A comprehensive resource for understanding the various components of spiritual direction
Early mystics of the Near East and northern Africa created the monastic traditions and were the first psychologists, exploring various practices to test the human capacity. In medieval times, spiritual direction was common in the Roman Catholic monastic traditions. It extended significantly into Protestant Christianity in the late twentieth century by predominantly white and affluent organizations. Spiritual direction has progressively become a global, multireligious, and interfaith practice.
This book is a comprehensive and concise text from a spiritual director of color, offering inclusive resources and tools to spiritual directors of many faiths and for people of diverse cultures and traditions. Core skills such a deep listening, hospitality, and discernment are presented with cutting-edge lessons on internal liberation, systemic trauma, and imaginative discovery. Spiritual direction is taught by more than 100 educational institutions and spirituality centers in the United States alone, but typical curriculum generally does not reflect current cultural reality and growing diversity. This is a textbook for anyone who studies spiritual direction as both preparation for and deepening of their calling.
“This is what has been missing from my canon of spirituality books since I began working as a spiritual director over twenty years ago! . . . Kaleidoscope is a breath of fresh air, courtesy of one of the most well-known and respected spiritual guides
writing today, Ineda Pearl Adesanya.”
— Teresa Blythe, director of the Hesychia School of Spiritual Direction at the Redemptorist Renewal Center in Tucson, Arizona
“What Ineda Pearl Adesanya and her collaborators have accomplished is remarkable: a volume that is at once a basic introductory textbook for spiritual directors in formation and, at the same time, one that reveals the art and practice of spiritual direction as seen and experienced by people of color.”
— John R. Mabry, PhD, director of the Interfaith Spiritual Direction Certificate Program at the Chaplaincy Institute, Berkeley, California
“Comprehensive in scope and accessible in style, Kaleidoscope offers a hopeful look at the rainbow-colored future of spiritual direction.”
— Arthur Holder, professor of Christian spirituality, the Graduate Theological Union
“As a professor of spirituality and spiritual direction, I am eager to share this book with those who are being formed as directors.”
— Susan S. Phillips, PhD, executive director and professor of spirituality at New College Berkeley
