The aim, ultimately, in any discussion about ‘spirituality’ and ‘activism’ is to bring about some form of reconciliation between the ways in which we understand our world and God. The goal is to bring healing to a world that has grown accustomed to an unholy disassociation between spirituality and morality, and to a disciplinary divorce within academia itself of Christian ethics (in Protestant confessions), moral theology (in Roman Catholic circles) and Christian spirituality (in Orthodox theology). We are called –somehow — to close the gap, to hold in tension the stress of fleeing from the world and the anxiety to change the world; to bring together the struggle towards personal holiness and the struggle towards social justice; to reconnect our need for personal salvation and the need for cosmic transformation. The problem is not that spirituality is ‘privatized’ and internalized, or that activism is ‘globalized’ and externalized, but that the two are distinguished from one another in the first place.
— John Chryssavgis, “Orthodox Spirituality and Social Activism: Reclaiming our Vocabulary — Refocusing our Vision,” pg. 130 – 138 in The Orthodox Churches in a Pluralistic World: An Ecumenical Conversation. ed. Emmanuel Clapsis (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2004):131.
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