Christian Humanist Profiles Episode 282: Volker Leppin

Talk to an American Protestant about her spiritual life, and you’re as likely as not to hear about reading a printed Bible, usually in solitude, for the sake of resisting the distractions that an image- and video-saturated world.  There’s nothing inherently bad about any part of that picture--certainly I’ve meditated on the Psalms in a quiet place for similar reasons.  But spirituality does not always take that form.  Whatever one posits about human nature–whether it’s a historically-developing reality or trans-historical, the documented, concrete practices of Christian spirituality have changed substantially over the course of the centuries and have taken different forms in different places.  The study of such things is daunting, and Volker Leppin’s new book Medieval Spirituality: An Introduction aims at a moment–some time between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries–and a place–largely in the German-speaking regions called the Holy Roman Empire–that show us modern Americans just how interesting and just how various Christian spirituality has been.  Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Leppin to the show.