Spiritual Friendship: Learning to Be Friends with God and One Another

Aelred’s Spiritual Friendship focuses on being God’s friend expressed through three conversations with different friends. Aelred draws upon his friendships both with contemporaries and with authors who lived centuries before. This work provides an antidote to our contemporary milieu which, though replete with unremitting communications, propels toward individualism, autonomy, and loneliness. What Spiritual Friendship affords is a guide toward “holy and life-giving” friendships fruitfully marked by joy and happiness.

Professor Hank Voss amplifies a voice from the 12th century that explored Christian friendship in Scripture, in creation (reason), in church teachings (tradition), and in his own practice of spiritual friendship (experience). While acknowledging the work of others, in this edition Voss enables the reader to hear Aelred’s Spiritual Friendship with clarity and vibrancy and provides a suggested framework for deep engagement.

"All ministry leaders need to cultivate healthy and life-giving friendships, with peers and especially with Jesus. Unfortunately the concept of friendship has been reduced to clicks and “likes” on social media sites that are neither life-giving nor truly signs of friendship. Hank Voss, using the wisdom of Aelred of Rievaulx, reorients us to the great value and depth of true and lasting friendships and to their centrality in generous and holistic service to others."

~ Rev. Greg Peters, PhD,
Professor of Medieval and Spiritual Theology,
Torrey Honors College, Biola University

"As a pupil of Bernard of Clairvaux and his Sermons on the Song of Songs, Aelred focused on being God’s friend (John 14:1). Aelred’s Spiritual Friendship is an excellent book, both of scholarship and of devotion."

~ James M. Houston, DPhil,
Professor Emeritus of Spiritual Theology,
Regent College

"In an age of information overload, globalization, increasing isolation, and individualism, we need the reminder that friendships among Christians can be holy and life-giving, and indeed provide the needed accountability for faithful, fruitful, long-term ministry. From my own experience as a single in ministry, life can be lonely . . . but it does not have to be. Thanks to Aelred and Hank Voss, we have that reminder."

~ Stephanie Lowry, PhD,
Lecturer in Theology and Programme Coordinator,
Africa International University