents of these testimonies and to confront them with the Christian spiritual tradition as it developed from the Bible and in the mystical History of the Christian West. It emphasizes the attitudes and orientations of contemporary Christian spirituality, in individual and common prayer or in the ways of life involved.

Aims

At the end of this learning unit, the student is able to :
1	The students must be able to hear a contemporary spiritual experience, to identify the constituent elements of a truly Christian experience (a more or less critical relationship to Sacred Scripture, a type of prayer practice, a type of community life evoked) and to confront these elements with what the Theological Tradition brings as elements of discernment of a mystical experience.

The contribution of this Teaching Unit to the development and command of the skills and learning outcomes of the programme(s) can be accessed at the end of this sheet, in the section entitled “Programmes/courses offering this Teaching Unit”.

Content

Contents of this course will be approached from the texts of contemporary authors of fictions or essays (Georges Bernanos, Paul Claudel, François Mauriac, Marie Noël, Sylvie Germain, among others) as well as texts by contemporary spiritual authors, whether they are founders or not of 'movements' at the heart or on the periphery of Christianity (Simone Weil, Etty Hillesum, Chiara Lubich, André Louf, Jean Vanier, etc.). These texts will be read, analyzed in their redactional context, and confronted with the requirements of the Christian theological tradition in matters of spirituality, and their relevance, contribution and novelty will be appreciated. This reading and confrontation will form the basis of the evaluation.

Faculty or entity

TEBI