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Gentle Space-Making: Christian Silent Prayer, Mindfulness, And Kenotic Identity Formation, Travis Ryan Pickell

Faculty Publications - George Fox School of Theology

The practice of mindfulness has reached an unprecedented level of prevalence in the US and the UK, both in terms of widespread popularity and in terms of institutional support and investment. One potential clue to this phenomenon may be found in the nature of the institutional contexts that are increasingly being filled with mindfulness practitioners and seminars: each is deeply embedded in and pervaded by what philosopher Charles Taylor calls the ‘modern identity’. This article provides an analysis of mindfulness as a practice of moral formation that challenges these late-modern notions of human agency and identity. It does so by …