Our Unforming: De-Westernizing Spiritual Formation
Fortress Press, 2022
By Cindy S. Lee
Christian spiritual formation resources and teachings have primarily come from Western spiritual traditions. Our current approach to formation comes out of a western way of thinking and being, communicating that the white experience of the sacred is the norm and authority.
In Our Unforming: De-Westernizing Spiritual Formation, Cindy S. Lee proposes that those in the Christian tradition need a new way to engage in spirituality. To thrive in our increasingly diverse contexts, we need an unforming and a reforming of our souls. We need to unform the ways Western-dominated Christian traditions have understood spirituality. We need to reform–to imagine and create a more intricate spirituality that includes diverse experiences of the divine.
Our Unforming is organized into three cultural orientations and nine postures. Lee proposes that when we consider non-Western cultural ways of being–turning from linear to cyclical, from cerebral to experiential, and from individual to collective–our spiritual experience shifts. We live out these movements through postures, ways of entering into deeper spiritual transformation. The nine postures reflect our experience of time, remembering, uncertainty, imagination, language, work/rest, dependence, elders, and harmony.
Cindy S. Lee 