Research Article
Rut Björkman's Spiritual Strategy of Dealing with the Existential Contradiction
Imre Koncsik*
Issue:
Volume 13, Issue 3, September 2025
Pages:
89-94
Received:
28 May 2025
Accepted:
16 June 2025
Published:
4 July 2025
Abstract: Spirituality is not identical to religion, but implies a life in the spirit as a result of a religious experience. Spirituality leads to "spiritual knowledge" in contrast to "intellectual knowledge". It is that "search, practice and experience..., through which the subject makes the necessary changes in himself to gain access to the truth." Primary are of course religion beliefs. They are based on a) an existential experience and b) the existential response to it in the act of faith. Subsequently, whether spirituality - here: by Rut Björkman - does justify the religious experiences of a deep contradiction, will be considered and reflected.
Abstract: Spirituality is not identical to religion, but implies a life in the spirit as a result of a religious experience. Spirituality leads to "spiritual knowledge" in contrast to "intellectual knowledge". It is that "search, practice and experience..., through which the subject makes the necessary changes in himself to gain access to the truth." Primary...
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Commentary
Silences and Solitudes, Between the Human and the Divine
Issue:
Volume 13, Issue 3, September 2025
Pages:
95-98
Received:
4 June 2025
Accepted:
16 June 2025
Published:
7 July 2025
Abstract: The attempts at dialogue, in the 1950s and 1960s, between the journalist Sergio Zavoli and the cloistered nun Maria Teresa offer us the opportunity to dwell on the connections between experiences such as solitude, dialogue, silence, listening. Phenomena on which philosophers such as Aristotle and Hume shed light. In Hume, the Aristotelian philía, based on utility and/or pleasure and/or virtue, is accompanied and almost replaced by that linked to joy and the need to share. And involuntary solitude becomes a painful condition and a torment of the body and soul, a real misfortune. What happens, however, when solitude is voluntary, for example aimed at listening to God? In reality, as the life of Sister Maria Teresa shows, there can be an intimate and fruitful tension between silent conversation with God and interhuman dialogue. She seeks and loves men in God for a long time, then slowly learns to seek and love God in men. Here, among other things, André Neher's intuition is confirmed, according to which dialogue is nourished by both silences and words, sometimes accompanied by a meta-silence dimension, which transcends both. At a certain point, Sister Maria Teresa feels a sort of vertigo: the silence of the cloister is too silent, that isolation risks translating into arid solitude, that silence, more silent than any noise and any silence, becomes an abyss, a chasm, a limit.
Abstract: The attempts at dialogue, in the 1950s and 1960s, between the journalist Sergio Zavoli and the cloistered nun Maria Teresa offer us the opportunity to dwell on the connections between experiences such as solitude, dialogue, silence, listening. Phenomena on which philosophers such as Aristotle and Hume shed light. In Hume, the Aristotelian philía, b...
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