So I wanted to give you a chance, especially because it's a fairly new discipline, right? As far as academic disciplines go, I wanted to kind of give you a chance to describe this academic field and sort of it's sort of early development, its first few decades, how you would kind of make sense of it's, um early development or kind of trace that that lineage that you sort of see yourself being a part of in this book being a contribution

yeah there are a lot of ways to go about answering that question there's kind of the official narrative that we work through in the book and then we try to get behind that a little bit as well So each time I have that question posed to me, I think I take a different tack.

In some ways, I spoke about the experience component.

I spoke about it as a bit of a reform of theology.

That's definitely there.

The founder, the most explicit founder of the discipline of Christian spirituality, Sandra Schneiders, who's uh work prior to that point was as a biblical scholar and in some ways an early feminist in the catholic church in that very uh sort of rough period when uh sandra and and others dealt with um you know the full brunt of a kind of patriarchal consciousness if you will with all sorts of prejudices.

And so she went and faced that in her own work, previously established herself as a productive and insightful scholar.

sort of sublime experiences of of the divine or these these sort of really emotionally charged experiences or encounters with the divine