Spiritual Formation in the Trinity: A Review Essay of Donald Fairbairn’s Life in the Trinity

As I was rearranging some shelves recently, I was struck by the fact that my books on spiritual formation occupy a peculiar region. They live somewhere toward the end of the whole theological collection, after the books on Christology and pneumatology and ecclesiology; in fact they’re about as far from the books about God and Christ as you can get. They’re somewhere between ethics and eschatology. In the Library of Congress classification system, they’re around BX4511. That’s what we used to call practical theology, and it’s a region of books more or less dominated by studies of technique.