While by now, Christian theology and spirituality have rightfully critiqued the misuse and abuse of Christian asceticism (especially the meaning and application of sacrifice), the interlocking realities of ecological exploitation/devastation and unfettered capitalism may suggest that there is need to revisit asceticism as a discipline. Christian spirituality scholars and practitioners should consider ways that asceticism is a site both for agency and for exploitation. This panel imagines a future for Christian asceticism that is capable of responding to the needs of our present age through an integrated balance of attentiveness, urgency, and resistance to systemic injustice.
This study rethinks Christian asceticism through the lens of hunger, drawing on Simone Weil’s work. For Weil, hunger is not something to be overcome but a concrete exposure of human vulnerability, where bodily need, spiritual truth, and ethical responsibility converge. The paper proceeds in three parts. The first section situates her view of renunciation—not as a pursuit of spiritual advantage but as relinquishing all that is not grace—within the history of ascetic mastery, emphasizing consent to human vulnerability. The second section examines Weil’s account of hunger on multiple interrelated levels: as a physical reality, as an expression of desire, and as a source of ethical awareness. The third section proposes a reimagined Christian asceticism that distinguishes genuine need from manufactured appetite, reorients practice from mastery toward consent, and extends personal discipline to an awareness of structural oppression and systemic injustice.
Peter Thiel states that death is a problem to be solved. He routinely frames his transhumanist ideas through theological language, highlighting resonances between his vision of immortality and the Christian eschatological body. But beyond an external motivator for innovation, there is little room in Thiel’s proposal for dying one’s own death; that is, our deaths do not seem to inform us about life, finitude, or even mortality itself. As such, this paper offers a pedagogical interpretation of death by way of the ascetical rule of John Climacus. Through a constructive reading of The Ladder of Divine Ascent, I demonstrate that death operates paradoxically for Climacus, by inverting expectations on spiritual maturity with the goal of constituting the ascetic’s relation to the world by reorienting them back to their finitude.
This paper examines Emmanuiel Mounier’s account of personalist asceticism as a social practice. Mounier articulates the human as a relational being, irreducible to her social, historical conditioning and yet organically and constitutively embedded within living communities. Asceticism, in his view, becomes the practice by which the human becomes fully personal and creates healthy social bonds. In our precarious ecological and capitalist moment where human beings are too easily reduced to producers and consumers, I argue that Mounier offers a vision of ascetic practice that can synthesize the hopes for personal flourishing with social justice. This demands a reconceptualization of asceticism and refusal not as an acceptance of lack or as a necessary sacrifice but as the very path to personal flourishing and, thus, social wholeness.
This paper engages apocalypse not as genre, ideology, or eschatology, but as praxis. Drawing the three-fold way of perfection from the Christian spiritual tradition, it proposes an account of the apocalyptic as a renunciation of the world as it is, an imaginative vision of the world as it might be, and a practice of creaturely care in the meantime. In the practices of purgation (lament, renunciation, conversion), illumination (vision, imagination, thanksgiving), and unity (care, indifference, discernment, praise), apocalyptic praxis allows Christian to engage the endings of the world with hope. Under such a description, the apocalyptic is less a predictive tool and more a spiritual practice. And in this way, apocalyptic praxis becomes a guide and challenge for Christian spirituality as the world seems to be ending.