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Spiritual desire and religious practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2019

CLARE CARLISLE
CLARE CARLISLE*
Affiliation:
King's College London, London WC2R 2LS
*
e-mail: clare.carlisle@kcl.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article clarifies the relationship between spiritual desire and religious practice. I outline a philosophical account of practice, and suggest that desire is one of four cornerstones of the concept of practice. I distinguish three kinds of practice – art practice, skill practice, and spiritual practice – which are differentiated by their structures of desire. I argue that ‘spiritual desire’ can be understood as an ‘infinite desire’’, and that spiritual practices offer determinate, embodied, culturally specific ways to express this infinite desire. Within this theoretical framework, I discuss certain salient features of experiences described during my interviews with religious practitioners, showing how these first-person accounts of spiritual desire and religious practice relate to my philosophical analysis.

Type
Original Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 55 , Special Issue 3: Religious Experience and Desire , September 2019 , pp. 429 - 446
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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