How do we ask spirituality questions?

Question

Background

After decades of teaching and observing Christian practice in multiple cultures and denominations, theology professor Roger Olson reflected on his experience on his blog and asked: What Is the Essence of Christianity? His answer: orthodoxy (right belief: doctrines), orthopraxy (right living: ethics/morality), orthopathy (right experience: spirituality), and he thinks the most crucial is actually orthopathy for which he argues in part two.

Another blog article also highlights the same 3 terms as part of Sanctification defining them:

• Orthodoxy is correct doctrine/teaching. The content is right.

• Orthopraxy is correct living. The lifestyle is right.

• Orthopathy is right emotional and/or affections.

  

and then discussing them within the indicative, imperative, and subjunctive framework:

C.SE and Spirituality related Questions

Does C.SE have good guidelines for these 3 areas?

• I think C.SE has excellent guidelines for good questions on doctrines, by scoping orthodoxy to denominations, where they truly belong. Denominations are also tightly linked to theological camps, which help a lot in scoping questions.
• Questions on morality are also handled adequately, but less satisfactorily, since there are a lot of overlap between theological camps, and the natural dividing line seems to be philosophical (divine command theory vs. natural law) which even influences exegesis. My (subjective) perception is that even in twenty-first century theologians from a theological camp that used to favor divine command theory (such as Calvinists) are appreciating more the natural law way of framing morality questions, although still a lot watered down compared to Catholic natural law practice.
• But when it comes to spirituality, what is the guideline for scoping, tagging, focusing, and objectivity?

I found that in the area of "spirituality" C.SE has comparatively a lot fewer questions than the other 2 areas. At this point, there are only 44 tagged spirituality and 23 tagged mysticism. The rest (216) seems to fall under a "catch all" tag christian-living but only a small subset have spirituality as a topic with the rest are mostly morality or cultural.

How to ask spirituality questions?

The question that prompts this meta question is What does it mean to "seek" and "find" God?. I think this is a perfectly valid question to obtain a good definition and a good criteria of how Christians frame all their religious activities, which in Roger Olson's dichotomy falls under orthopathy (right experience / spirituality). The fact that the Bible use the terms (see examples) should be enough reason for the question's validity.

But the question is currently under criticism for

• Need more focus ("does not focus on any particular denomination")
• Opinion based ("These are matters of personal experience, not of stated doctrine.")

Using that question as a test case, my question is what is the guideline for scoping, tagging, focusing, and objectivity so that questions on Christian experience can be asked on this site? Given that orthopathy (right experience) is important (see Roger Olson's argument) there is inherent objectivity (which is important for this site), otherwise "ortho" wouldn't make sense.

Mitigation for objectivity

Some ideas to provide stable definition of Christian experience / spirituality to discuss this topic more objectively:

1. Use definitions from standard textbooks on Christian spirituality such as Protestant Alister McGrath's Christian Spirituality: An Introduction or Catholic Jordan Aumann's Christian Spirituality in the Catholic Tradition.
2. Create good tag definitions that further divides spirituality to serve as scoping mechanism. For example, mysticism is a proper subset of spirituality.
3. Consult websites such as gotquestions.org What is spiritual theology, wikipedia Catholic spirituality, etc.

Answer 1

While I agree it's a little bit awkward, I think scoping questions about spirituality should be the same as the scoping for doctrine. Why do I think that, despite spirituality being a cross-cutting concern between denominations?

Sourcing

Ideally (despite that ideal often not being reached) answers should be opinion-free, with sources backing what is said. In case of spirituality, this probably means quotes from spiritual leaders discussing spirituality. Which leaders though?

I think this question is a good example. Despite being a very general question that I would put in the category spirituality, the appropriate scope here is, at least in my opinion, a catholic answer, since the question is clearly from a catholic POV (synodal path being a current topic among catholics in Germany). So I provided a quote from the Pope. Did the Pope say anything that any other leader of any other denomination couldn't also have said? No. I still feel it is appropriate to provide quotes from people that are authorities in the scope of the question, if possible. Without scoping, it's hard to tell who counts as authority.

Answer 2

When I suggested things like this in the past, it was suggested to me to start a new site. When my several attempts at doing this failed and then the Area51 requirements got tightened to the extent that it was highly unlikely that a religious site was ever going to gain critical mass again, it just seems like a unlikely to go anywhere.

That being said, I don't have any problem with opening up the scope of Christianity.SE to include things that we've never allowed before that the powers that be will never allow on another StackExchange site, but we need

Profound Community Buy-In

in order for us to change the scope of the site and not just close questions about matters of spirituality that aren't qualified by some sort of doctrine (i.e. non-denominational spiritual, but not religious questions of faith)