Janet K. Ruffing RSM

Originally from California, Professor Ruffing, a Sister of Mercy, is Professor Emerita of Spirituality and Spiritual Direction at Fordham University where she directed the spiritual direction program from 1986 until her arrival at Yale Divinity School in the spring of 2010. She has published five books and numerous articles on spiritual direction and supervision, mercy spirituality, female religious life and leadership, kataphatic mysticism, prayer, and other technical topics in spirituality. She has lectured or given workshops in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, the UK, Ireland, India, Thailand, the Philippines, Korea, Hong Kong and Macau. She was a founding member of Spiritual Directors International and is past president of The Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality. She has also chaired the mysticism group in the AAR, been an associate editor for The Way, and on the Editorial Board for Presence. She has experience in teaching religion and English in secondary schools, in the formation of spiritual directors, permanent deacons, and women religious.

Read more about Professor Ruffing: Janet Ruffing: understanding the winds of the spirit in the 21st century.

Read more

• Janet Ruffing: understanding the winds of the spirit in the 21st century

• Janet Ruffing: scholarly research turns to archival adventure

Books

1. To Tell the Sacred Tale: Spiritual Direction and Narrative (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2011)
2. Elisabeth Leseur: Selected Writings. Classics in Western Spirituality (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2005)
3. Spiritual Direction: Beyond the Beginnings (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2000)
4. Essays on Mysticism and Social Transformation (Editor) (Syracuse University Press, 2001)
5. Uncovering Stories of Faith: Spiritual Direction and Narrative (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1989)
6. Lettres sur la souffrance: Correspondance avec soeur Marie Goby (1910-1914) (Paris: Les Editions du Cerg, 2012)

Further Information

Selected Articles and Essays:
Available in PDF (full citations are on the C.V.)

Historical Essays:

• The Epistolary Soul-Friendship Between Elisabeth LeSeur and Soeur Marie Goby
• Catherine McAuley and Nonviolence
• Catherine McAuley’s Quaker Connection
• Catherine’s Spirituality of the Cross
• Introduction to Élisabeth Leseur. Journal et pensées de chaque jour. Paris: Editions du Cerf, 2005. 7-74. Translated Micheline Triomphe.
• Elisabeth Leseur’s Spirituality of the Communion of Saints.
• Elizabeth Leseur: Wife and Mystic in a Wordly Milieu
• Physical Illness: A Mystically Transformative Element in the Life of Elizabeth Leseur
• Recovering a History of Partnership: American Sisters in the Nineteenth Century

Religious Life:

• A Woman’s Perspective on a Spirituality of Brotherhood
• Discernment Dissected
• Fire Cast on the Earth: Spiritual Implications for Mercy in the 21st Century
• Discernment and Our Vow of Obedience
• A Burning Love Ignited: The Experience of Call in Religious Life
• Exercising Power and Discerning Spirits
• The Gifts of Celibate Friendship and Intimacy
• Going Up into the Gaps: Prophetic Life and Vision
• Visiting a Scene of Election
• Celibacy and Contemplation
• The Passage of Mercy Life into the Third Millennium
• The Burning of the Heart on Account of Creation
• Leadership a New Way: If Christ Is Growing in Us
• Leadership a New Way: Women, Power, and Authority
• Enkindling the Embers: The Challenge of Current Research on Religious Life
• Seeing in the Dark
• Mother-Daughter Remnants in Religious Life
• It Matters How We Tell the Story of Religious Life
• “The God-Quest and the Gift of Religious Life to the Church,” Vinayasadhana  IV, 2(July 2013),12-23.
• “Transformational Leadership and the God Leaders Serve and Represent,” (July 2014) 17pp.

Spiritual Direction and Supervision:

• “They say that We are Wound with Mercy Round and Round:’ The Mystical Ground of Compassion”  Studies in Spirituality  26, 33-44, 2016
• “Here I Am, Standing Right Beside You”: Spiritual Accompaniment and Care of Alzheimer’s-Impaired Parents
• Opening One’s Heart to Another: The Rediscovery of Spiritual Direction
• To Tell the Sacred Tale: Spiritual Direction and Narrative
• An Integrated Model of Supervision in Training Spiritual Directors
• “Flesh is more than Flesh”: Sexuality and Spirituality in Spiritual Direction
• Liturgy and the Ritual Processes during the Directed Retreat
• Supervision and Spiritual Development: the Conventional/Post-Conventional Divide
• “Look at Every Path Closely and Deliberately” What’s on Offer?
• Encountering Love Mysticism: Issues in Supervision
• Spiritual Direction: An Instance of Christian Friendship or a Therapeutic Relationship
• Review Essay: Recent Literature and Emerging Issues in the Ministry of Spiritual Direction
• When Directors and Directees are at Different Levels of Psychological and Spiritual Development
• Training, Mentoring and Supervision: An Integrated Model of Supervision in Training Spiritual Directors
• Liturgy and ritual processes during the directed retreat
• Sacred is the Call: Supervisory Accountability and Responsibility in the Formation of Spiritual Directors
• Ineluctible this Shimmering
• “God’s Compassionate Heart: the Source of Compassionate Accompaniment” Studies in Spirituality 23 (2013), 201-211.
• A Contemporary Experience with the Rules for Almsgiving
• A Puzzling Question Post Practicum Supervision
• Formation of Lay Ecclesial Ministers
• Opening One’s Heart to Another, The Rediscovery of Spiritual Direction
• Spirtual Direction with Women - Reclaiming and Reinterpreting Key Themes from the Spiritual Tradition
• Spiritual Identity and Narrative Fragmentation, Coherence, and Transformation
• Supervisory Accountability and Responsiblity in the Formation of Spiritual Directors
• The Practice of Spiritual Direction: A Theologically Complex Process

Mysticism:

• Music as an Opening to Religious Experience
• Spirituality, Sexuality and Embodiment
• Jesus: A Feminist Mystical Perspective
• Ignatian Mysticism of Service
• Knitting Together Mind, Body and Spirit
• The World Transfigured: Kataphatic Religious Experience Explored through Qualitative Research Methodology
• You Fill up my Senses: God and Our Senses
• An Option for Women?
• Introduction to Essays in Mysticism and Social Transformation
• Hearing Voices - An Interpretation of Contemporary Locutionary Phenomena
• The Path to God Mediated through Visionary Experience

Spiritual Life:

• Why Women Mystics Still Matter
• Martha and Mary: Integrating or Disintegrating Images for Action and Contemplation
• Socially Engaged Contemplation: Living Contemplatively in Chaotic Times
• Loosing the Cords which Bind: Forgiveness and Reconciliation
• Unacknowledged Conflicts: Prayer and Morality
• The Human Experience of Prayer: East and West
• As Refined by Fire
• Prayer During Life’s Transitions
• Resisting the Demon of Busyness
• Sexuality and Spirituality
• Cultivating Compassion: Developing a Habit of Mercy and Recognizing its Interruptions
• The Praxis of Spirituality: Experiencing God and Responding to that Relationship

Other Topics:

• Personality Sciences
• Affirmative Way
• Meditation: Christian Perspectives
• Intimacy and Mutuality with God: Relational Prayer
• Power
• Psychology as a Resource for Christians
• Storytelling in the RCIA Process
• Embodied Family Spirituality
• Spiritual Companions
• Resurrection and Beyond: the Fourth Week
• Spirituality and Narrative
• “From Transfiguration to Transformation” Spiritual Life, 59.1 (Spring 2013) 30-41.
• Transformational Leadership, the God Leaders Serve, Represent
• God-mother of the True Believers: Teaching Spirituality in Non-Denominational Seminar
• Reflections on Spirituality in Laudato Si’
• “Walking a Path of Peace and Mercy while Staring into Chaos” Reflections: Yale Divinity School (Spring 2018): 25-28.
• “Conversations as Doorways for Conversion” (Spring 2018)