title: A spiritual person.
abstract: When asked in a questionnaire to describe a spiritual person, William James named one instead: Phillips Brooks. This article focuses on Brooks--his life, his sermons, and his poem "O Little Town of Bethlehem"--to make the case that he exemplified James' view of spirituality as "a susceptibility to ideals, but with a certain freedom to indulge in imagination about them." It also supports Belzen's (Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 12:205-222, 2009) view that there is no spirituality in general but only individual manifestations of it, a point that James' nomination of Brooks implicitly supports.
authors.affiliation: Princeton Theological Seminary, P.O. Box 821, Princeton, NJ 08542-0803, USA. cappsdonald@aol.com
authors.forename: Donald
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Capps
mesh_terms: D002977:Clergy; D049672:History, 19th Century; D006801:Humans; D029181:Spirituality; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires