Spiritual Practices

What is the goal of our spiritual practices? Is it different from other contemporary or past Christianity communities? What type of human subjects do they produce? How do we navigate the competing ideals that our spiritual practices imitate?

We have a number of spiritual practices in LDS tradition. There are many that argue that these spiritual practices are in fact the most important aspects of Mormonism and that “doctrine” is merely secondary. I take the view that, like ancient philosophy, Mormonism is a “way of life,” wherein the beliefs and practices work together to allow the individual to engage in a series of techniques to embody a certain kind of ethical subject. However, I am not quite sure how to articulate what that subject looks like. Is there a guiding logic to our spiritual practices? Or, are they simply eclectic inheritances? Or, are these practices fundamentally paradoxical, as Givens has noted about Mormon thought. Consider the following set of spiritual practices. Each of these activities are imbued with a sense of spirituality. In each case they are the voluntary taking on of a certain personal discipline: