Welcome to An Ignatian POV
Ignatian spirituality: What it is. What makes it different. Why it's great.
This Substack is about Ignatian spirituality. It’s my effort to draw attention to it on this corner of the internet.
What is POV?
It’s an acronym for point of view. A POV is a way of looking at things, a sensibility, a slant, a take, a spice that flavors the food. Ignatian spirituality is a point of view. That’s not all it is but that’s a large part of it—a way of looking at things. Jesuits talk about “our way of proceeding.” People with this POV say that an idea or remark or attitude is “very Ignatian.” What do they mean by that? We’ll try to find some answers here.
This Substack is about this POV: what it consists of, what’s different about it, its origins, traditions, uses. I’ll try to demonstrate an Ignatian point of view as well. This will be hard but I’m making it easier on myself by calling this an Ignatian POV, not the Ignatian POV.
What Can You Expect Here?
I’ll post something at least once a week. My tagline for this Substack is Ignatian spirituality: What it is. What makes it different. Why it’s great. So my brief is expansive. I’ll write about lots of different things.
To get started we’ll have some fun. My first post will be about Jesuit basketball. That’s part of the Ignatian tradition (or so I claim) and anyway I’m launching this Substack in the middle of March Madness, the NCAA men’s and women’s college basketball tournaments, and nine of the teams are from Jesuit schools.
Then we’ll get down to business. Here are some of the things I’ll be writing about in the next few weeks:
“The greater good” – an Ignatian principle for making choices
Baltasar Gracian, SJ – a fine Jesuit writer you may not know about
Ignatius’s near-death experience in a storm at sea
Something about Peter Faber
After that I’ve got lots of draft posts and ideas. I’d like to hear your ideas. Contact me through my website jimmanneybooks.com.
All subscriptions are free. Nothing I write here will be behind a paywall.
Who Is Jim Manney?
I’m a writer and editor who settled into a career in Catholic publishing after excursions into newspaper reporting, academia, and technical writing. I met the Jesuits in college at Saint Peter’s in Jersey City. I spent my junior year living with the British Jesuits at Campion Hall at Oxford University. My intensive Ignatian education happened at Loyola Press, a Jesuit publisher, where I worked with great Ignatian writers—William Barry, James Martin, Chris Lowney and many others. I worked on the website IgnatianSpirituality.com and started the Ignatian blog dotMagis. I’ve written books about the examen, discernment, the spiritual exercises, and Ignatian decision making. You can learn about my books at my website jimmanneybooks.com.
My wife Susan and I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We have four children and eight grandchildren. I like baseball, jazz, and a bunch of other things. Some of these interests may find their way into my Substack posts, but not excessively so, because this Substack is about Ignatian spirituality, not me.
Why Am I Doing This?
I like Ignatian spirituality. I talk to my friends about it. Here I can talk to everybody about it. I said this in the introduction to my latest book, What Matters Most and Why: Living the Spirituality of Saint Ignatius Loyola:
“I hope this book helps you find a better way of living. Ignatian spirituality did that for me. Only a few philosophies and ethical systems have the chops to do this. The bold claim of this book is that Ignatian spirituality is one of them. It has forever changed the way we think about God. It has already given hope and direction to millions of people. If you set your mind to it, and put your heart in it, Ignatian spirituality can do that for you, too.”
Why Subscribe?
It’s free, so why not give it a try? If you subscribe you’ll be notified when I post something here, which is at least once a week. You’ll be able to write comments on the posts.
If you read something here you like, forward it to your friends. Maybe they’ll subscribe too and we can build one of those virtual communities we keep hearing about.