Spirituality, Liberation, and Intelligence: Resourcing Pragmatic and Liberationist Methodologies

In what ways can spirituality help to promote human flourishing in an age of moral, spiritual, and ecological decay? Can life-giving spiritualities arise beyond the parameters of prophetic forms of organized religion?  And what methodological resources can help fortify more pluralistic and liberating approaches to spirituality?  

With these questions in mind, I argue that pragmatic and liberationist methodologies have much to offer. I approach philosophical pragmatism and liberation theology—two quintessentially "American" traditions—as non-reductive empirical discourses that foreground the role of human intelligence in promoting human flourishing.  At their best, these traditions not only help to expand our understanding of spirituality as a pervasive quality of human experience, but also, they shed light on spirituality as an active function of human intelligence.  Such an approach, I argue, offers the study of spirituality both analytical rigor and explanatory force.  

Recent scholarship has begun to probe the ways in which empiricist, naturalistic, and/or pragmatic approaches to spirituality, on the one hand, can intersect with more liberationist approaches, on the other.  Over the last decade, contributions include Michael S. Hogue's American Immanence: Democracy for an Uncertain World(2018), Michael L. Raposa's Theosemiotic: Religion, Reading, and the Gift of Meaning (2020), Christopher D. Tirres's Liberating Spiritualities: Reimagining Faith in the Américas (2025), and Carol Wayne White's Black Lives and Sacred Humanity (2016).  As all of these works suggest, spirituality need not be confined to ecclesial and/or traditional theological categories.  Furthermore, these works show that spirituality is much more than a "thing" that exists "in" experience.  Rather, spirituality is better understood as a mode of being-in-the world that colors multiple aspects of our being.  As such, spirituality is better understood as a verb than as a noun.

Digging deeper, these works show how philosophical pragmatism (and, oftentimes, its close cousin, process thought) share at least three central methodological affinities with liberation theology.  First, these traditions espouse a relational and emergentist metaphysics that understands experience in non-dualistic ways.  In these traditions, there is no sharp separation between nature and supernature, nature and grace, or immanence and transcendence.  Rather, the divine emerges qualitatively in and through nature.  

Second, as pragmatism makes clear, to fully understand the meaning of something, we must inquire into itsfunction and its conceivable practical effects. This emphasis on what an idea does is echoed in liberation theology’s claim that faith ultimately has less to do with orthodoxy (“right-belief”) and more to do with orthopraxy (“right-action”). For both liberation theologians and pragmatists, therefore, a truly faithful person iswhat a truly faithful person does.  So, too, with spirituality. To grasp fully what spirituality is, we must therefore attend to the ways in which it functions in experience. 

This last phrase, “in experience,” is the third major touchstone within pragmatism and liberation theology. Both traditions take actual experience—and, more specifically, problematic situations that arise in actual experience—as their methodological starting point. The task for both is how best to reconstruct and resolve problematic situations. Naturally, these two traditions express the transition from problem to resolution in different ways, but in both there is a sense of experience being “fulfilled.” We see this especially in John Dewey’s sense of “consummatory experience” and liberation theology’s invocation of “the fullness of life.” 

All of these methodological affinities help us to reimagine spirituality anew.  Inspired by the work of John Dewey, Paulo Freire, Roger Haight, Charles H. Long, Ronald Rolheiser, Sandra Schneiders, Paul Tillich, and others, I understand spirituality as "the intelligent reconstruction or reorganization of experience through a consistent pattern of habit and action that is measured by some ultimate concern."  Pushing the envelope further, I am interested in how liberating spiritualities place added emphasis on a critical consciousness and critical habits of mind that connect ultimate concern to acts that redress systems of oppression and promote human flourishing.   

In this paper, I am especially interested in exploring how liberating spiritualities are fueled by critical intelligence.  In both pragmatism and liberation theology, human intelligence, broadly understood, is a—if not the—primary means by which human beings transact with the world and through which spirituality is, in fact, “activated.” But careful attention must be given to what is meant here by “intelligence.” Oftentimes, we envision intelligence as a high-order capacity of the mind that helps us to acquire some form of knowledge. We might think of an intelligent person, for example, as someone with a vast or deep expertise in a particular area. In this paper, I approach intelligence in a more expansive, embodied, and functionalist light: at its core, intelligence is the manner in which we transact with our environment in order to address particular problems. When seen this way, knowledge is less like a fixed state in which we definitively “possess” certain bits of information and more like an emerging process that is forged through our encounter with—and ongoing adaptation to—the ever-changing situations around us. Within a pragmatic model of inquiry, knowing is an “adaptive activity” that involves a dynamic process of doubt, belief, inquiry, and judgment.  

At root, I aim to make more explicit a promising insight that remains somewhat latent within pragmatic and liberationist traditions alike: spirituality is already itself a powerful, adaptive mode of inquiry.  Yet, several questions may remain, including:  In what ways, exactly, are spirituality and human intelligence complementary and/or even coextensive, and where are the differences?  To what extent would liberation theologians concur (or disagree) with the idea that human intelligence is a "spiritual praxis"?  And does philosophical pragmatism, which is often tied to philosophical naturalism, really allow for the possibility that human inquiry can also be a "spiritual" practice?  

By delving further into questions like these, I hope to elucidate how pragmatic and liberationist methodologies may offer valuable resources for the study of spirituality, whether approached theologically or humanistically.