Classics of Western Spirituality

Classics of Western Spirituality [CWS] is an English-language book series published by Paulist Press between 1978 and the present, which offers an extensive library of historical texts on Christian spirituality as well as a representative selection of works on Jewish, Islamic, Sufi and Native American spirituality. Each volume is critically selected and translated by one or more internationally recognized scholars and spiritual leaders, with scholarly introductions and carefully selected bibliographies of both primary and secondary materials. The series contains multiple genres of spiritual writing, including poems, songs, essays, theological treatises, meditations, mystical biographies, and philosophical investigations, and features works by famous authors such as Augustine of Hippo and Martin Luther as well as lesser known authors such as Maximus the Confessor and Moses de León.
CWS was originally planned by an editorial board of some thirty scholars to "[foster] more enlightened spiritual direction and fruitful meditation practices", and was projected to contain sixty volumes. Today it comprises more than 130 volumes, and for ease of reference has been thematically subdivided below into pre-Reformation Christianity (57 volumes), Christianity after the Reformation (47 volumes) and Judaism, Islam and Native American religions (28 volumes).
The series was almost immediately "acclaimed as one of the most important religious publishing events of recent years." An early reviewer remarked that "[t]he impression left by a preliminary contact with this courageous attempt to open the vast treasures of Western spiritual classics to present-day readers is one of astonished admiration. It is a triumph of editing and the printer's art." More recently, in assessing the impact of the series as a whole, one scholar concluded that CWS has been responsible "not only in making the acknowledged classics of the tradition more available, accessible, and better known but also in the process . . . expanding and deepening the canon of classics and thereby both broadening and refining the definition of 'classics' and of 'spirituality' itself."