“Everyone has their own religion.” So said my mother, a thoroughly Irish Catholic. What was I to make of it? (My father, whose piety was more wintry, kept his own counsel.) Looking back, I suspect what my mother had in mind was that different people have different spiritualities.

Nonetheless, given America’s religious individualism, some folks do invent their own religion. Robert Bellah, in his contemporary classic Habits of the Heart, recounts an interview with a woman named Sheila who professed what she called “Sheila-ism.” Its chief tenets? To be gentle with herself and take care of people. Christians, to be sure, welcome gentleness and compassion. But loving kindness comes at a cost and begins with repentance.

And, yes, Christians have presented themselves in surprising ways. Consider Teddy Roosevelt’s “Muscular Christianity.” It combined Christian spiritual development with the promotion of physical health and strength. How better to be rough and ready! Muscular Christianity helped launch the YMCA—with its own brand of spirituality.

Best though to be alert to a “spirituality sprawl.” Last month a physician, noting a cross pinned to my shirt, asked me if I was a clergyman. He then assured me that it was acceptable to be spiritual. So I broke it to him: “But I’m religious, not spiritual.” Of course, in light of human frailty, we regularly make a mess of religion and spirituality alike.

Might I hazard, then, a working and limited definition? A Catholic spirituality is a characteristic emphasis on a certain range of themes emerging from Scripture and the ongoing life of the Church. There is a plurality of Catholic spiritualities, including a broad lay spirituality and the distinctive spiritualities of religious orders. Often these spiritualities give rise to a distinctive theology.

Two examples of the conjoining of spirituality and theology have of late been much on my mind. The first example is the poet Czeslaw Milosz, a winner of the Nobel Prize. I’ve been reading his late in life collection, Second Space (2004). Milosz’s spirituality is disturbed, insistent, and questioning. In his poem “I Apologize,” he confesses that

I thrash in the bed of my style, searching for a comfortable position, / not too sanctimonious and not too mundane.
There must be a middle place between abstraction and childishness / where one can talk seriously about serious things.

How, he wonders, can the dogmas of the Faith “well armored against reason…be grasped by little girls dressed in white for First Communion!”

Nonetheless, in his retrospective poem “A Young Man,” Milosz both asks and answers a haunting question. Why theology? Because the first must be first. With the same persistence, in his “Ode for the Eightieth Birthday of Pope John Paul II,” he writes, We come to you, men of weak faith, / So that you might fortify us with the example of your life /And liberate us from anxiety /About tomorrow and next year.

My second example is Thomas Joseph White, OP. He is a convert, a banjo player, a theologian, and Rector of the Angelicum in Rome. His core spirituality, we can suppose, is captured in the Dominican motto Contemplata aliis tradere, “to give others the fruits of one’s contemplation.” In his scholarly and yet accessible writing, he is wide-ranging and forthright. I’ve paid close attention to his new essay “The Future of Catholic Theology” in First Things (Aug./Sept. 2025).

On his view, Catholic theology is spiritual and explanatory. What should its first aim be today? Nothing less than “to engage intellectually with the creed.” Let’s hope that a good many serious Catholics will say “Amen.” White immediately adds that “We must talk about the intelligibility of the creed in the public square, for all comers.” We should do so with confidence. If theology falls silent, man goes into eclipse. White is on the mark when he tells us that a world without credal theology “is a world in which humans no longer know where they originate from, what they should live for, or who and what they really are.”

But theology isn’t just for academic theologians. It is central to our shared missionary vocation. The Gospel enjoins us without compromise: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37). That last part, “with all your mind,” can get lost in a haze of good feeling; it can get obscured by diplomacy; it can even be displaced by an incipient quietism. Yet the poet Czeslaw Milosz insisted there must be a place where we can talk seriously about the most serious of things, and he was right. Dare I say, gentle reader, that in its own fitful and upstart way the New Oxford Review is one such place.