Heythrop College has a thriving research student community, with around 35 students spread across the three departments. The descriptions of research projects given on this page provide a sense of the wide range of interests among the current student body of the Pastoral and Social Studies department. Many students are attached to one of our Centres or Institutes, where appropriate.

William Andrews
Mark Barrett 
Roderick Campbell Guion
Anthony Doe
Veronica Fulton
Sahaya Gnanaselvam
Sheila Grimwood  
Stefan Reynolds
Martine Thompson
Helena Walsh

This study seeks to explain the presence in the writings of Fr. Augustine Baker of two apparently contradictory views about the need for contemplative religious to read spiritual books as guides. In his Cambrai treatises Baker teaches the need for well-informed spiritual texts to guide the contemplative, but he also claims that books are unnecessary because an internal “divine call” can direct the aspirant.      

The Cambrai treatises were written by Baker between 1627 and 1632 for the English nuns of Our Lady of Consolation, Cambrai, to supplement the inadequate library of that newly founded monastery. They comprise original compositions on aspects of prayer and monastic ascesis, translations of significant spiritual writers and collections of passages from a wide range of contemplative authors. After Baker’s death a rewritten systematic digest of his works entitled Sancta Sophia was published in 1657. For almost four hundred years this book has been taken to represent the spiritual teachings of Augustine Baker, and his work at Cambrai has been understood in the light of both its contents and its form of presentation.

However, Baker never set out to create an original conspectus of contemplative spirituality, but rather through both his writings and his teaching of the nuns of Cambrai to mediate to a newly established community of very young women those aspects of the tradition of apophatic affective prayer he judged most necessary to their flourishing. The publication in modern editions of Baker’s texts allows his original project to be seen in a new light.

Baker saw spiritual reading as in many respects foundational to the contemplative life, and hence the amount of effort he devoted to creating the treatises. He intended that the library he created for the Cambrai community should furnish them, through their monastic practice of spiritual reading, with continuing guidance and spiritual formation after he was no longer personally on hand to assist them. But he also comes close to dismissing the value of religious books, teaching that God himself could guide the soul directly, and that spiritual texts, unless informed by this divine guidance, could be misleading or even harmful. Baker himself never resolved the potential tension between these two positions.

This study finds that Baker’s approach to spiritual reading is closely related to the practice of lectio spiritualis, in which both scriptural and other religious texts are read in order to generate interior affective motions of the soul. His spirituality is informed by the perspective of the affective Dionysian mystical tradition, which prioritises the interior faculty of the will over that of the intellect. Taken together, these two contexts account for, but do not resolve, the disjunction between the two aspects of Baker’s teaching on religious reading.

'Trinitarian Relationality: A study of the mysticism of Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity'

Elisabeth of the Trinity was a French Carmelite nun who died of Addison's disease in 1906 at the age of 26. In 1901 Elisabeth set aside a potentially promising career as a concert pianist to fulfil a vocation to Carmel that she had felt since the age of 7.

Elizabeth wrote four short powerful testaments in the terminal stages of her suffering. These, taken with other surviving writings, express a Trinitarian doctrine rich in the language of the western mystical tradition. I hope my study will help to develop a better understanding of her position within that tradition.

Character strengths as mediators in mindfulness based intervention for recovery from addictive behaviour: a study in psychology of religion and positive psychology

The objective of this PhD project (now nearing completion) was to elucidate the increasing association between spirituality and recovery from addiction, and to identify the mediators of the association within a viable theoretical framework.

Given that there are a lot of parallels between the constructs of spirituality as explored within psychology of religion, particularly in spirituality-addiction literature, and the list of character strengths in Positive psychology, Values in Action (VIA) was used as the theoretical framework.  A systematic literature review of spirituality-addiction literature yielded a list of salient character strengths.  A conceptual model was developed predicting that the boosting up of the salient character strengths would facilitate recovery from addiction.  The model was tested by a two part empirical study carried out in Nairobi, Kenya.  The first part looked at the correlation between addiction and character strengths.  The second part was an intervention study to test the efficacy of Christian Mindfulness to boost up the character strengths and reduce addiction.  The correlation data supported the model to some extent.  Though the quantitative data from the intervention produced few significant results, the case studies show some interesting patterns.  The results suggest that the VIA Inventory may not actually present the best measurement to address the association, still character strengths could provide a conceptually meaningful framework.

'Attitudes to the Body in Fourteenth Century English Mystical Literature'
 
I am looking at the writings of Richard Rolle, the Cloud of Unknowing,  Walter Hilton and Julian of Norwich to show that late medieval mystical writing is not 'anti body' as popular and some scholarly perceptions have seen it. In fact it seems clear from these writings that there is an active concern to make sense of the body as an important part of the spiritual life. Far from accepting a dualistic anthropology the concern of these writers is toward the integration of the human person where the body is as much a place for the encounter with God as the soul.