I am a Latino, a Franciscan and a spiritualogian. Most people know what a Franciscan is, but very few have heard the term spiritualogian. I coined the word about 24 years ago, around 2002, to distinguish theologians who specialize in spirituality from those working more broadly in spiritual theology. As I wrote in Beyond Piety, "Spiritualogians are scholars dedicated to the advancement of the academic discipline known as spirituality" (p. 3).

To be clear, spiritualogians are Christian theologians, not anthropologists, psychologists, or sociologists. That distinction matters. Spirituality is studied across all of those fields, but each approaches it with different methods and goals. Spiritualogians are not primarily interested in analyzing spirituality as a social or psychological phenomenon. Our concern is the spiritual growth, formation, and development of the Christian faithful.

Michael Downey, in Understanding Christian Spirituality (1997), offers a helpful framework. He describes spirituality in three ways: first, as an existential reality grounded in personal experience; second, as communal, shaped by religious traditions and often embodied in saints and exemplary figures; and third, as a field that can be studied in an academic or scientific way.

Of course, not everyone is called to study spirituality academically. But some of us are. Among scholars, there is no full agreement on whether spirituality is best understood as a science or simply as an academic discipline. Often, the difference comes down to emphasis; some prefer the precision implied by "science," while others are more comfortable with the broader category of academic study.

I must admit, though, that words like "scientific" and "academic" can sometimes feel as if they drain the Spirit right out of spirituality. For that reason, I have increasingly begun to think of Christian spirituality as an art.

The Capuchin friar Ignacio Larrañaga, writing on prayer, describes prayer itself as an art. Like any art, it requires discipline, practice, and sustained study, but it is also, at its core, a gift, a grace. The same, I would argue, is true of spirituality itself.

There is an ancient insight from the Toltecs of Mexico: the true theologian is an artist. It is the artist who, through painting, sculpture, and music, can communicate something of God to the soul in ways that abstract theological writing often cannot. Talent plays a role; it cannot simply be taught. But it can be cultivated over time through sustained attention and practice.

And yet art is not opposed to study it is itself a discipline. Artists learn by studying the masters, by analyzing form, balance, color, and structure, so that their own work might deepen and mature. In a similar way, growth in the spiritual life depends on both grace and formation. One becomes a person of spiritual depth through learning, practice, and engagement with the great spiritual movements and figures of the past, as well as the living witnesses of the present.

So yes, spirituality can be studied. It has existential, communal, and academic dimensions. But more than anything, it is a self-implicating art. It is a kind of painting in which the artist does not stand outside the work, but places himself or herself onto the living canvas of the Gospel and tradition. In this way it becomes socio-implicating as well improving the world and building up the Reign of God.

Would that all of us might learn to become such artists!