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The Spirituality of African Peoples: The Search for a Common Moral Discourse (review)

134 spiritual life, both early and recent, has often been mesmerized by the modern self and its self-actualizing will and its developmental self-transcendence, Williams reaches beyond that conception entirely. He re-discovers a true soul that never was locked away in private interiority but has always been the growing agency that flourishes in practicing the various relations with others that constitute human life. In Williams’s perceptive account, these patterns of human relationality yield, in the last chapter, a fragile yet unmistakable hint of the embracing divine relationality within which all agency and otherhood and soul may spring to life. By drawing attention so perceptively to the concrete practices that shape and inform the way we relate to one another, Williams provides a crucial thickening to any study of spirituality. There is so much else in the book beyond what this review has noted. Williams provides deft and searching thoughts on an extensive range of issues and concerns as they relate to his topics: children’s literature, the ambiguous depths of choosing and willing, school reform, mourning and remorse as opposed to victimage and guilt, vulnerability and the comic, media manipulation, political scandal, ethnic and religious conflict, psychotherapy—to name only a sampling. The work could certainly be recommended to nonreligious friends or colleagues as a thoughtful way of opening up conversation about the many deep issues we all face in new ways since last September. It would also be of enormous value in upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in theology, spirituality, or, more generally, in any courses considering the moral dimensions of contemporary life. It would be of considerable assistance also to all those collaborating in various ways in the work of spiritual formation and direction. What is lost when we lose the skill of being present patiently with and in the other? Mistrust and violence grow up in the empty lot of atomized desires. What is lost, he claims,