More Summer Reading

[A new piece by MOJ-friend Greg Kalscheur, SJ.]

"Ignatian Spirituality and the Life of the Lawyer: Finding God in
All Things - Even in the Ordinary Practice of the Law"
Boston College Law School Research Paper No. 95

Contact:

GREGORY A. KALSCHEUR
Boston College - Law School
Email:  [email protected]
Auth-Page:  http://ssrn.com/author=352803

Full Text:  http://ssrn.com/abstract=903161

ABSTRACT: All of us know lawyers who seem unhappy, unfree,
directionless, and disintegrated, who seem to be following paths
they haven't consciously chosen, leading them to places they would
never have chosen to go, seemingly locked in lives they haven't
freely chosen to live. Some would characterize this reality as a
manifestation of a spiritual crisis, a crisis of meaning and value
in the law, rooted in the difficulty lawyers have integrating the
practice of the law into the whole of their lives. This article
argues that the spirituality flowing from the life of Ignatius of
Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, offers resources for
addressing the spiritual crisis afflicting the contemporary legal
profession. Ignatius shows us how to pay attention to God calling
us to freedom and wholeness in the ordinary experience of our
daily lives. The Ignatian understanding of God as one who labors,
who struggles with hard work to bring all things to life,
wholeness, freedom, and integrity, may well resonate with people
whose lives are given over to the hard and rigorous work of
practicing law. Ignatius understands God as one not distant from
our labors in the law. Instead, we are working in the trenches
alongside God who is always already at work in our midst, giving
a "religious density" to our lives as lawyers, and the challenge
for us is to try to discern more clearly how God is at work in us
and around us, so that we can more fully align our labors with
God's. If lawyers today experience a spiritual crisis because
there is a compartmentalizing wall between their faith and their
work, the Ignatian understanding of God might spark the renewal
this crisis calls for, by bringing a new depth of meaning and
integrity to our labors in the ordinary practice of the law.
_______________
mp