Emily is Campion’s JRF in Spiritual Practice, a fellowship focusing on Ignatian spirituality both conceptually and in action. On the practice side, Emily offers spiritual direction (ongoing and during retreats) and is part of the Hall’s team in providing Ignatian formation. Her research concerns spirituality and literature, both their relationship to each other and also as distinctive disciplines. Her interest in spirituality is particularly in terms of spirituality as operating at a profounder level than religious identity, not because the two are disconnected (often they aren’t), but because spirituality gives us the opportunity to focus on ‘how’ as constitutive of ‘what’. For instance, a question that is genuinely spiritual may not ask what you believe, but will help you explore the live issues in your life at present and how you respond, as well as how your religious or spiritual practice, if any, fits in. This move from the ‘what’ of substance to the ‘how’ of relationship and attitude is a core part of Emily’s work.
Most of Emily’s research centres in some way or another on verbal agency, the capacity of language to open up conceptual and emotional and imaginative spaces in our thinking and perceiving, in our bodies and how we move through time and place, in our relationships to ourselves, each other, and the world. She is particularly interested in the ways literature might open such spaces in our political, ethical, and spiritual lives — spaces which politics, ethics, and spirituality themselves, as they are broadly conceived of in shared culture, tend not to hold room for. Emily’s first book, Experiencing Ways Through Words: on our relationship with language (and so literature), concerns language as something we relate to and experience as well as use. The book is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan.
Currently Emily is working on projects on Ignatian discernment and on the various modes of giving the Spiritual Exercises (e.g., in daily life, on a silent retreat, etc.), and on the ‘bodiliness’ of Hopkins’s imagination. Beneath these is her ongoing fascination with Ignatius and literary thinking, and she is especially interested in Ignatius’s approach as exemplifying a ‘way of proceeding’ that has much in common with what we could broadly call a ‘literary’ one: open; flexible; exploratory; process- and not ends-oriented; directional; relational; perspectival; attentive to atmosphere and placement and context and rhythm and momentum; interested in the human person as a whole (body, heart, soul, mind); fundamentally desiring; emotive and reflective; contemplative and active; stirring; hopeful; facing reality; imagining possibilities.
Emily also writes creatively, and her book Body Tectonic, a work of ‘news poetry’ on Lebanon’s economic crisis, is forthcoming with Broken Sleep Books.
