The Way is an international journal of contemporary Christian spirituality, published by the Jesuits in Britain. Through writing informed by critical and creative scholarship, it aims to provide a forum in which thoughtful Christians, from different walks of life and different traditions, reflect on God’s continuing action in human experience.
Among particular concerns of The Way are:
The year 2025 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of the renowned Welsh poet R. S. Thomas. His 1975 collection Laboratories of the Spirit, from which the title of this issue is taken, explored the elusive presence of God in the spaces opened up by language. The collection begins with the poem ‘Emerging’, in which he proposes: ‘There are questions we are the solution / to, others whose echoes we must expand / to contain’. Such questions were also envisioned by St Ignatius when he devised a system of formation for novice Jesuits based around a series of practical experiences that would help them to grow into their vocation before God. The articles in this issue show in different ways how literature, language and experience create experimental spaces in which we can attend to the movements of God deep within us.
Ignatius called the experience of the sheer grace of God ‘consolation’, and constrasted it with the ‘desolation’ that results from self-obsession and self- absorption. Explore different ways of understanding and reponding to these ‘movements of the spirits’.
A spiritual conversation is any conversation where God is encountered, from spiritual direction and the Ignatian Exercises themselves to a casual exchange that opens on to deeper meaning and grace. Experience that moment when wonder strikes, energy is found and new horizons are revealed.
What is the relationship between spirituality and psychology: between how we understand and care for the mind, and how we encounter God? And what can spiritual direction, psychotherapy and counselling learn from one another?
The Ignatian Book Service exists to distribute The Way’s own publications and also to bring together in one place related books on Ignatian and spiritual topics that are not always easy to obtain elsewhere.
Mary Ward (1585-1645) was a recusant, an English Catholic living with the threat of persecution. Only in exile could she develop her sense of vocation. It was from that difficult situation that she was inspired to found an institute of religious women modelled on the Society of Jesus. They lived unenclosed, dedicating themselves to education and pastoral care. But the idea was ahead of its time. Church authorities would not allow Mary Ward’s institute to become established, and eventually suppressed it harshly.
Immolata Wetter’s Mary Ward under the Shadow of the Inquisition enhances significantly our understanding of Mary Ward’s conflicts with the papacy. Drawing on newly available material from the Inquisition archives, Sr Immolata traces in detail the most acute phase of the struggle. Mary Ward was creative and tenacious in the pursuit of her vocation, but an innocent when it came to the papal court’s subtleties. For its part the Vatican felt threatened by the questions she was raising, and went to quite extraordinary lengths in restraining her. The clash of cultures and personalities generates a drama that is both striking and moving.
paperback 222pp.