Professor Sandra Schneiders:

• The lived experience of the faith (Beyond Patching)
• The experience of consciously striving to integrate one’s life in terms not of isolation and self-absorption but of self-transcendence toward the ultimate value one perceives.  Christian spirituality involves a specification of this definition in terms of the participation of the person in the paschal mystery of Jesus Christ.  It is essentially trinitarian, christocentric, and ecclesial. (Beyond Patching, 73-74)
• Personal participation in the mystery of Christ begun in faith sealed by baptism into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ (“Scripture and Spirituality,” 1)
• Among Christians…spirituality is the referent of Christian religious experience as such.  What this means  is that spirituality, for Christians, is Christian and therefore theological considerations are relevant at every point; it is also religious, which means that it is affective as well as cognitive, social as well as personal, God-centered and other-directed at the same time; and it is experience, which means that whatever enters into the actual living of this ongoing self-transcendence is relevant, whether it be mystical, theological, ethical, psychological, political or physical.  The Transcendent who is the horizon, the focus, and the energizing source of Christian spirituality is an Other who is personal, living, and loving and is fully revealed in a human being, Jesus of Nazareth.  (“Theology and Spirituality,” 267)
• Spirituality is that field-encompassing field which studies Christian religious experience as such.  And there is…almost nothing whose study is more important than spir for us who are called to integrate our lives in self-transcending faith, hope, and love through and in the Spirit of Jesus the Christ. “Theology and Spirituality,” 274

Oliver Davies (quoted by Arthur Holder):

• Spir is a complex of theological ideas, sacramental experiences, religious forms of life and interior piety that construct Christian experience at a particular time and place.

Raymundo Panikkar:

• one typical way of handling the human condition

John Macquarrie:

• it has to do with becoming a person in the fullest sense.

Gordon Wakefield:

• a word … to describe those attitudes, beliefs, practices which animate people’s lives and help them to reach out toward super-sensible realities.

Richard P. Hardy:

• spir is that attitude, that frame of mind which breaks the human person out of the isolating self.  As it does that, it directs him or her into another relationship to whom one’s growth takes root and substance.

Christian Duquoc:

• the lived unity of human existence in faith

Kees Waaijman:

• Spir is the ongoing transformation which occurs in involved relationality with the Unconditioned.

Ewert Cousins:

• Spir concerned with the inner movements of the human spirit; that toward which the spirit transcends as “the real, the transcendent, the divine.”  Spir is wisdom intended to help follow a path…”towards the goal of spir realization.” (Modern Christian Spirituality, 3).

Bradley C. Hanson:

• Spir is a faith’s wisdom for living that faith.  (Modern Christian Spirituality, 3).

Bernard McGinn:

• Mysticism:
  1) a part or element of religion;
  2) a process or way of life; and
  3) an attempt to express a direct consciousness of the presence of God [bec there can be no direct access to experience for the historian] (The Foundations of Mysticism, pp. xv-xvi)