Journal Articles by Simone Kotva
Theory, Culture & Society, 2015
In 1971, Ivan Illich wrote that school had become the world religion of a modernized proletariat.... more In 1971, Ivan Illich wrote that school had become the world religion of a modernized proletariat. Without undoing the power of human interaction undergirding it, understanding how we learn is thus vital to undoing the institutional power of the West – of ‘deschooling’ society. Responding to the conflict between secular and religious schemes of education, the article investigates the ways in which the ‘atheist’ Gilles Deleuze and the ‘mystic’ Simone Weil both employed related stratagems from Stoic philosophy to critique ‘schooling’ construed as the acquisition of, rather than participation in, knowledge. Through a critical reading of the differences between Deleuze's and Weil’s ideas of education, the argument suggests that these differences run aground on the fundamental opposition to a common adversary: that normative pedagogy which trivializes the need to re-school, as well as de-school, society.
Modern Theology, 2016
In 1948, the Catholic philosopher and cultural critic Josef Pieper remarked that modern-7 ity had... more In 1948, the Catholic philosopher and cultural critic Josef Pieper remarked that modern-7 ity had been characterised by a 'Herculean' ethics. 1 Hercules, the hero-god of the 8 ancient Cynics and Stoics, embodied in the Hellenistic world the virtue of effort, self-9 sufficiency and ascetic hardihood, accompanied by that ambiguous maxim: 'pain is a 10 good thing'. 2 For Pieper, this Herculean ethics suggested both Calvinist pessimism and 11 Enlightenment optimism, an impulse towards submission and fatalism on the one 12 hand, and hubristic self-betterment on the other. And indeed, it is possible to trace a 13 genealogy linking humanist, sixteenth-century Neostoicism, to the moral psychology of 14 Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, for whom radical autonomy similarly 15 entailed ascetic submission to a moral law. 3 Nowhere is this genealogy more clearly 16 discernible than in France, once the cradle of Neostoicism. 4 Renewed interest in the 17 ancient school peaked again in the 1980s, when Pierre Hadot produced a novel reading 18 of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations as spiritual exercises and 'way of life', influencing, sub-19 sequently, the later work of Michel Foucault and, more recently, a resurgence of inter-20 est in philosophy as 'therapy'. 5 In this article I shall not be exploring, primarily, the
Critical Survey, 2017
In recent years, theologians have begun to interest themselves in the sacred
yet avowedly non-co... more In recent years, theologians have begun to interest themselves in the sacred
yet avowedly non-confessional nature of much environmental writing, and
the present article addresses this field of enquiry via a critical engagement
with Ken Cockburn and Alex Finlay’s project The Road North (2010–2011).
Appropriating Matsuo Bash¯o’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North to modern
Scotland, Cockburn and Finlay distance their ‘pilgrimage’ from institutional
religion yet engage with a tradition of contemplative practice, from the
spirituality of the Desert Fathers to the manuals of Zen monasticism. In this
article, we will draw on Finlay’s description of his work as ‘non-secular’ to
develop a hermeneutic of the sacred in recent nature poetry. We will argue
that while non-secular engagements with environment may educe forms
of ‘ritual looking’ comparable to those practised by the religious mystic, a
demurral of the ‘end’ and purpose of pilgrimage distinguishes this nonsecular from the theological ‘contemplation of nature’ to which it gestures.
Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, 2019
Not to be imprisoned by the greatest things but to be limited by the smallest, is divine.
Epit... more Not to be imprisoned by the greatest things but to be limited by the smallest, is divine.
Epitaph, St. Ignatius of Loyola
The poetry of Thomas A. Clark is a poetry of attention. It is also a poetry of redemption: ‘Clark invites us to look at the world with attention and to receive in return a form of redemption, a falling away from the self, and a sense of the numinous’. In the 1990s Clark read and took impression from Simone Weil, a philosopher and mystic who also wrote extensively on the redemptive quality of attention. ‘The love of God [has] attention for its substance’, argued Weil, because ‘[t]hose who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention’. Since the 1990s Clark’s work has contained many echoes of Weilian themes, and Clark often describes attention in terms similar or identical to those used by Weil. Yet Weil mostly writes about attention, while Clark attempts also to perform attention with his poetry. Where Weil presents us with a theory of attention, Clark experiments with different techniques of attention and presents us also with a practice of attention. As I will try to show, the most important result of Clark’s experimentation with attention is to challenge the absolute claims which a philosophy of attention may make when it forgets its practice, at the same time as Clark’s experimentation with attention gives to any philosophy of attention its ground and purpose.
International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, 2018
As a postscript to this special issue, the author reflects on the difference between religion and... more As a postscript to this special issue, the author reflects on the difference between religion and ritual by drawing a comparison with culture and nature. In the same way that culture and nature are entangled yet distinct, so too religion and ritual are best understood as a paradoxical configuration of spiritual deliberation and unconscious desire. It is argued that religion and ritual exceed and depend on each other in equal measure as the organism explores new modes of living.
Religions, 2021
Biblical apocalypse has long been a source of contention in environmental criticism. Typically, e... more Biblical apocalypse has long been a source of contention in environmental criticism. Typically, ecocritical readings of Biblical apocalypse rely on a definition of the genre focused on eschatological themes related to species annihilation precipitated by the judgement of the world and the end of time. In this article, we offer an alternative engagement with Biblical apocalypse by drawing on Christopher Rowland and Jolyon Pruszinski’s argument that apocalypse is not necessarily concerned with temporality. Our case study is The Book of Enoch. We compare natural history in Enoch to Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenological analysis of Biblical apocalypse as a way of seeing the world that worries human assumptions about the nature of things and thereby instigates an “anamorphosis” of perception. Following Timothy Morton’s adaptation of Marion’s idea of anamorphosis as an example of the ecological art of attention, we show how apocalypse achieves “anamorphic attention” by encouraging the cultiv...
Worldviews, Oct 19, 2022
This article considers J. G. Ballard’s account of deep time in The Drowned World (1962) from a re... more This article considers J. G. Ballard’s account of deep time in The Drowned World (1962) from a religious perspective. I situate Ballard’s account of deep time in the context of Mircea Eliade’s influential work on the “Real Time” of ecstasy—a time in which humans recognize their indistinctness from the animal and undergo an experience of self-annihilation. But Eliade’s is not the only interpretation of ecstatic temporality that is relevant to Drowned World. I argue that Ballard also narrates a constructive response to deep time that issues not in self-annihilation but in communal action and group living. It is in order to parse this aspect of Ballard’s account of deep time that I turn, in the final part of the article, to consider Drowned World as an anticipation also of more recent, cosmopolitical approaches to ecstatic temporalities by theologians, anthropologists and philosophers.
Philosophical Investigations, Dec 27, 2019
This article argues that Weil's interest in occult and esoteric subjects such as Gnosticism and E... more This article argues that Weil's interest in occult and esoteric subjects such as Gnosticism and Egyptian mystery religion was not an eccentric sideline to an otherwise ‘Christian’ mysticism but emerged necessarily out of her philosophical method, which, quite independently of those texts where Weil deals with esoterica, displays that pathos of hiddenness so characteristic of occultism: the notion, expressed especially clearly in her late work, that philosophy is the search for a truth hidden from the eyes of ordinary persons and accessible only to those able to endure the ordeals required to gain access into its mysteries. In the second part of the argument, I show that Weil's ‘occultism’ was not an isolated phenomenon but symptomatic of broader trends among intellectuals at the time.
PARSE, Nov 1, 2017
In the Faroe Islands, long-standing but now rapidly declining practices of tabooing have governed... more In the Faroe Islands, long-standing but now rapidly declining practices of tabooing have governed the language of fishermen at sea. Based on fieldwork that combines ethnography with intellectual history, this article explores the continuity of this allegedly superstitious practice within the broad framework of Western secularity. In the 1990s, local practices of naming found expression at a national level with the compilation of the first ornithological handbook written entirely in Faroese. The example of this field guide, in which local names were made to conform to scientific nomenclature, is used to interrogate tensions between orality and literacy. Contrary to the tradition that would oppose folk-taxonomy to classical systematics, it is shown that among field observers both practices of naming are used simultaneously, and, frequently, non-competitively. Through these and other examples it is argued that what is at stake in practices of naming is a habit of paying attention to the environment, premised not on lexical expertise or ideas of knowledge but on a singular hedonism of taking pleasure in the thing named. It is the cultivation of this habit that is proposed as the critical foundation and future purpose of any planetary consciousness.
St. Sunniva: Norwegian Journal for Feminist Theology, 2022
This article is about traditional magic and the close relationship between traditional magic and ... more This article is about traditional magic and the close relationship between traditional magic and earth ethics. Traditional magic is a very broad term; the practices studied here are situated in post-Reformation Fenno-Scandinavia, where Christianity is a significant factor. Here, traditional magic shows influence from both Christian (Catholic as well as Protestant) and pre-Christian (Norse as well as Sámi) thought worlds, and is characterized by a deep rootedness in the environment, which has been perceived historically as a living source of knowledge by practitioners. While it is fairly common today to see anthropologists linking traditional magic to ecology, it is rare to see theologians making the same connections; in this piece, I present a first theological reading of traditional magic as an ecological art.
Poetry by Simone Kotva
Radical Orthodoxy Theology Philosophy Politics, Nov 20, 2014
Radical Orthodoxy Theology Philosophy Politics, Feb 20, 2014
Book chapters by Simone Kotva
Political Geology, 2018
Without a doubt, the most remarkable consequence of the recent proposal to name our current geolo... more Without a doubt, the most remarkable consequence of the recent proposal to name our current geological epoch the Anthropocene is the philosophical inquiry it has yielded. For what is at stake in the ‘epoch of the human’ is not, as would first appear, the task of exposing the scandal of human exploitation of planetary resources over the past century (though it is this too) but to expose, as scandalous, the very nature of human agency as such (Latour in New Literary Hist. 45: 71–81, 2014). The Anthropocene tells a story about causality, of how human beings have caused the earth’s atmospheric composition to change. That human beings have been instrumental in causing climate change few would now deny, yet attempts to account for how this causality is distributed repeatedly fail. As critics are beginning to realise, to claim that the guilt is collective, applying to humanity as a species, is absurd, for in developing nations many are without substantial carbon footprints, and even in the...
The Resounding Soul , Sep 29, 2016
Dresden, the winter of 1828–29. In the final months of a life not
wanting in notoriety, Friedric... more Dresden, the winter of 1828–29. In the final months of a life not
wanting in notoriety, Friedrich Schlegel (born 1772) delivers a set
of curious lectures “concerning in particular the philosophy of language
and words.” They are the third part of a trilogy, collectively christened the
Philosophy of Life (Philosophie des Lebens), which argues that the Divine
telos of the soul, “the full and living centre of consciousness,” lies in the
restoration of the imago Dei. Despite this stolid appeal to doctrine, Schlegel’s
late Philosophy of Life has caused continual embarrassment for scholars of
Romanticism, focusing the eye on its apparent heterodoxy with regard to a
professed Catholicism, coupled with its enthrallment to a “Christian-vitalist
occultism.” This has contributed to the unfortunate neglect of a significant
chapter in the philosophical theology of “high” German Romanticism.
New Directions in Science and Theology: Beyond Dialogue, Jan 5, 2022
My purpose here is to examine the field in which science and theology
work together, a topic whi... more My purpose here is to examine the field in which science and theology
work together, a topic which seems to me important and urgent, although
ignored in much of the literature, and at the same time to attempt a few
constructive proposals for a future co-existence of the disciplines—a future
that would be, at the same time and without contradiction, a future of
planetary co-existence.
Science and theology are academic disciplines but like all such disciplines
they do not encounter one another only in institutions or within the four
walls of conference rooms, nor are the discussions, debates, and exchanges
between them merely a scholarly affair. Science and theology meet also and
first of all in those places and communities in which intellectual discourse
finds itself embedded and on which it is sustained. Today those places
and communities face uncertain futures. The relative climatic stability of the
Holocene has given way to the extreme weather events and geopolitical
instabilities of the current epoch, which Paul Crutzen and others have
christened the “Anthropocene,” but which Donna Haraway has named the
“Chthulucene”—a name which hints at the strangeness of what is to come.3
In this epoch much will depend on the willingness and ability of the disciplines not only to respond adequately to one another—addressing that
perennial excitement of scholars, the “interdisciplinary dialogue”—but to
respond collectively to the uncertainties that shoot up, and to work together
as we discover new ways of living, dying, and making do.
This idea, which is also held by Isabelle Stengers and a great many other
environmental writers, is considered by Amitav Ghosh to have particular
relevance for the discipline of theology. His seminal lectures, The Great
Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), observe that
religious communities provide at present the largest transnational flow of
organisations on the planet—and suggest that religion thus needs to be a
key collaborator in coming attempts to coordinate timely climate activism.5
This question deserves extensive study. For the moment, I will remark
simply that if theology’s promise to be a discipline to work with in uncertain times is to be found in the field its practitioners frequent, then that
field is where the question of theology “and” the disciplines must begin.
Habit and the History of Philosophy, Jul 14, 2022
Animism and Ornitheology, 2024
What divides God from the living, material world if the latter is considered to be more-than-huma... more What divides God from the living, material world if the latter is considered to be more-than-human? Animism is a concept that has been used to describe the eco-spirituality of contemporary nature writers, and, in this chapter, I apply animism in order to interpret the descriptions of place in the writings of the Swedish ornithologist and author of literary non-fiction, Paul Rosenius (1865–1957). The chapter ends with an in-depth comparison of the “Christian animism” of Rosenius and the remarks on animism made by his more well-known contemporary in England, ornithologist and nature writer William Henry Hudson (1841–1922).
Monographs by Simone Kotva
Effort and Grace: On the Spiritual Exercise of Philosophy, Jun 25, 2020
Philosophy and theology have long harboured contradictory views on spiritual practice. While phil... more Philosophy and theology have long harboured contradictory views on spiritual practice. While philosophy advocates the therapeutic benefits of daily meditation, the theology of grace promotes an ideal of happiness bestowed with little effort. As such, the historical juxtaposition of effort and grace grounding modern spiritual exercise can be seen as the essential tension between the secular and sacred.
In Effort and Grace, Simone Kotva explores an exciting new theory of spiritual endeavour from the tradition of French spiritualist philosophy. Spiritual exercise has largely been studied in relation to ancient philosophy and the Ignatian tradition, yet Kotva’s new engagement with its more recent forms has alerted her to an understanding of contemplative practice as rife with critical potential.
Here, she offers an interdisciplinary text tracing the narrative of spiritual exertion through the work of seminal French thinkers such as Maine de Biran, Félix Ravaisson, Henri Bergson, Alain (Émile Chartier), Simone Weil and Gilles Deleuze. Her findings allow both secular philosophers and theologians to understand how the spiritual life can participate in the contemporary philosophical conversation.
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Journal Articles by Simone Kotva
yet avowedly non-confessional nature of much environmental writing, and
the present article addresses this field of enquiry via a critical engagement
with Ken Cockburn and Alex Finlay’s project The Road North (2010–2011).
Appropriating Matsuo Bash¯o’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North to modern
Scotland, Cockburn and Finlay distance their ‘pilgrimage’ from institutional
religion yet engage with a tradition of contemplative practice, from the
spirituality of the Desert Fathers to the manuals of Zen monasticism. In this
article, we will draw on Finlay’s description of his work as ‘non-secular’ to
develop a hermeneutic of the sacred in recent nature poetry. We will argue
that while non-secular engagements with environment may educe forms
of ‘ritual looking’ comparable to those practised by the religious mystic, a
demurral of the ‘end’ and purpose of pilgrimage distinguishes this nonsecular from the theological ‘contemplation of nature’ to which it gestures.
Epitaph, St. Ignatius of Loyola
The poetry of Thomas A. Clark is a poetry of attention. It is also a poetry of redemption: ‘Clark invites us to look at the world with attention and to receive in return a form of redemption, a falling away from the self, and a sense of the numinous’. In the 1990s Clark read and took impression from Simone Weil, a philosopher and mystic who also wrote extensively on the redemptive quality of attention. ‘The love of God [has] attention for its substance’, argued Weil, because ‘[t]hose who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention’. Since the 1990s Clark’s work has contained many echoes of Weilian themes, and Clark often describes attention in terms similar or identical to those used by Weil. Yet Weil mostly writes about attention, while Clark attempts also to perform attention with his poetry. Where Weil presents us with a theory of attention, Clark experiments with different techniques of attention and presents us also with a practice of attention. As I will try to show, the most important result of Clark’s experimentation with attention is to challenge the absolute claims which a philosophy of attention may make when it forgets its practice, at the same time as Clark’s experimentation with attention gives to any philosophy of attention its ground and purpose.
Poetry by Simone Kotva
Book chapters by Simone Kotva
wanting in notoriety, Friedrich Schlegel (born 1772) delivers a set
of curious lectures “concerning in particular the philosophy of language
and words.” They are the third part of a trilogy, collectively christened the
Philosophy of Life (Philosophie des Lebens), which argues that the Divine
telos of the soul, “the full and living centre of consciousness,” lies in the
restoration of the imago Dei. Despite this stolid appeal to doctrine, Schlegel’s
late Philosophy of Life has caused continual embarrassment for scholars of
Romanticism, focusing the eye on its apparent heterodoxy with regard to a
professed Catholicism, coupled with its enthrallment to a “Christian-vitalist
occultism.” This has contributed to the unfortunate neglect of a significant
chapter in the philosophical theology of “high” German Romanticism.
work together, a topic which seems to me important and urgent, although
ignored in much of the literature, and at the same time to attempt a few
constructive proposals for a future co-existence of the disciplines—a future
that would be, at the same time and without contradiction, a future of
planetary co-existence.
Science and theology are academic disciplines but like all such disciplines
they do not encounter one another only in institutions or within the four
walls of conference rooms, nor are the discussions, debates, and exchanges
between them merely a scholarly affair. Science and theology meet also and
first of all in those places and communities in which intellectual discourse
finds itself embedded and on which it is sustained. Today those places
and communities face uncertain futures. The relative climatic stability of the
Holocene has given way to the extreme weather events and geopolitical
instabilities of the current epoch, which Paul Crutzen and others have
christened the “Anthropocene,” but which Donna Haraway has named the
“Chthulucene”—a name which hints at the strangeness of what is to come.3
In this epoch much will depend on the willingness and ability of the disciplines not only to respond adequately to one another—addressing that
perennial excitement of scholars, the “interdisciplinary dialogue”—but to
respond collectively to the uncertainties that shoot up, and to work together
as we discover new ways of living, dying, and making do.
This idea, which is also held by Isabelle Stengers and a great many other
environmental writers, is considered by Amitav Ghosh to have particular
relevance for the discipline of theology. His seminal lectures, The Great
Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), observe that
religious communities provide at present the largest transnational flow of
organisations on the planet—and suggest that religion thus needs to be a
key collaborator in coming attempts to coordinate timely climate activism.5
This question deserves extensive study. For the moment, I will remark
simply that if theology’s promise to be a discipline to work with in uncertain times is to be found in the field its practitioners frequent, then that
field is where the question of theology “and” the disciplines must begin.
Monographs by Simone Kotva
In Effort and Grace, Simone Kotva explores an exciting new theory of spiritual endeavour from the tradition of French spiritualist philosophy. Spiritual exercise has largely been studied in relation to ancient philosophy and the Ignatian tradition, yet Kotva’s new engagement with its more recent forms has alerted her to an understanding of contemplative practice as rife with critical potential.
Here, she offers an interdisciplinary text tracing the narrative of spiritual exertion through the work of seminal French thinkers such as Maine de Biran, Félix Ravaisson, Henri Bergson, Alain (Émile Chartier), Simone Weil and Gilles Deleuze. Her findings allow both secular philosophers and theologians to understand how the spiritual life can participate in the contemporary philosophical conversation.
yet avowedly non-confessional nature of much environmental writing, and
the present article addresses this field of enquiry via a critical engagement
with Ken Cockburn and Alex Finlay’s project The Road North (2010–2011).
Appropriating Matsuo Bash¯o’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North to modern
Scotland, Cockburn and Finlay distance their ‘pilgrimage’ from institutional
religion yet engage with a tradition of contemplative practice, from the
spirituality of the Desert Fathers to the manuals of Zen monasticism. In this
article, we will draw on Finlay’s description of his work as ‘non-secular’ to
develop a hermeneutic of the sacred in recent nature poetry. We will argue
that while non-secular engagements with environment may educe forms
of ‘ritual looking’ comparable to those practised by the religious mystic, a
demurral of the ‘end’ and purpose of pilgrimage distinguishes this nonsecular from the theological ‘contemplation of nature’ to which it gestures.
Epitaph, St. Ignatius of Loyola
The poetry of Thomas A. Clark is a poetry of attention. It is also a poetry of redemption: ‘Clark invites us to look at the world with attention and to receive in return a form of redemption, a falling away from the self, and a sense of the numinous’. In the 1990s Clark read and took impression from Simone Weil, a philosopher and mystic who also wrote extensively on the redemptive quality of attention. ‘The love of God [has] attention for its substance’, argued Weil, because ‘[t]hose who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention’. Since the 1990s Clark’s work has contained many echoes of Weilian themes, and Clark often describes attention in terms similar or identical to those used by Weil. Yet Weil mostly writes about attention, while Clark attempts also to perform attention with his poetry. Where Weil presents us with a theory of attention, Clark experiments with different techniques of attention and presents us also with a practice of attention. As I will try to show, the most important result of Clark’s experimentation with attention is to challenge the absolute claims which a philosophy of attention may make when it forgets its practice, at the same time as Clark’s experimentation with attention gives to any philosophy of attention its ground and purpose.
wanting in notoriety, Friedrich Schlegel (born 1772) delivers a set
of curious lectures “concerning in particular the philosophy of language
and words.” They are the third part of a trilogy, collectively christened the
Philosophy of Life (Philosophie des Lebens), which argues that the Divine
telos of the soul, “the full and living centre of consciousness,” lies in the
restoration of the imago Dei. Despite this stolid appeal to doctrine, Schlegel’s
late Philosophy of Life has caused continual embarrassment for scholars of
Romanticism, focusing the eye on its apparent heterodoxy with regard to a
professed Catholicism, coupled with its enthrallment to a “Christian-vitalist
occultism.” This has contributed to the unfortunate neglect of a significant
chapter in the philosophical theology of “high” German Romanticism.
work together, a topic which seems to me important and urgent, although
ignored in much of the literature, and at the same time to attempt a few
constructive proposals for a future co-existence of the disciplines—a future
that would be, at the same time and without contradiction, a future of
planetary co-existence.
Science and theology are academic disciplines but like all such disciplines
they do not encounter one another only in institutions or within the four
walls of conference rooms, nor are the discussions, debates, and exchanges
between them merely a scholarly affair. Science and theology meet also and
first of all in those places and communities in which intellectual discourse
finds itself embedded and on which it is sustained. Today those places
and communities face uncertain futures. The relative climatic stability of the
Holocene has given way to the extreme weather events and geopolitical
instabilities of the current epoch, which Paul Crutzen and others have
christened the “Anthropocene,” but which Donna Haraway has named the
“Chthulucene”—a name which hints at the strangeness of what is to come.3
In this epoch much will depend on the willingness and ability of the disciplines not only to respond adequately to one another—addressing that
perennial excitement of scholars, the “interdisciplinary dialogue”—but to
respond collectively to the uncertainties that shoot up, and to work together
as we discover new ways of living, dying, and making do.
This idea, which is also held by Isabelle Stengers and a great many other
environmental writers, is considered by Amitav Ghosh to have particular
relevance for the discipline of theology. His seminal lectures, The Great
Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), observe that
religious communities provide at present the largest transnational flow of
organisations on the planet—and suggest that religion thus needs to be a
key collaborator in coming attempts to coordinate timely climate activism.5
This question deserves extensive study. For the moment, I will remark
simply that if theology’s promise to be a discipline to work with in uncertain times is to be found in the field its practitioners frequent, then that
field is where the question of theology “and” the disciplines must begin.
In Effort and Grace, Simone Kotva explores an exciting new theory of spiritual endeavour from the tradition of French spiritualist philosophy. Spiritual exercise has largely been studied in relation to ancient philosophy and the Ignatian tradition, yet Kotva’s new engagement with its more recent forms has alerted her to an understanding of contemplative practice as rife with critical potential.
Here, she offers an interdisciplinary text tracing the narrative of spiritual exertion through the work of seminal French thinkers such as Maine de Biran, Félix Ravaisson, Henri Bergson, Alain (Émile Chartier), Simone Weil and Gilles Deleuze. Her findings allow both secular philosophers and theologians to understand how the spiritual life can participate in the contemporary philosophical conversation.