Course content
In this course, we aim to explore spirituality and deep reading together, assuming that one thing that unites them is transformation. Both activities aim to change the practitioners’ outlook on the world, and to transform the way they act in and perceive the world in powerful and unpredictable ways.
In recent years there has been increased interest in religion and spirituality. Parallelly, there has been much interest in, and worries of, our capacity for deep reading, caused by declining reading skills and issues of attention linked to new digital tools. The reasons for these developments are not agreed on, and they are rarely put together. This course aims to forge new connections between reading and spirituality to enable greater insight into their nature and effects.
We do so by looking at these two activities from the perspective of distributed cognitive science. Here, cognition is seen as spreading out beyond the brain and into the world. Our thinking is deeply integrated with external resources and environments, such as churches, retreat centers or books, but also by language. In historical and contemporary practices, neither spirituality nor reading are reducible to psychological change, but can be seen as a distributed transformation that spans brain, body and physical and imaginative environments, often depending on language. Seen as such, both reading and spirituality can be understood as narrative and distributed technologies of the self.
Michel Foucault’s later work offers a philosophical framework for understanding spirituality as a way of life structured by practices through which the subject transforms itself. Spiritual traditions can be seen as genealogies of ethical subjectivation, in which exercises such as meditation, spiritual reading, and disciplined reflection function as technologies of the self that reshape perception and ethical orientation. Karl Rahner, in turn, interprets the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola as a structured form of existential knowledge, where the subject does not merely learn doctrines but undergoes a transformation of freedom and decision. Overall, spiritual practice thus becomes a form of transformative knowledge in which cognition, imagination, affectivity and discernment are integrated within an embodied process of self-formation.
Similar dynamics can be seen in recent research on reading from a distributed perspective. Reading a literary text, or a religious one, goes well beyond the mere decoding and translating of linguistic content into symbolic representations. Reading is seen as dependent on enacting different kinds embodied simulations, providing readers with experiences of imagined worlds, with other kinds of probabilities. Similarly to spirituality, reading enables the embodied and distributed minds of readers to access linguistically meditated transformative experiences that changes their perceptual take on the world, and the actions available to them.
Overall, in this course we explore spirituality and reading as distributed transformation through perspectives from theology, religious studies and reading research. We explore both activities as transformative processes that come about as an overall change in distributed and embodied cognitive systems.
This is a 1 ECTS course.
Course preparations and deadlines
In preparation for the course, participants will read ten articles or excerpts, around 200 pages. By August 15, participants must submit a 2-page reflection note on the subjects of the course, to be approved by the organizers.
Reading list
Spirituality and theology
Foucault, M. (1999). About the beginning of the hermeneutics of the self (1980). In Religion and culture (J. R. Carrette, Ed., pp. 158–181). London: Routledge. (contact Mats Haraldsen for copy of the text)
Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises, trans. E. Mullan (New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1914), pp. 88–92 (§§ 313–336), ref. Rules for the Discernment of Spirits (First and Second Week). (contact Mats Haraldsen for copy of the text)
Rahner, K. (1966). Poetry and the Christian. In Theological Investigations (Vol. IV: More Recent Writings, K. Smyth, Trans., pp. 357–366). London: Darton, Longman & Todd; Baltimore: Helicon Press. (contact Mats Haraldsen for copy of the text)
Villas-Boas, A. (2024). Vincent van Gogh’s Theological Chromatology: A Critical Reader of the Bible from His Option for the Poor Avant la Lettre. Religions, 15(4), Article 425. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15040425
Villas Boas, A., & Candiotto, C. (2025). The Task of an Archaeo-Genealogy of Theological Knowledge: Between Self-Referentiality and Public Theology. Religions, 16(8), Article 964. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16080964
Reading research and distributed cognitive science
Casey, M. (2008). The Book of Experience: The Western Monastic Art of Lectio Divina. The Eye of the Heart: A Journal of Traditional Wisdom, 2, 5 – 32 (contact Mats Haraldsen for copy of the text)
Feldt, L. (2023). Training for total devotion: emotionality and narrativity in Deuteronomy. Religion, 53(1), 43–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2022.2150402
Haraldsen, M., & Kukkonen, K. (2025). Thinking elsewhere: designer environments for religion and literature. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2025.2574276
Haraldsen, M., & Trasmundi, S. B. (2026). Vittorini’s double realities in Conversations in Sicily : Embodied remembering in reading. Memory Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980261425542
Trasmundi, S. B., Toro, J., & Mangen, A. (2022). Human Pacemakers and Experiential Reading. Frontiers in Communication, 7. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2022.897043
Course convenors
Mats Haraldsen, ILOS
Alex Villas-Boas, Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Registration
Registration deadline is: 19 June 2026.