Michael F O'Sullivan

• BSocSc, BPhil, BD, MTh, STL, PhD
• Co-Founder / Executive Director and Treasurer at Spirituality Institute for Research and Education

This paper made the case for studying lived experience as spiritual experience through the methodology of authentic subjectivity. By authentic subjectivity I mean the form of subjectivity characterised by a determined and sustained desire for and commitment to beauty, intelligibility, truth, goodness, and love in contextualised human experience. Th...

This article is a tribute to Archbishop Oscar Romero written thirty years after his death in 1980. It is uploaded in view of his impending canonisation on Oct 14th, 2018

Spirituality in Contemporary Ireland: Manifesting Indigeneity1 Michael O’Sullivan and Bernadette Flanagan Spiritus 16 Special Issue (2016): A56–A73 © 2017 by Johns Hopkins University Press Opening extract; the whole text can be requested from the authors The focus of this essay is an examination of a few of the contours of the spiritual search in c...

Holiness in the Christian tradition has often been understood in a way that devalues embodiment and practical engagement with the world of one’s time. The latter understanding, for example, led to Marx’s critique and repudiation of Christianity. Both interpretations of holiness can be understood as mistaken efforts to express the dynamism for authe...

A Spirituality Interest Group (SIG) was set up in in the School of Nursing and Midwifery, Trinity College Dublin, Republic of Ireland (ROI), in March 2013. This paper reports on some of the journey and requirements involved in developing the group. It highlights the essential work of establishing agreed understandings in an objective way in order f...

In this paper, I present evidence of the developing interest in spirituality in healthcare and treat three questions it raises: (1) what makes a person and a life spiritual so that a strictly medical model of health and care won’t do?; (2) what is the scope of healthcare?; and (3) what makes care in healthcare ‘spiritual’ precisely? In addressing t...

This paper reports on a descriptive qualitative study that explored the value and benefit of Serenity Spirituality Sessions programme for older nursing home residents. The research was carried out in six nursing homes in the Republic of Ireland. The facilitators of these sessions, who worked in the nursing homes, were interviewed about their experi...

Male violence against women is at shocking levels in South Africa. According to Faul, ‘A woman is killed by an intimate partner every eight hours, a probable underestimate because no perpetrator is identified in 20 percent of killings’, whilst ‘More than 30 percent of girls have been raped by the time they are 18’. Reeva Steenkamp’s killing by her...

This book articulates a Roman Catholic theological understanding concerning salvation in Jesus Christ that can be transformative of physical and sexual male violence against women across the world. It identifies key elements for a working definition of such complex violence, and highlights the pervasiveness and seriousness of the violence with quan...

published in Joe Egan and Brendan McConvery, eds., Faithful Witness: Glimpses of the Kingdom, Dublin: Milltown Institute of Theology and Philosophy, 2004, 24-39.) Male violence against women is a massive problem across the world. 2 However, the Christian Churches are now, at last, giving it greater attention in their mission and theology. 3 In this...