Foundations of Spirituality - by Carla Mae Streeter (Paperback)

About the Book

Scholarly approaches to spirituality often overlook the need for a sound anthropology as the base for explaining conversion, the dynamic of grace, and the effects of conversion in virtue theory. In Foundations of Spirituality, longtime educator Carla Mae Streeter provides a more adequate account of what it means to be a person before God. By mining the insights of Bernard Lonergan on human consciousness and the virtue theory of Thomas Aquinas, she presents a clear and integrated incarnational spirituality.

Book Synopsis

How does the Holy come to meet the human? Or, said another way, how does God work with the physical, psychic, and spiritual persons that each of us are?

Scholarly approaches to spirituality often overlook the need for a sound anthropology as the base for explaining conversion, the dynamic of grace, and the effects of conversion in virtue theory. In Foundations of Spirituality, longtime educator Carla Mae Streeter provides a more adequate account of what it means to be a person before God. By mining the insights of Bernard Lonergan on human consciousness and the virtue theory of Thomas Aquinas, she presents a clear and integrated incarnational spirituality.

Streeter argues that God works with precisely what God has made, enhancing it rather than overriding or disposing of it. The basic premise of this book is that every person is called to holiness, which comes about through the relationship of the human with the Divine. It is a divine summons heard and responded to by a human being.

Carla Mae Streeter, OP, is professor emerita at the Aquinas Institute of Theology in St. Louis, Missouri, where she continues to teach in the areas of systematic theology and spirituality.

Review Quotes

A lucid, hospitable, comprehensive book, seeded in Bernard Lonergan and Robert Doran's work on conversion. The author, nurtured in her own rich Dominican tradition, asserts that the human is spiritual from the outset. It is this human that the Holy 'woos into holiness.' It is a wondrous story, narrated in many religious traditions. Streeter's scholarly, systematic, theological text explains how we are forged in truth, goodness and beauty.Cora Twohig-Moengangongo, Theologian, Independent Scholar, Toronto, Ontario

Foundations of Spirituality brings striking new insights about the relationship of the human with the divine.Ruthanne Reed, OP, Director of Associate Relationship, Racine Dominicans, Racine, WI

Readers will find here questioning and commitment, substance and sensitivity, clarifications and illustrations, on the part of a spiritual person who is also a competent theologian.Louis Roy, OP, Professor of Theology, Dominican University College, Ottawa