Abstract

Educational and organizational reformers have identified a crisis of meaning, created by the loss of a language to identify and describe spiritual experiences. Failure to reflect upon the spiritual aspect of everyday occurrences has robbed leaders--in organizations, businesses, education, and churches--of direction and soul. However, in moral and religious language is the potential for restoring a substance and context for meaning, a context for wholeness out of which leadership may serve. ;A hermeneutics of testimony is established as a theory of action by its focus on the connection expressed between inner beliefs and outward acts. Paul Ricoeur's work on testimony and mimesis provides the framework for a discussion of the spiritual dimension of action, through the interpretation of the experience in the narrative and interpretive aspects of testimony, and the expression of self that unfolds in the testimony. ;Field-based research was conducted through conversations with individuals who articulate and demonstrate an integrated relationship of spirituality and daily life in the workplace. Conversations with the thirteen participants include stories of prisons in Argentina and Mexico; politics in Cambodia, Guatemala, and America's corporate world; life-changing educational and ministry experiences in Kenya and Scotland and the United States. ;Presentation of data in this study follows the configuration of the circle of mimesis in narrative. The hermeneutics of testimony allows a place for a religious nature of the stories, yet the interpretive demand of testimony extends its application to explorations of belief systems and meaningful action in general. The power of imagination in the narrative and interpretive aspects of testimony offers a clearing in which new worlds are opened by new understanding through conversation. ;The mediating function of testimony to offer an account for critical reflection and appropriation has produced this text which orders the events of these lives and places them before the reader. The challenge is to breathe life into these words, for it is in the intersection of the world of the text and the world of the reader that this narrative is restored to time and action