Laurie Cassidy – författare

Why do the Spiritual Exercises not change us as deeply as we hope? This is the haunting question that was raised at the recent general congregation of the Jesuits about Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises and the question the contributors to this book explore and attempt to answer in the context of ongoing racial injustice in the United States. All of us who love and are engaged in Ignatian spirituality must also ask ourselves this same question. Contributors explore this question by examining how “color-blindness racism” determines our interpretation of the Spiritual Exercises in the United States. Animated by the grace of Ignatius's conversion experience these spiritual directors, theologians, and leaders in Jesuit ministries offer insightful scholarly and creative pastoral engagement of the Spiritual Exercises for the ongoing journey of conversion from racism and white supremacy in the United States. Contributors Include:       - Maka Black Elk (Oglala Lakota)       - Laurie Cassidy       - Matthew J. Cressler       - Paulina Delgadillo       - Elise Gower       - Armando Guerrero Estrada       - Jeannine Hill Fletcher       - Ken Homan, SJ       - Alex Mikulich       - Maria Teresa Morgan       - Marilyn L. Nash       - Maureen H. O'Connell       - Hung T. Pham, SJ       - Christopher Pramuk       - Andrew Prevot       - Patrick Saint-Jean, SJ       - Justin T. White

The idea and ideal of "beauty" has been used to oppress women of different ages, body types, skin color, and physical ability. The theoretical discussion of aesthetics has also been conditioned by these same dynamics of power and oppression. In She Who Imagines, a diverse set of scholars challenges the exclusion and false definitions while constructing capacious ideas that discover beauty in unexpected places.

In these essays, the authors draw on a variety of arts media-painting, photography, portraiture, craftwork, poetry, and hip-hop music-thereby joining beauty to truth and, in a richly defining way, to the practice of justice. In a variety of ways all the essays link women's definitions of beauty with experiences of suffering and hence with the yearning for justice. All clearly prize resistance to degradation as an essential element of thought.