Engaged Spirituality: 100 Stories of Inspiration and Resilience

This report summarizes findings from “Spiritual Exemplars: A Global Project on Engaged Spirituality” and includes a directory of the more than 104 extraordinary humanitarians profiled by the project.

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Around the world, humanitarians care for AIDS orphans, fight oil companies in the arctic, perform surgery in the middle of wars, save migrants from certain death in the desert or the sea, and give love and jobs to gang members. They work on intractable issues, often in the face of great challenges.

In November 2018, the Center for Religion and Civic Culture (CRCC) at the University of Southern California launched a five-year project focused on people who dedicate their lives to human flourishing. The joint academic-journalistic project resulted in the publication of more than 100 stories of “engaged spirituality”—stories about how religious values and spiritual practices inspire and sustain social action. Through “Spiritual Exemplars: A Global Project on Engaged Spirituality,” CRCC gained insights into how spiritually engaged humanitarians understand their lives and their work, as well as how their social action affects their beliefs and practices. This booklet presents an introduction to the project as a whole, as well as to these extraordinary individuals.

While there is a long tradition of research on “saints” from times past, CRCC’s project focused on living individuals—people from all over the world who are confronting issues ranging from climate change to human rights, poverty and gender equity. Moreover, it sought to bring these individuals’ stories to the public with the help of journalists as data collectors and storytellers. Stories of religious actors working for positive social change were told in major newspapers, magazines, an award-winning podcast and online videos.

As journalist Judy Silber describes in the trailer for The Spiritual Edge podcast, which produced 18 episodes from the project: “These are stories of struggle, often without resolution. They’re also stories of hope.”

We are grateful for the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation and Templeton Religion Trust, who took a risk on an innovative project that brought together scholars and journalists to reveal hope in the time of global uncertainty.

• Who are Spiritual Exemplars?
• Telling Good Religion Stories
• Insights into Engaged Spirituality

CRCC’s project on “spiritual exemplars” expands upon a burgeoning field of research on moral exemplars, primarily undertaken in psychology and moral philosophy. Scholars leading this field ask why we should limit our understanding of human moral functioning by looking at the average; studying exemplars teaches us something about the full range of human potential.

Though scholars note that spirituality is important to exemplars, living or dead, we know little about how it functions for these individuals. This project fills that gap by interviewing people from a wide variety of religious and spiritual perspectives about the role that their values, beliefs and practices play in their lives—as well as how their efforts to advance human flourishing influence their spiritual orientation.

Because the idea of “spiritual exemplar” is highly subjective, CRCC crafted criteria to focus our work on spiritually engaged humanitarians:

1. A living individual anywhere in the world;
2. Engaged in significant humanitarian work;
3. Inspired and sustained by their spiritual values, beliefs and practices;
4. Admired and emulated by others within and beyond their community;
5. Respects human rights, such as those defined by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

By looking at lists of prize winners and soliciting nominations from the public and pitches from our team of journalists, CRCC developed a database of 430 individuals fitting these criteria.

Of those, the project profiled 104 spiritually engaged humanitarians. Forty-two countries are represented in our sample, along with 13 different faith traditions. While our sample is skewed toward humanitarians from the United States, in part because the COVID-19 pandemic limited travel, well over half are from outside the US. Nearly 20 percent are from Africa, 12 percent from Asia, 12 percent from Europe, about 9 percent are from the Middle East and Caucasus, and 8 percent are from Latin America. Overall, slightly less than a quarter of the people profiled were white/European, and almost a quarter were Black/African.

On gender and age, we also have a good distribution. Fifty-seven percent of the exemplars were women. More than half are between 30 and 60 years of age. We initially speculated there might be more men than women, and that the sample would skew older than it did, since exemplars are often recognized later in life. The group includes both a Nobel Prize winner as well as little known figures, working day in and day out to improve their communities.

News coverage of religion can be cynical, focusing on corruption, abuse and the negative elements of religion as a crutch or escape from reality. With this project, CRCC aimed to introduce into the media landscape stories in which religion and spirituality are a force for positive social change.

We were interested in why someone would heroically commit themself to a life of radical engagement with issues of justice and equity, oftentimes at a considerable cost to their own comfort.

We found that journalists were likewise interested in telling such stories. More than 350 journalists from around the world applied to be a part of the project. CRCC worked with 33 journalists over the course of the project, including two writer-photographer pairs, two video producers, and The Spiritual Edge podcast’s editorial team. In addition to US-based journalists, the project’s fellows lived in Brazil, Guatemala, Mexico, India, Indonesia, Israel, Georgia, Germany, England, Spain and Nigeria.

The journalists also were attracted to the project by the financial support it offered. Our deal with the journalists was that we would pay their travel costs as well as an honorarium for their work, and they, in turn, would provide audiotapes of their interviews with the “spiritual exemplar,” so our research team could analyze them for academic publications.

The financial award allowed the journalists to produce “good journalism,” as one fellow described it. Although the COVID-19 pandemic limited travel and in-person access to their subjects, many journalists spent multiple days with the exemplar, interviewing and observing the individual’s work and their community in some depth. They defined their work as ethnographic journalism, literary journalism or even “spiritual journalism,” which speaks to the personal impact reporting such stories can have on the journalists themselves.

The USC research team also did profiles of exemplars in Sudan, Uganda, Malawi, Congo, Egypt, Lebanon, France and the United States, which gave them first-hand experience of some of the challenges and inspiration of encountering exemplary humanitarians.

In our orientation meeting with the journalists, we stressed that we were not interested in putting exemplars on a “saintly” pedestal. We wanted well-rounded profiles that would also include the shadow side of exempars’ work, including burnout, vicarious trauma because of their exposure to human suffering, loneliness and costs to their families and friends.

Like the lives of the exemplars themselves, the stories emerging from this project are anything but Polly-Annish. They are filled with tragedy and trauma, and grapple with the evils of torture, genocide, abuse, inequality and discrimination. At the same time, aligning with the trend of solutions journalism, these stories present people working to address and solve their communities’ most critical issues. And indeed, the solutions that these exemplars seek to implement are grounded in their spirituality—in a belief in human dignity, an understanding of karma or a value of gratitude, for instance.

Such complex stories are difficult to tell in 800 words, and pitching remained a challenge for many of our fellows. Nonetheless, articles have been published in the New York Times, Guardian, Al Jazeera, Christian Science Monitor, America: The Jesuit Review, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, various online publications and other venues. We are grateful to Religion News Service and Religion Unplugged for their partnership in helping these stories reach their audiences.

Bringing journalists into an academic project breaks some conventional standards of social science research, which typically focuses on controlled samples and standardized research protocols. Doing so allowed us to pull off a far-ranging project such as this, and to look at questions about how both journalists and academics craft narratives about the people they study.

To give the researchers and journalists a common frame, we provided an adapted “life story interview” tool (see page 62 for the guide), which encouraged journalists to solicit exemplars to share their life trajectories. Religion is not a “thing” that can be abstracted and examined in isolation; rather it is integrally interwoven in everyday experience. Furthermore, examining spirituality or religious identity at a single point in time is not adequate, as spiritual exemplars evolve in response to particular crises, events, opportunities—and the quest for meaning itself. Within these life story interviews, CRCC asked its researchers and journalists to touch on common themes: inspiration; sustenance, the reciprocal effect of the work on the exemplars’ spirituality, the shadow side, and their relationship with institutional forces, whether their own organization or a religious institution.

Working with about 140 coding categories, academic researchers have processed hundreds of interviews, analyzing themes across the global database. Themes include: the life trajectory of exemplars, values they embody, their spiritual practices and beliefs, as well as their personal qualities and characteristics, program focus and strategies, and their shadow side.

It is simplistic to say that religion or spirituality inspires exemplars to act in the world. Rather, the interviews reveal multiple pathways to humanitarian work. For many individuals, it was a search for meaning and purpose in their lives. For others, they encountered a personal crisis or trauma in their community that called out for a response. And for some, it was a nearly accidental involvement where they engaged in initial acts of charity that then evolved into a life-long passion.

At the heart of exemplars are a number of values, including compassion, empathy, selflessness, hope, tolerance, courage and humility. These are individuals who live for others, not themselves or their own happiness. And yet joy and a sense of purpose permeate their lives.

They are resilient individuals. They often see themselves as the vessels of a higher purpose or calling. They have a gritty perseverance, taking the long view on tackling an issue. Their theology or philosophy enables them to place temporary disappointments in a larger framework. At the same time, a subset of the exemplars showcase a little acknowledged value of spiritual sustenance: the prophetic call to end human suffering. Embodying a “holistic resilience,” these actors seek to dismantle the structures that require them and their communities to be resilient in the first place.

Although spiritual practices varied by religious traditions, common to exemplars were regular periods of prayer, meditation, corporate worship/rituals, and times apart in retreat. These practices renew them daily. While a few exemplars reported mystical experiences, there was something very this-worldly about their approach to the sacred and ultimate reality. Exemplars reported finding God, for example, in service to the poor and marginalized.

Their spiritual practices and contexts open exemplars to a consciousness of ideal relations, characterized by beliefs in the sacredness of all beings, and the rights and dignity of all persons. This realm of consciousness becomes “real” in engaged spirituality—when prayer and contemplation connect helpfully with people in need. Their beliefs also enable them to frame and constantly reframe situations to find hope and possibility regardless of the circumstances.

Exemplars’ perspectives have been particularly refreshing in the midst of global turmoil caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has endangered people’s lives, health and livelihoods while exacerbating the issues that exemplars seek to address. We have been struck by exemplars’ entrepreneurial spirit in the face of poverty and trauma. Perhaps visionary action is an antidote to pessimism, cynicism and paralyzing fear.