A Peircean Reimagining of Thomas Moore’s Spirituality

Thomas Moore's psycho-spirituality offers many practical insights for people to cultivate their soulfulness. Underlying his program is the internal dichotomy between imaginal soul and intellectualizing spirit. Moore prioritizes soul and privileges its mystical worldview, which can lead to exaggerating introspectiveness and difficulty bridging a world of imagination with a world of fact. This book offers a pragmatic model of spirituality to serve as an alternative to Moore's Platonically inspired soul program. Drawing from the Pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce, this book uses his famous Three Categories and Modes of Inference to reinterpret Moore's concepts of soul and spirit. Peirce's metaphysical categories situate soul in distinct relationship with the world, while the epistemological modes guide spirit to educate soul through experience. This book offers a Peircean-inspired pragmatic model of spirituality drawing from Moore's vibrant character of soul and redirecting it toward critical social dialogue, scientific inquiry, and elevated political participation. The concluding tripartite model is called a soulful anthropology, a nascent foundation for a 21st century American theological anthropology dedicated to the needs and charisms of today's culture.