Spiritual Friendship: Learning to Be Friends with God and One Another

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Spiritual Friendship

my current colleagues at Taylor University—especially Mike, Phil, Kevin, and Jenny; to my former students, many of whom I can also call friends, especially to those who worked on this spiritual classic—Loyal Juraschek, Cheyenne King, Clay Wright, Nathan Peters, Jayden Wilhelm, Mary Hawthorne, Sam Wolowski and Gillian Haenggi; to all of these I say thank you. I am especially thankful to Mark Williams, Professor Emeritus of Classics at Calvin College for permission to use his 1994 translation as the base for this Sacred Roots Spiritual Classic edition of Spiritual Friendship . I am also grateful to Dr. Jeff Gingerich, Provost at University of Scranton, for permission to use Williams’ translation which was originally published by Scranton University Press. Thanks also to David Duncan for timely aid in sorting through various copyright issues related to this volume. A special word of thanks is due to some additional people: to Father Francis Benedict, who introduced me to Aelred during a weekend retreat and has since remained an encouraging friend; to James Houston, whose pioneering work exploring the frontiers of friendship has led the way for this project, who kindly hosted me and some dozen others for lunch and a discussion about spiritual classics (in his ninety-seventh year!), and who provided an endorsement for this volume (from a hospital bed); 1 to Uche Anizor, Rukshawn Fernando, Jeremy Treat, May Young, and Denise Flanders, for patiently enduring long conversations about the nature of friendship in concrete contexts; to the Thursday Morning Men’s Prayer Group at

1 For a testimony to the power of friendship in a Christian leader’s life see James M. Houston, Memoirs of a Joyous Exile and a Worldly Christian (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2019).