Dr. Aaron T. Hollander is Executive Director of Graymoor Ecumenical & Interreligious Institute, Editor of Ecumenical Trends, and Adjunct Faculty in Theology at Fordham University. He is a scholar of theology and culture with his PhD from the University of Chicago. He serves on the steering committee of the Ecclesiological Investigations International Research Network, the board of the North American Academy of Ecumenists, and the summer faculty of the Centro Pro Unione in Rome. His research focuses on the lived dynamics of ecumenical and interreligious conflict, the aesthetic texture and political power of holiness, and the circulation of theological understanding beyond explicitly religious settings. His first book, Saint George Liberator: Hagiography as Resistance in the Modern Mediterranean (Fordham, 2026), is a historical-ethnographic study of Orthodox Christian hagiography amidst cultural and political domination.
“Spiritual ecumenism” has occupied an uncertain place in the interchurch endeavors of the last sixty years, since the Vatican II council fathers described prayer as “the soul of the whole ecumenical movement,” along with the “change of heart and holiness of life” that enable “mutual fraternal love” among Christians separated by ecclesiology, morality, or identity.1 In the ecumenical boomtimes of the 1970s and 1980s, concern for intellectual exchange and collaborative social action outweighed the attention given to spirituality or even common worship, which prevailingly occupied a support role in filling the spiritual cup, so to speak, of Christian leaders who could then be refreshed for the exoteric work of ecumenism. Even in the early twenty-first century, with grassroots ecumenical methods and venues coming increasingly into view as institutional support for interchurch exchange has thinned, concerns for rectifying our shared understanding and aligning our shared labor have overwhelmed concerns for realigning the character of our identity toward and in relation to others (particularly those others whose otherness – whose wrongness! – has significantly shaped our own self-understanding). And yet, what Paul Murray and Susan Durber have called an “ecumenism of the heart” is making significant new inroads in our present moment of soul-searching (some would say hand-wringing) about the future of ecumenism, at a time when Christian institutions are unsure of the meaning and merit of the last century’s patterns of conciliar ecumenism.2
Following the conversations leading up to the 11th General Assembly of the World Council of Churches, in Karlsruhe, Germany, Durber observed that WCC leadership had identified and committed to the need for a “realignment of the heart” as a necessary component of sustaining both the search for doctrinal alignment and the collaborative social action that had animated so much ecumenical endeavor in recent years. We cannot prioritize orthodoxy or orthopraxy at the expense of what she called orthokardia: a change of heart toward one another, particularly toward those whom we fear or disdain, in search of a new quality of relationship more fundamental than the fruits of that relationship.3 But changes of heart are neither easy nor automatic: “although the impetus for this movement may indeed be Christ’s love, it will not sweep us along into perfect harmony without our cooperation; even a profound conversion needs to be sustained by our behavior, our habits, and our institutions.”4
In this editorial I consider (1) why spiritual ecumenism remains vitally important for the future of the church, and (2) what is needed for this “ecumenism of the heart” to be transformative rather than tranquillizing. My appeal is that the ecumenical spirituality we need to cultivate today and tomorrow depends not only on opportunities for shared prayer and common worship, but also on reimagining and mobilizing the treasury of early Christian ascetical traditions: those which provide a training ground for strengthening the heart and uprooting its poisonous dispositions that distort our perception of others.
One of the basic problems with “spirituality” as a category of Christian formation or ecumenical engagement is that it too easily becomes a platitude, too interiorized and too individualized.
One of the basic problems with “spirituality” as a category of Christian formation or ecumenical engagement is that it too easily becomes a platitude: too interiorized and too individualized. “Spiritual” ecumenism can quickly become coded either as a substitute for more difficult paths of peacemaking (in the sense of coming together “spiritually” because we cannot yet be “actually” united) or as an opportunity to temporarily “feel” united without adequately grasping what such feelings might have to do with becoming more united.5
In no way am I suggesting that shared prayer and common worship are not vitally important. Such worship aligns us with God’s invitation to unity even when we do not adequately experience the wound of its absence, and such prayer invigorates the crucial recognition that genuine unity is a spiritual grace, not just the work of our hands.6 So they are necessary, but they are not sufficient: first, because an overemphasis on prayer and feelings as all but synonymous with “spiritual ecumenism”7 risks blinding us to the richly textured spiritual traditions of the church that have never been limited to prayer alone; and second, because even earnest prayer is not guaranteed to be more than self-satisfaction when it is carried out under infelicitous spiritual conditions. Grace can freely break through our human weakness and may refresh and inspire even those engaged in distracted or hypocritical prayer, but let us remember the ancient insight of Evagrius of Pontus (d. 399 CE) that one who “stores up injuries and resentments and yet fancies that he prays might as well draw water from a well and pour it into a cask that is full of holes.”8 In other words: the problem is not with the water, it is with the cask.
The good news is that diverse Christian traditions enshrine not only wisdom but practical methodology for repairing this cask of the heart into a viable channel for the Holy Spirit. This is what I mean by “asceticism” – and we have to be very careful not to mistake ascetic perspectives and practices for forms of elitist, exclusivist discipline or masochistic self-denial. Askēsis is a metaphor that derives from athletics and art: Its basic meanings in Greek (from which the theological tradition draws metaphorically) include “exercise,” “practice,” “training,” or the “working [of] raw materials.”9 Asceticism thus includes what we would call “spiritual exercises,” practices of mind and habits of relationship by which we regulate our fears and desires, seeking “a transformation of our vision of the world, and . . . a metamorphosis of our personality.”10 At its most expansive, it reflects a moral cosmology in which Christian life is a “struggle for liberation from death-dealing dispositions of the heart that captivate persons, societies, institutions, and histories.”11
This tradition was formulated in Christianity in no small part as a response to the accumulation of Christian power in the Roman Empire, recognizing that the end of an era of martyrdom would expose the Church to the same temptations to whom its former persecutors had succumbed. From an ecumenical perspective, it is vitally important that such perspectives do not belong to one branch or another of Christianity; they were the product of the intense ecumenical laboratory of the late antique Egyptian desert, where Latins, Greeks, Syrians, Africans, and others, both men and women, came to share, learn, work, and struggle together. As in the vision of the prophet Isaiah (35:6-7), the wasteland became a wellspring for ascetical procedures across the Christian world – first geographically and then confessionally, irrigating a long history of Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican, Protestant, and Pentecostal practices. It remains today a common ground that we may till together, collaboratively, fertilizing new insights for our present moment.12
. . . an ascetically informed, collaboratively and inter-confessionally elaborated spirituality is notmerelya third necessary wavelength of ecumenical engagement (that of the “heart” alongside the “head” and the “hands”). It is the function of this spirituality to provide the means, and the guidance, for growing into who we need to be to sustain transformed relationships with one another . . .
In all these respects, I want to suggest, an ascetically informed, collaboratively and inter-confessionally elaborated spirituality is notmerelya third necessary wavelength of ecumenical engagement (that of the “heart” alongside the “head” and the “hands”). It is the function of this spirituality to provide the means, and the guidance, for growing into who we need to be to sustain transformed relationships with one another, including as a foundation for intellectual and practical engagement alike.13 An ecumenical ethics that does not presuppose spiritual formation is unsustainable at best, and it risks settling into an unserious philosophy of niceness.14 As Rick Elgendy observes, “spirituality” differs from “philosophy” in that the latter seeks to articulate the truth but the former entails “intentional work on oneself in order to become able to perceive the truth.”15 This “work” does not, of course, imply any kind of “works righteousness” – it is the humble work of taking responsibility for the effect of our actions and ideas, naming and resisting the demonic temptations to which we and our communities have capitulated, and relentlessly protecting our clarity of mind from toxic habits of perceiving those with whom we disagree.
The virtue ethics tradition reminds us . . . that ecumenical engagement is never solely a matter of the encounter or its viable products. It presupposes humility, patience, gratitude, hospitality, and hope; it depends on healthy and continually repaired relationships between responsible moral agents who, though constrained by power in a thousand ways, are never completely trapped by it.
In this respect, there remains much to say about the integrity of ecumenical spirituality with virtue ethics: the cultivation, through practice in community, of the capacity for goodness even in the midst of enormous forces that captivate us and feed on our complicity.16 The virtue ethics tradition reminds us, essentially, that ecumenical engagement is never solely a matter of the encounter or its viable products. It presupposes humility, patience, gratitude, hospitality, and hope; it depends on healthy and continually repaired relationships between responsible moral agents who, though constrained by power in a thousand ways, are never completely trapped by it.17 Such an ecumenical spirituality is anything but navel-gazing: it is active, it is transformative, it is ethical, it is political – it resists our captivity to the falseness of our disunity, grounded as that disunity is in our failures to see and meet one another fully as children of God and members of one household.
I will conclude for the moment by suggesting why such an ecumenical spirituality is so urgently needed today – even as its ascetical resources have to be regrown on the trellis of contemporary culture, climate, and technology.
As has been well appreciated, the conciliar ecumenism of the twentieth century was in a sense a victim of its own success. The relationships that have formed across confessional boundaries have proven authentic and sustainable. The degree of appreciation and agreement on both doctrinal and moral questions has been substantial – so much so that interconfessional solidarity has become a norm rather than an exception,18 and disputes that are specifically denominational (rather than, say, moral and political) are far less common than they were a century ago. But as a result, so much of the ecumenical conversation today is around intellectual nuance on fine details of divergence and around coalition building for collaborative action among partners who already agree in broad strokes on what is to be done. What the ecumenical conversation needs to recover is its capacity to address the sectarian dynamics of our time, which run deeper than theological or political disagreement and remain consequential and destructive, even as they are no longer inter-denominational. For there remains, in our American context not least, “a system of attitudes, actions, beliefs, and structures . . . which arises as a distorted expression of positive, human needs especially for belonging, identity, and the free expression of difference . . . and is expressed in destructive patterns of relating” (from scapegoating to demonization to outright violence).19
What the ecumenical conversation needs to recover is its capacity to address the sectarian dynamics of our time, which run deeper than theological or political disagreement and remain consequential and destructive even as they are no longer inter-denominational.
I was trained at the Irish School of Ecumenics, where we learned ecumenical methodology in the shadow of the Troubles, thirty years of paramilitary violence (following centuries of colonial extraction and nationalistic differentiation) between Christians for whom the human cost of ecclesial division and theologically encoded political antagonism became unforgettable. One of the transformative insights that had to be digested in order to free Ireland from sectarian violence was a specifically ascetic insight – that sectarianism is not the fault of bad others but a “fallen” system of distortion in which we are trapped alongside those who revile us and want to see us extinguished.20 Our apparent, flesh-and-blood enemy is not the real enemy – dehumanizing dispositions, temptations, and incentives are the enemy that must be resisted and exorcised, even when we are morally or theologically on the right side of a given dispute. The desert fathers and mothers knew this intimately: When our brother has wronged us, our difficult calling is to have compassion and support him, directing our opposition toward the demon to whose influence he may have succumbed but to whom he is not identical. We may have legitimate reasons to oppose or denounce him for what he has done or is continuing to do, and yet the annihilation of our love for him is a real danger and a demonic victory.21 Our resentment and rancor toward those who do us wrong will sicken our souls and ensure that our resistance is misdirected: “The demon can be defeated, but not on its own terms.”22
Love for our enemies is not a platitude; it is a platform.
Another way is possible, but we must cultivate an ecumenical spirituality in our churches that equips us to experience, practice, and habituate it. Love for our enemies is not a platitude; it is a platform. Are we so-called “ecumenists” or “peacemakers” angry about the hypocrisy and moral affrontery of so-called “fundamentalists” or “extremists”? What then can we do to help them? How can we treat the disease rather than attempting to outmaneuver the symptoms? How can we heal a situation in which we cannot even talk to each other, and in which we do not even particularly want to be reconciled? How can we learn to feel in our bones that this struggle to transform sectarianism cannot be a scorched-earth power politics against human antagonists (even when they are indeed in the wrong morally or politically) but rather has to remain a struggle to resist and redeem the “principalities and powers . . . of this present darkness” (Ephesians 6:12)?23 This is a struggle in which only a nonviolent and hateless heart will endure. Love for those who revile us is not about one-upping them – it is indeed not about winning at all. Such a relentlessly self-scrutinizing and exorcistic love for enemies is about transforming the terms of engagement, refusing to play by broken rules of zero-sum engagement.24
How can we learn to feel in our bones that this struggle to transform sectarianism cannot be a scorched-earth power politics against human antagonists (even when they may indeed be in the wrong morally or politically) but rather has to remain a struggle to resist and redeem the “principalities and powers . . . of this present darkness” (Ephesians 6:12)?
“An ethics of spiritual self-formation,” Elgendy reminds us, “is simultaneously a politics of resistance.” In an ecumenical key, this means resisting a sectarian imagination of our hated antagonists, seeking a reparative and truth-seeking relationality with them, and guarding our hearts against the pleasure and pride taken from being in the right (even or especially when we are).25 Ecumenism, for all that it is rightly critiqued for its history of imperialistic entanglement, runs against the grain of our increasingly oppositional identities and sectarian ideologies; it is accordingly disparaged by the forces of polarization (including those in the church), all those powers that benefit from our miscommunication, division, and desire for revenge. Ecumenical spirituality is not a magic medicine – it is not guaranteed to “work,” and it is not likely going to be embraced by the beneficiaries of ecumenism’s failure. And yet, uprooting our own psychological dependency on opposition to a threatening other is reparative even when it is not reciprocated.
Such an ecumenical spirituality is thus akin to the fourth-century flowering of Christian asceticism in the desert, in that it is one modest but indispensable means of reintroducing “Christianity into Christendom”.26 As Martyn Percy reminds us, the church’s essential response to the world is not victory but goodness and love, all the way to the cross if necessary.27 The ancient ascetic tradition represents a repertoire of imaginative, practical, and interpersonal resources that twenty-first-century ecumenism would do well to recover in its attempt to ever more meaningfully, and ever incompletely, embody that goodness and love in the midst of our fragmentation.
Notes
1. Unitatis Redintegratio, §7-8; cf. Ut Unum Sint §2, §15. This methodological grounding of ecumenism in repentance, conversion, and holiness precedes Vatican II, however, being a distinguishing feature of pioneering ecumenical endeavors including the Church Unity Octave (later Week of Prayer for Christian Unity) founded by Paul Wattson, SA, Lurana White, SA, and Spencer Jones in 1908; the Groupe des Dombes founded by Paul Couturier in 1937; and the Taizé Community founded by Roger Schutz-Marsauche in 1940. See also John W. Crossin, OSFS, Moving into the Ecumenical Future: Foundations of a Paradigm for Christian Ethics (Pickwick, 2022), 49-50; and Antonia Pizzey, Receptive Ecumenism and the Renewal of the Ecumenical Movement [hereafter Receptive Ecumenism](Brill, 2019), 8-15, 62-95, 117.
2. See Paul D. Murray, “Families of Receptive Theological Learning: Scriptural Reasoning, Comparative Theology, and Receptive Ecumenism,” Modern Theology 29, no. 4 (2013), 86; Susan Durber, “Christ’s Love Moves the Church: An Ecumenism of the Heart,” The Ecumenical Review 73, no. 3 (2021), 364-74; and Susan Durber, “A New Theme for the World Council of Churches: Toward a Heartfelt Ecumenism,” Ecumenical Trends 51, no. 1 (January/February 2022), 14-17.
3. See Durber, “A New Theme for the World Council of Churches,” 15; cf. Crossin, Moving into the Ecumenical Future, 102-3; and again Unitatis Redintegratio, §7-8. For examination of these themes traced in conversation with distinguished participants at the Assembly itself, see Aaron T. Hollander, “‘For God’s Sake, Do Something Brave!’ Voices of Karlsruhe 2022 on Renewal, Reconciliation, and the Realignment of the Heart – Part One,” Ecumenical Trends 52, no 1 (January/February 2023), 16-28.
4. Hollander, “‘For God’s Sake, Do Something Brave!,’” 24.
5. Such platitudes and substitutes, of course, are distortions of how spiritual ecumenism is meant to function as a means of realigning hearts and revitalizing our desire for communion (see Pizzey, Receptive Ecumenism, 14-15), but empirically speaking, the risk is significant of diffusing this renewal into temporary and photogenic togetherness without real transformation.
6. See Cardinal Walter Kaspar, A Handbook of Spiritual Ecumenism (New City, 2007), on reconciliation and communion beginning “when Christians feel the painful wound of division in their hearts,” and 10, on unity being “a gift from above,” best expressed through prayer rather than through intellectual teaching or moral commandment. On Cardinal Kaspar’s contribution to the theorization of ecumenical spirituality, see Pizzey, Receptive Ecumenism, 103-6. Cf. Crossin, Moving into the Ecumenical Future, 11-13.
7. See, for instance, Durber, “Christ’s Love Moves the Church,” 365-66 (which offers a tripartite schema for ecumenical engagement in terms of “thinking,” “acting,” and “praying,” where greater attention to “the heart” allows for a more satisfactory balance between “thought, feeling, and action”).
8. Evagrius Ponticus, Chapters on Prayer, §22, trans. John Bamberger (Cistercian, 1981), 58.
9. Cf. Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, eds. A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford University Press, 1996), s.v. ἀσκέω and ἄσκησις, ‑εως, ἡ; Frederick William Danker, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (University of Chicago Press, 1979), s.v. ἀσκέω; and G. W. H. Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon (Oxford University Press, 1961), s.v. ἄσκησις, ‑εως, ἡ.
Like all theology, the early Christian ascetical tradition was a product of its time, contextually rooted and imperfectly translatable. It was, for instance, tightly entangled with Roman imperial gender ideology, in which masculine virtue could function as a metonym for spiritual fitness. So we cannot simply import ancient thought or praxis as a panacea for our world today – a world in which, to continue this example, athletics and art and military service are not only the province of men, and in which non-male achievement in those fields does not need to be coded as an edifying adoption of maleness. Rather, ancient ascetic insights need to be digested, translated, and re-enunciated as if for the first time. What practices, we might ask, will provide the most fruitful means of guarding the heart and repairing the human person in an age of uncritical deference to “artificial intelligence”?
10. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (Blackwell, 1995), 82.
11. Aaron T. Hollander, “The Courage to Hearken: Ecumenism and the Underside of Modernity,” Ecumenical Trends 48., no.2 (February 2019), 6.
12. This is why I am careful not to frame “spiritual ecumenism” or “ecumenical spirituality” in ways too closely determined by one tradition or another (in spite of the elegant schema of prayer, conversion, and holiness as three pillars of spiritual ecumenism, as articulated in Unitatis Redintegratio and taken up in Ut Unum Sint and the work of Walter Kaspar). Rather, a genuinely ecumenical spirituality needs to be elaborated collaboratively across our lines of confessional distinctiveness.
13. See Pizzey, Receptive Ecumenism, 113-14. Cf. C. Christopher Epting, “Exercises in Spiritual Ecumenism,” The Ecumenical Review 55, no. 3 (2003), 275-76.
14. See Pizzey, Receptive Ecumenism, 11 (drawing on Walter Kaspar, “The Ecumenical Movement in the 21st Century”); and Crossin, Moving into the Ecumenical Future, 96-104.
15. Rick Elgendy, Life Among the Powers: A Political Spirituality of Resistance (Cascade, 2024), 174, drawing on Michel Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France, 1981-82, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell(Picador, 2005), 10-16.
16. See John Fitzmaurice, Virtue Ecclesiology: An Exploration in the Good Church (Ashgate, 2016), 65-70, on the role of training and habituation in the formation of character and the cultivation of virtue; he draws on Alasdair McIntyre’s insight that “virtue is more than right action, it is a reorientation of motivation, indeed of the whole being” (67)—against Kant, McIntyre shows that virtue is not “acting against inclination” but rather a retraining of inclination and then acting from it once that inclination is well-formed. In this respect, virtue reflects what Susan Durber describes as orthokardia in her treatment of ecumenical spirituality (“A New Theme for the World Council of Churches,” 15). Cf. Elgendy, Life Among the Powers, 182: “Like virtue ethics, self-attentive asceticism is concerned with forms of work on oneself that lead to the development of capacities.”
17. See Pizzey, Receptive Ecumenism, 149-78; Crossin, Moving into the Ecumenical Future, 75-76; and Elgendy, Life Among the Powers, 62-68. Elgendy in particular develops a “total complicity” account of human constitution within relations of power, not ruling out responsible moral action but situating it as “embodied in the resources given by the powers and [unable to] help but to bear their imprint” (63).
18. We might say that the Lund Principle (if not necessarily by that name) has been largely accepted as normal rather than revolutionary, even as it remains peripheral to actual ecclesial life under the stresses of contemporary society.
19. Joseph Liechty and Cecelia Clegg, Moving Beyond Sectarianism: Religion, Conflict, and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland (Columba, 2001), 102-03. Each of the terms of this definition is discussed in depth on 107-47, and see also 279-81 on specific ways that positive human needs become distorted. Cf. John Chryssavgis, In the Heart of the Desert: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers (World Wisdom, 2003), 56-61, on the passions as intrinsically positive but corrupted.
20. See Liechty and Clegg, Moving Beyond Sectarianism, 117-19.
21. See Evagrius of Pontus, Talking Back: A Monastic Handbook for Combatting Demons, 5.21-31, trans. David Brakke (Cistercian, 2009), 123-25. For modern rereadings of the “demonic” dimension of human existence, see also Walter Wink, Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces that Determine Human Existence (Fortress, 1986), 41-43; and Hollander, “The Courage to Hearken,” 6-8.
22. Hollander, “The Courage to Hearken,” 7. Cf. Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Fortress, 1992), 195-207, “On Not Becoming What We Hate.”
23. Cf. Leichty and Clegg, Moving Beyond Sectarianism, 121-28.
24. See Gennadios Limouris, “Orthodox Insights on JPIC,” in Between the Flood and the Rainbow: Interpreting the Conciliar Process of Mutual Commitment (Covenant) to Justice, Peace, and the Integrity of Creation, ed. D. Preman Niles (WCC Publications, 1992), 112-14, on the “sacramental attitude” toward the neighbor (including or especially the neighbor whom we do not want to love) that undergirds Christian ethics and eschatology alike. Cf. Wink, Engaging the Powers, 263-77, on love for enemies; and Elgendy, Life Among the Powers, 206, on Karl Barth’s understanding of love as the “great positive possibility” that bursts the walls of our moral status quo.
25. Elgendy, Life Among the Powers, 176; see also 181: “Self-attentive asceticism is a spiritual practice of freedom,” even in the midst of domination and despair.
26. Søren Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, trans. Walter Lowrie (Random House, 2004), 31. Cf. Chryssavgis, In the Heart of the Desert, 15-18.
27. See Martyn Percy, Foreword to Fitzmaurice, Virtue Ecclesiology, xiii.
This article originally appeared in Ecumenical Trends 55.1 (January/February 2026), a publication of Graymoor Ecumenical & Interreligious Institute. The journal offers distinctive perspectives where the church, the academy, and the interfaith field coincide, and combines reporting on current developments in ecumenical/interreligious affairs with accessible scholarship, interviews, and pastoral reflection on the dynamics of religious difference on common ground. Find out more, and subscribe to Ecumenical Trends (print and/or online), by clicking here.