How do we define spirituality?

Part 3 of a series on thinking about what it means to be spiritual in Christ and how we can do that together.

Aug 04, 2026

In the last post, we looked at some concrete examples of Jesus from the Gospels through the lens of his question: In what ways did Jesus’ teachings, actions, and conversations evaluate conceptions of spirituality around him?

We discovered that Jesus’s very words and actions were critiques, based on his convictions about God and the Kingdom, whether or not he was being directly confrontational. Through the examples we looked at, it seems clear that Jesus was (and is) a judge, but a judge who judges rightly based on authoritative experience in the with-God life and the Kingdom. His very presence seemed to indicate a sort of judgment, as his way of life called into question the commitments of those around him.

However, critique along the lines of Charles Taylor’s strong evaluations and the fact that we are never not critiquing or making judgments begs the question: what are we critiquing anyway? In this brief piece, I want to try my best to stitch together some thinking that has been helpful for me as I have sought to understand what spirituality is and how it works so that I could guide myself and others well. I’m going to build on the work of three key voices in the study of spirituality, all Christians, who have committed their lives to studying what is actually happening in a person’s spirituality.

The Problem of Definition

What is spirituality? If you ask any random sampling of people on the street in the US, you will likely encounter just as many definitions. Some might even refuse the term, insistent on the idea that “spirituality” is New Age gobbledygook.

Perhaps. But I want to encourage you to stick with me here as we attempt to frame a definition for the purposes of this series. This is a fraught task, though - so many definitions exist, many of which are confessional (that is, emerging from a specific religious or theological tradition) or attempt to exist “outside of religion” (that is, critiquing or naming spirituality from outside of any place or time).

This presents a problem, though. It’s increasingly more common to distinguish “spirituality” from “religion” - confessional attitudes are lower than historical norms, and spirituality is seen as an experience open to all. While there is some overlap in how people define these terms themselves, distinctions on the ground level exist. One study among older adults from 2008 postulated that, perhaps, those who would identify as “spiritual but not religious” would lose out on the concrete expressions of spirituality that happen within a religious community, such as care when illness or crisis occurs.1

As someone who lives and breathes within a confessional commitment, I can’t help but do this work from “inside the fold,” as it were. I desire to introduce you to my thinking here in the hopes that it will be helpful, but I also color within the lines of Christian orthodoxy as well as I can. All that to say, I don’t believe this is the time or place to do semantic gymnastics with “religion” and “spirituality.” By the end of this piece, I also hope you will see that while this kind of question might be important, it’s secondary.

What is spirituality?

A particularly artful definition of spirituality comes from Fr. Ronald Rolheiser’s landmark book The Holy Longing, where he commits a full chapter at the beginning of his book to the question:

Spirituality is not something on the fringes, an option for those with a particular bent. None of us has a choice. Everyone has to have a spirituality and everyone does have one, either a life-giving one or a destructive one. No one has the choosing here because all of us are precisely fired into life with a certain madness that comes from the gods and we have to do something with that. We do not wake up in this world calm and serene, having the luxury of choosing to act or not. We wake up crying, on fire with desire, with madness. What we do with that madness is our spirituality.2

He goes on to say that, “Long before we do anything explicitly religious at all, we have to do something about the fire that burns within us…Irrespective of whether or not we let ourselves be consciously shaped by any explicit religious idea, we act in ways that leave us either healthy or unhealthy, loving or bitter.”3

For Fr. Rolheiser, there is a pre-religious dimension of our spiritualities, something that animates and drives us outward in search of a fulfillment of our longings. Writing out of the Catholic Christian tradition, he is in good company with Augustine of Hippo, who in the opening lines of his Confessions, inscribes as a sort of thesis that “You arouse us so that praising you may bring us joy, because you have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is unquiet until it rests in you.”4 There’s a drivenness within us, something to which we respond by willing-to-act in such a way as to give reason and structure to the experience of our “madness.”

Spirituality, he argues, is not some sort of specific esoteric commitment to a New Age boogeyman, nor is it something that is sidelined by properly advanced people. There’s no “opt out” on the multiple choice test, nor is someone more or less spiritual if they practice meditation, do yoga, say the Daily Office or, for my Evangelical readers, read their Bibles each day. For Fr. Rolheiser, spirituality is the hand we are dealt by virtue of being human.

I think he’s right. While the rise – and now the leveling off or even decline – of Nones in survey data5 might indicate a certain distaste for Christian institutions and even organized religion as such, Fr. Rolheiser’s definition of spirituality would allow us to say something more about the spirituality of church leavers who do, in their experience, still retain things like belief, prayer, and gathering together as a way of making sense of the madness and deep-seated desires that these Nones still wrestle with.6

Kees Waaijman, a famed Carmelite scholar of spirituality, frames part of his introductory textbook Spirituality: Forms, Foundations, Methods with an exploration of the “Inner Life.” Spirituality, he argues, is situated within “the interior of the human subject” and is contrasted, at some levels, with “The public nature of the cosmos and society.”7 Through an exploration of the history of the interior life throughout Western history, beginning with Scripture’s witness to the soul through the 20th Century, he notes that this inner turn seemed to be framed as an escape from the “harshness of the exterior world.” This situates spirituality as a withdrawal from the world rather than something discovered within it, something that gives each of us an escape from the problems and complexity of the concrete universe as we seek interior union with God.8 Spirituality, then, centers on the relational connection between humans and God and is most readily identified with our inner worlds.9

Philip Sheldrake, whom I mentioned in the last post, is a leading, world-recognized interdisciplinary scholar of spirituality. He complicates all this while also holding the center that Fr. Rolheiser named for us. In terms of defining spirituality, “this is assumed to be a set of practices, something specifically ‘spiritual,’ sometimes generally life-framing, that are distinct from systems of belief” and “may be associated with values.” However, “these are treated as somehow free-standing or self-evident rather than based on prior assumption or judgments about the meaning and purpose of human existence.”10 He suggests that spirituality “refers to the deepest values and meanings by which people seek to live…[it] implies some kind of vision of the human spirit and of what will assist it to achieve full potential.”11

This sort of existential framing is a great example of those definitional ranges that resist being contained by the language of a particular tradition, and, in some ways, it’s helpful. Like Fr. Rolheiser, Sheldrake points to a meaning-making and structuring set of behaviors and beliefs that give someone an adequate account of their experience. He also helpfully underscores that spirituality points to a particular understanding of the human spirit and what it means for this human spirit to reach its “full potential.” This is a worldview-laden work: it seems that no one can get the perennial “viewpoint from nowhere” that was so important in the scientism of the past several centuries.12

Sheldrake goes even further, though, to offer a definition within specifically Christian terms, in which spirituality refers to “the way our fundamental values, lifestyles, and spiritual practices reflect understandings of God, human identity, and the material world as the context for human transformation.”13 This matches up cleanly with Fr. Rolheiser’s framing and Waaijman’s tracing of the “inner life” through history, but also expands spirituality beyond what’s going on “inside”: for Sheldrake, it seems that there are concrete expressions that denote the movements of the inner life (captured in lifestyles and practices) that explain how we conceptualize things that are nebulous (captured in God and human identity, for instance).

I find that this particular framing is helpful because it is inclusive of concrete and visible phenomena while also holding the tension of those transcendent things to which concrete and visible references refer. In Sheldrake’s view (at least in Explorations in Spirituality), we have a sort of matrix that emerges:

Values, Lifestyles, and Spiritual Practices stand on one axis.
Understanding of God, Understanding of Human Identity, and Understanding of the Material World stand on the other axis.

This grid is important because at each and every intersection something foundational can be uncovered, or, more precisely a new question can be asked. For instance:

What do this community’s or person’s values demonstrate about their understanding of who or what God is and what God is life?
In what ways does this person’s lifestyle align with or detract from the traditions’ understandings of human identity?
How does this spiritual practice help us understand how this person understands the material world?
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Is Spirituality Concrete? Perhaps so.

This smattering of questions indicates that, perhaps, we are on the right track: while there is a madness and longing under which we act or fail to act in the world (Rolheiser), there are also concrete expressions of those acts and questions about what those acts say about beliefs and faith commitments (Sheldrake). The inner life and the pursuit of relationship between humans and God (Waaijman) is concretized outside the self just as much as it affects the interior of the self.

In a way, all this honors what we noted in Charles Taylor’s idea of strong evaluations, in that you and I are always acting from within an evaluative grid of dedicated commitments, even if we don’t consciously recognize them.

If you have stuck with me so far…good for you. I hope you found this portion interesting and helpful (I did). As Jesus acted within the Gospels, he was critiquing values, practices, and lifestyles because what we do with our life constitutes our spirituality. The examples from last week’s post (which is just a sample of many possible) elucidate the problem from the first post in this series: we can’t not evaluate spirituality, in ourselves or in others.

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