“Spirituality is not simply concerned with religious devotion or spiritual practices but also with how to live in a virtuous way. Equally, ethics is not merely concerned with ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ actions but also with people’s dispositions of character. In other words, both spirituality and ethics focus on the quality of our basic humanity.”
(Philip Sheldrake, Spirituality: A Very Short Introduction)
Established in honor of Father Jake Foglio, the MSU Foglio Speaker Series on Spirituality creates opportunities to collectively explore the role spirituality assumes across global religious cultures and as an expression of humanity’s efforts to carve out meaning, purpose, and virtuous living. Consistently emphasizing the need to understand spirituality in relation to our base humanness, Father Jake stressed that “to be human presumes the ability to love…one of the surest ways of practicing your humanity is to practice unconditional love…at the heart of being virtuous, then, is to love with our will, which is to act humanly.”
Through talks, lectures, and workshops, the MSU Foglio Speaker Series on Spirituality seeks to unpack how spirituality leads to and complicates this commitment to act humanly; it will offer space to consider how spirituality advances individual meaning and collective worldviews, all while attending to global flows of people, cultural knowledge, and religious traditions.
Through broad and far-reaching initiatives, the Speaker Series ultimately aims to understand how spirituality manifests into projects concerned with advancing the social good, pursuing social justice, and enhancing collective commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusivity. In this unique way, while never ignoring the western contexts associated with the word spirituality, as well as its deep rooted connection to religion, the Series follows Ursula King’s challenge to “ask what spirituality does rather than [only] what it is” (The Search for Spirituality).