Elizabeth LIEBERT and Annemarie PAULIN-CAMPBELL. The Spiritual Exercises Reclaimed: Uncovering Liberating Possibilities for Women (Second Edition). New York/Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2022. Pp. xxiv + 359. $34.95 pb. ISBN: 9788-0-8091-5531-6. Reviewed by Tim MULDOON, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467

Over twenty years ago, the first edition of this important book was released. Its goal was to attend to emerging feminist hermeneutics, in order to make possible the recovery of Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises in a manner that enabled contemporary women to experience the grace of God directly, unmediated by antiquated images and a distorted anthropology. The new edition, informed by two generations of women’s experiences of the Exercises, extends that dynamic, with particular attention to the hermeneutics of intersectionality. One of the authors (Liebert), a vowed religious woman, was also a co-author of the first edition, while the other (Paulin-Campbell), a lay woman, is head of the School of Spirituality of the Jesuit Institute South Africa in Johannesburg. They describe their purpose as inviting others “into a direct experience of God, to create parameters within which radical transformation might occur through the action of the Holy Spirit” (xiii).

Chapter 1 identifies problems with the original text of the Exercises which become clear by using the interpretive lens they describe. Chapter 2 focuses on the women of Ignatius’s life, and highlight the important role they played in the development of Ignatius the person and in his early days of giving of the exercises. Chapter 3 focuses on the relationship between the one who gives the exercises and the one who undertakes them, highlighting the very important dynamic that unfolds in that relationship. As one who has given and taught the exercises, I found this section of particular importance, eliciting ideas of how I would want to use it in the context of graduate courses. Chapter 4 is an extended reflection on the Principle and Foundation within a cosmological paradigm, and chapter 5 offers a grounding for understanding prayer itself. Chapters 6-9 attend to the exercises within the four “weeks” of the Exercises, offering an interpretation of them using the hermeneutical principles established in chapter 1. Chapters 10-12 are about discernment, election, and rules for thinking with the Church, respectively. An appendix offers a modern morality play that personifies the dynamics of the Exercises.

I consider this edition to be required reading for those who will give the Exercises, and recommended reading for those who will undertake them. To be sure, there are excellent interpretations and adaptations of the Exercises which the authors are happy to recommend. But in light of the fact that the majority of those undertaking the Exercises are women, and in light of the fact that the history of interpretation and adaptation has been an almost entirely male (not to mention Western) enterprise, this book addresses a significant need. From the beginning, Ignatius of Loyola sought to invite others—including a number of women, whom the authors name in chapter 2— to have a direct, unmediated experience of God, and deployed various methods of reflection, imagination, lectio, meditation, and so on as a kind of spiritual toolkit to aid them.

This book invites readers—women as well as men—to occupy a hermeneutical space in which they approach the Exercises unencumbered by the weight of historically conditioned presuppositions. Chapter 1, with its exploration of a hermeneutic informed by feminist theologians, is now somewhat dated, as its citations are from works of the 1990s and earlier. Still, the particular focus on women’s experience that emerged from those writings offer a needed corrective to unthematized assumptions held by both women and men about the dynamics of the spiritual life and, perhaps just as importantly, the dynamics of relationship between the giver of the exercises and the one undertaking them. With this attuned hermeneutical lens, one can proceed to understand the Exercises with fresh eyes. The authors include multiple testimonies of women who have experienced them, as well as concrete guidelines in a number of chapters for those who would give the exercises.

I intend to use this new edition in graduate courses on Ignatian spirituality, the Spiritual Exercises, and Discernment, and recommend it strongly to others who teach in seminaries, universities, and other adult programs in spirituality.