Spiritual desire and religious practice

Abstract

Abstract This article clarifies the relationship between spiritual desire and religious practice. I outline a philosophical account of practice, and suggest that desire is one of four cornerstones of the concept of practice. I distinguish three kinds of practice – art practice, skill practice, and spiritual practice – which are differentiated by their structures of desire. I argue that ‘spiritual desire’ can be understood as an ‘infinite desire’’, and that spiritual practices offer determinate, embodied, culturally specific ways to express this infinite desire. Within this theoretical framework, I discuss certain salient features of experiences described during my interviews with religious practitioners, showing how these first-person accounts of spiritual desire and religious practice relate to my philosophical analysis.

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