In an age when transparency often connotes surveillance or oversharing, spiritual friendship emerges as a counterexample: a relationship in which openness is not exploitative but ethically beautiful. Spiritual friendship can be defined as a mutual relation of reverent attention, patient disclosure, and non-instrumental care. In such a bond, two people attend deeply to each other’s inner lives, sharing truths in a climate of trust. Transparency here does not mean spilling every secret on demand; rather, it means thoughtful transparency – a calibrated offering of the self under conditions that can bear it. Unlike the glare of public exposure, the light between spiritual friends is gentle and warm, illuminating without burning. This chapter explores spiritual friendship as a privileged site where one’s interior may be offered without being consumed, drawing on wisdom from Simone Weil, Emmanuel Levinas, María Lugones, Gloria Anzaldúa, José Esteban Muñoz, and ascetical traditions. We distinguish this rare kind of friendship from ordinary companionship, contractual relations, therapy, or institutional community, and argue that “thoughtful transparency” signifies truth shared with care, not exhaustive exposure. Ultimately, spiritual friendship is presented not as a universal demand – not everyone can or must bare their soul – but as a moral possibility: a vision of intimacy in the world but not of it, where openness is guided by love and discernment.
Defining Spiritual Friendship
Spiritual friendship is friendship elevated to an ideal. It involves two people who approach each other with reverent attention, patient disclosure, and non-instrumental care. By reverent attention, we mean a profound respect for the other’s being and uniqueness – listening and perceiving the friend deeply, without rushing to judge or use their words for one’s own ends. The French philosopher Simone Weil famously wrote that “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”[1]. In her view, to truly pay attention to another person is a moral act of generosity, a way of saying your reality matters to me. Such attention is prayer-like: it requires humility and suspension of self-interest[2]. In spiritual friendship, each friend offers this attentive presence to the other. One friend listens as the other gradually discloses their interior life – fears, hopes, wounds, and aspirations – and this patient disclosure unfolds at its own pace, in an atmosphere of safety. Crucially, both friends engage in non-instrumental care: caring for each other not as means to an end (not for profit, social advantage, or therapy fees), but as ends in themselves. This kind of friendship has no ulterior motive or transactional contract; its purpose is simply the mutual good of two souls. It is, as one monastic writer put it, an expression of God’s love and a path to knowing God’s love[3][4] – a sentiment that resonates even in secular terms as the idea that through loving friendship we come to understand the fullest potential of human love.
Such a friendship is transparent in a thoughtful way. Each friend gradually reveals their interior – their truth, vulnerabilities, and moral struggles – but only as a freely given gift, not under any compulsion or for exploitation. Imagine two companions in a quiet “pleasant solitude,” where no one else intrudes, inviting each other: “reveal your heart and speak your mind… say whatever you wish”[5]. In spiritual friendship, one dares to say, “This is who I am, and I trust you with it,” and the other receives this revelation reverently. There is a mutual unveiling of souls, yet also a mutual guarding of those souls. Each friend becomes, in Aelred of Rievaulx’s beautiful phrase, “the guardian of our mutual love, or even of my very soul,” keeping “in faithful silence all its secrets”[6]. This means that whatever one friend discloses – their private grief, their hidden flaws – the other holds it confidentially and tenderly, never betraying that trust. Thus the interior may be offered without being consumed: transparency does not lead to violation. Instead, the inner self is seen and honored by the friend, not devoured or objectified.
Reverent Attention and the Face of the Other
At the heart of spiritual friendship is an ethical attention to the other person’s reality. Simone Weil’s notion of attention as generous, as we saw, is one key insight. Another is Emmanuel Levinas’s claim that the encounter with the Other – the face-to-face meeting with another person – interrupts the self and calls it to responsibility. Levinas describes the face of the other as an epiphany that shatters our egoistic complacency. In his ethical philosophy, when we truly encounter someone’s face (in a broad sense, their presence and vulnerability), we hear the silent command “Thou shalt not harm me.” Our usual self-centered perspective is disrupted. As Judith Butler explains of Levinas’s idea, “the face of the Other speaks to me from outside, and interrupts that narcissistic circuit. The face of the Other calls me out of narcissism toward something finally more important”[7]. In other words, encountering the reality of another person decenters the ego – it makes room for the other in our world. In a spiritual friendship, each friend continually undergoes this Levinasian interruption: seeing the friend’s face (literally and metaphorically), one cannot remain locked in self-interest. The friend’s needs, sorrows, and dignity impose themselves as paramount. One’s own interior is no longer a closed loop; it is opened by the appeal of the other’s presence.
This dynamic ensures that transparency in spiritual friendship is never one-sided or prurient. When my friend discloses her pain or her truth to me, I do not treat it as gossip or as data to be used; I experience it as a summons – a call to respond with care, empathy, and respect. Levinas would say the friend’s face, in its naked honesty, says “help me,” “do not leave me alone,” and I, if I am a true friend, answer “I am here.” Such reverent attention requires getting oneself out of the way. Weil similarly noted that real attention is a form of decreation of the self – a letting go of one’s ego and control in order to truly listen and attend to another[8][9]. In spiritual friendship, each person practices this attentive letting-be: I bracket my own assumptions and impatience so I can attend to what my friend shows me of her soul, and she does the same for me. The result is a space of ethical beauty – an intimacy where each is for the other, and where truth can be shared safely because it is met with humility and love.
Loving World-Traveling and Borderlands Kinship
Spiritual friendship often involves a kind of journeying into each other’s inner worlds. Philosopher María Lugones offers a vivid concept for this: “world-traveling.” In her essay on playfulness and loving perception, Lugones suggests that to love someone truly, we must be willing to travel into their “world” – their perspective, culture, and experiences – with affection and openness. This is not tourism or voyeurism; it is loving world-traveling, undertaken with the other’s well-being at heart. Lugones writes that such traveling teaches us our mutual dependence: “We are fully dependent on each other for the possibility of being understood… we do not make sense, we are not solid, visible, integrated; we are lacking. Travelling to each other’s ‘worlds’ enables us to be through loving each other”[10]. In other words, I become more real and intelligible when you lovingly enter my world, and vice versa. Spiritual friends engage in this two-way travel. Each steps into the other’s reality – tries to see through the friend’s eyes, feel with the friend’s heart – not as an academic exercise but as an act of love. This requires patience and humility: one must be willing to learn, to sometimes feel like a stranger in the friend’s world, and to cherish that world even if it is very different from one’s own.
We can think of this as a border-crossing kinship, which is where Gloria Anzaldúa’s and queer thinkers’ insights become illuminating. Anzaldúa, a Chicana lesbian writer, theorized the concept of the borderlands – not only the literal U.S.-Mexico border, but any space where different identities and cultures meet and mix. Life in the borderlands is often fraught, but it also creates new, hybrid ways of being and relating. Anzaldúa’s notion of nepantla, a Nahuatl word for an in-between space, has been applied to friendship: one scholar notes that Anzaldúa’s “liminal or in-between space” can describe friendship as a communal connection essential to discovering who we are[11]. Spiritual friendship often flourishes in such in-between spaces – for example, between people who share a sense of marginality or who come from very different backgrounds but meet in a higher place of understanding. When two people from different “worlds” form a spiritual friendship, they create their own small borderland where a new culture of two is formed, built on love and trust. This is frequently seen in queer kinship and other forms of chosen family. Queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz observed how LGBTQ people, often excluded from traditional family structures, knit together communities of chosen family that open up new horizons of possibility. In fleeting moments of relational connection – at a queer support group, in a gay nightclub, at a community center – something amazing can happen. Muñoz writes that such instances “[register] as the illumination of a horizon of existence,” as communities and chosen family “open up new horizons of possibilities for flourishing”[12]. What he describes is the utopian glimpse that a deep kinship offers: a sense that here, with these friends, my truth can shine and I can envision a better world.
Spiritual friendship partakes of this queer and borderlands kinship by creating a safe, attentive space where difference is honored and love ties people together more strongly than any external label. Whether it’s two women of color in a hostile academic world sustaining each other, a monk and a layperson sharing spiritual counsel across social divides, or two queer youths declaring themselves each other’s family – these friendships allow a degree of transparent sharing that the broader world often forbids. Lugones’s loving world-travelers do not consume or appropriate each other’s differences; rather, they cherish and learn from them. In crossing into my friend’s world, I don’t erase my identity or hers – I expand my understanding and affirm her reality. In this way, spiritual friendship is an anticonsuming transparency: the more we reveal to each other across our differences, the more we both become fully ourselves.
The Interior Offered Without Being Consumed
A central claim of this chapter is that in spiritual friendship “the interior may be offered without being consumed.” By offered, we mean that each friend entrusts personal truths, vulnerabilities, and revelations of the inner self to the other. By without being consumed, we mean that these offerings are not devoured, exploited, or used up by the other; they are held in trust and reciprocated. This contrasts sharply with many experiences of exposure in ordinary life. Too often, when people expose their interior – whether by confessing a secret, showing vulnerability online, or opening up in a competitive workplace – they may find others pounce on that information, using it for gossip, ridicule, or gain. That is exploitative transparency, leaving one feeling devoured or empty. Spiritual friendship is different. Here, every disclosure is sacred, and both parties implicitly agree to treat it as such. The twelfth-century abbot Aelred of Rievaulx, in On Spiritual Friendship, emphasized the sanctity of secrets between friends: a spiritual friend, he said, must “preserve in faithful silence” all the secrets of the other, and serve as the “guardian” of the friend’s soul[6]. Anything revealed in the intimacy of friendship remains wrapped in confidentiality and care. In practical terms, this means if my friend shares with me her deepest fears or past traumas, I do not repeat them to others; I do not even treat them as fodder for my own curiosity. I honor her interior as inviolable, even as she has voluntarily uncovered part of it to me.
Spiritual traditions capture this idea through metaphors of reflection and trust. In Sufi mysticism, for example, the true friend is likened to a mirror of one’s soul. As one Sufi teaching has it, “in such sacred meeting, the friend becomes a mirror, showing us the face we had before we were born”[13]. This poetic image suggests that a spiritual friend reflects your essence back to you – reminds you of your true self – without distortion or theft. A mirror takes in light and gives it back; it doesn’t keep it. Likewise, the friend who knows your interior does not seize it for themselves; they simply reflect it with clarity and love, helping you to see yourself. The Sufi concept of ṣuḥba (spiritual companionship) is considered a “pillar of the Sufi path,” a relationship of “witness, trust, and inward support”[14]. In the Qur’anic story of the Prophet Muhammad and his close companion in the cave, the Prophet consoles his friend, “Do not grieve. Indeed, God is with us” (Qur’an 9:40)[15] – a moment that Sufis interpret as the epitome of sacred friendship: one friend reminding the other of divine presence in their vulnerability. The Prophet calls his companion ṣāḥib, friend, and entrusts him with both his physical safety and his emotional state. This kind of companionship carries an Arabic concept called amāna, meaning trust or safekeeping. “True friendship in this sense becomes a form of sacred trust, or amāna,” writes one interpreter of Sufi wisdom[16]. Each friend holds something precious for the other – their disclosed interior life – as an amāna, to be guarded and never violated. Thus, the interior offering is not consumed; it is protected and even consecrated by the mutual promise of care.
To further illustrate: imagine a friend tells you of a profound spiritual experience they once had, or a grave mistake they deeply regret. In a spiritual friendship, you receive this confidence almost as a priest would receive a confession – with respect, secrecy, and the intent to support, not to judge. You might gently ask questions to help the friend articulate more, or simply offer empathy. You certainly do not broadcast their story or use it to manipulate them later (“remember that time you told me X…”). The moral beauty of this exchange is that transparency is married to restraint. The truth is shared, but it stops with the friend for whom it was intended. The interior light is revealed, but it is not seized; it illuminates the space between the two friends and then settles into the hearth of that relationship, warming it from within. Both religious and secular traditions affirm this principle. Many monastic rules through history cautioned monks and nuns to practice discretion and not betray confidences, precisely to foster trust in community. Likewise, modern ethics of care highlight confidentiality as key to any helping relationship. Spiritual friendship goes a step further: confidentiality is not just a professional duty but a sacred honor between friends. The result is a relationship where each person can be transparent without fear, knowing their vulnerability will be met with loyalty and gentle stewardship.
Not a Contract, Not a Cure, Not a Crowd
To better understand spiritual friendship, it helps to distinguish it from other forms of human relationship that it might superficially resemble. Spiritual friendship is neither a casual companionship nor a formal contract, neither therapy session nor institutional membership. It stands apart in its depth and intent:
- More than Ordinary Companionship: Ordinary friends or companions might enjoy each other’s company, share hobbies, jokes, or mutual acquaintances. Such friendship (what Aristotle calls friendships of pleasure or utility) often centers on external commonalities – working at the same office, liking the same sports team, etc. When circumstances change, the bond may fade. Spiritual friendship, by contrast, isn’t based on external activities or conveniences. It is rooted in the inner lives of the friends and their moral-spiritual growth. It involves a commitment to each other’s souls, not just to having a good time. Thus, while companions might say, “I like hanging out with you,” spiritual friends might say, “I am invested in who you are becoming.” It is a friendship of profound purpose.
- Not a Contract or Transaction: Unlike relationships formed by a contract (business partnerships, colleagues, or even some marriages of convenience), spiritual friendship has no explicit deal and no quid pro quo beyond love itself. There is no legalistic expectation like “I will do X for you if you do Y for me.” In fact, spiritual friends often help and serve each other, but these acts are freely given, not tallied. We might say spiritual friendship operates on the logic of gift, not exchange. Each friend gives the gift of attention and honesty to the other. If one friend discloses a painful truth today, there is no expectation that the other must disclose an equally painful truth tomorrow to “balance” the ledger. The timing and extent of openness are guided by trust and care, not obligation. This makes the relationship feel liberating – one can be transparent at their own pace, without fear that intimacy is a debt or that one is “owed” something in return.
- Beyond Therapy: A spiritual friendship can be deeply therapeutic in the sense that it offers emotional support, understanding, and even healing of old wounds. However, it is not the same as a therapist-patient relationship. In therapy, the flow of disclosure is one-directional (the client shares, the therapist mostly listens), and it’s framed as professional service. In spiritual friendship, both parties reveal themselves over time; both listen and both share. There is a mutual vulnerability that therapy, with its professional boundaries, does not allow. Furthermore, spiritual friendship is not time-bounded by appointments or limited to psychological issues – it encompasses moral, spiritual, even philosophical dimensions of life. One friend might indeed act as a counselor to the other at times (friends comfort and advise each other often), but they do so as equals and out of love, not as an expert treating a patient. Unlike a therapist, a true friend also challenges and corrects you out of concern for your character. Aelred of Rievaulx notes that a spiritual friend will “correct or endure [your flaws] with all his strength”[6] – meaning a friend lovingly helps you overcome vices or endures your imperfections patiently. This is a moral friendship, not a paid service.
- More Intimate than Community: Being part of a faith community, a school, or any institution can foster fellowship and a sense of belonging. Yet institutional community often comes with roles, rules, and hierarchies that can limit personal transparency. For example, in a religious community, one might share certain beliefs and rituals with others but still keep one’s deepest struggles private for fear of judgment. Spiritual friendship carves out a smaller, safer space within or alongside the community where two individuals can drop the masks required by roles. It’s personal rather than institutional. It also differs from broader kinship groups or “found families” in that it is typically dyadic (between two people) and focused. An entire support group might be a wonderful source of solidarity, but within that group usually each person has one or two special confidants – that is closer to the spiritual friendship we describe. Even in monasteries that emphasized communal life, certain pairs of monks formed special spiritual friendships that went deeper than what the whole group shared[17]. Those pairs could be candid to a degree that might unsettle the wider community. In sum, spiritual friendship is a singular bond that can exist within larger networks but maintains its unique, intimate character.
By highlighting these contrasts, we see that spiritual friendship is a unique blend of love, trust, and truth-telling that isn’t replicated by just any friendly relation. It demands more honesty than casual pals, more gratuity than contracts, more mutuality than therapy, and more personal focus than a communal circle. It is, as Aelred said, a “path that leads very close to…the enjoyment and knowledge of God”[18] – or in secular terms, a path to the highest understanding of goodness and truth between people.
Thoughtful Transparency: Calibrated Offering of Truth
We have used the phrase “thoughtful transparency” to capture how spiritual friends share themselves. This phrase means that honesty is given wisely, at the right time, and in the right measure. It rejects the idea that being a “good friend” means blurting out every secret or constantly exposing one’s raw emotions. Instead, it follows a principle of discernment: a sense of what, when, and how much to share, such that the truth communicated can be borne by both the speaker and listener. Thoughtful transparency is thus calibrated offering. Each person offers the truth of themselves like pouring tea into a cup – gently and not overflowing it. There is an art here: too little transparency and the friendship remains superficial; too much given too soon and one might overwhelm or even unintentionally burden the other.
What guides this calibration? Care for the other and respect for oneself. Out of care, I consider my friend’s capacity and context: is my friend in a place to hear a difficult truth from me today, or should I wait? Will sharing this detail help our mutual understanding, or would it just shift attention onto me unnecessarily? Respect for myself means I do not perform vulnerability just to gain sympathy, nor do I expose parts of myself that I am not ready to have held by another. In spiritual friendship, both individuals learn through trial and empathy how to navigate these questions. They create a kind of rhythm of disclosure. Early in the friendship, transparency may start with smaller confidences – a personal anecdote, a mild insecurity. As trust deepens and responses prove caring, the friends venture into heavier terrain – perhaps childhood wounds, spiritual crises, moral failings. At each stage, there is a kind of silent consent: both friends tacitly say yes, we are ready to know this deeper truth about each other. This pacing ensures that truth is shared under conditions that can bear it. As a wise saying goes, there are some truths we should speak only “as much as the other’s ear can hear.” In spiritual friendship, one cultivates that ear and that tongue, sensitive to timing and tone.
An example of thoughtful transparency is the practice observed in some monastic and Sufi traditions of having a spiritual dialogue at appointed times. Rather than incessantly confessing every thought, monks might sit once a week for a private talk with a spiritual friend or director, sharing what is most pertinent to their soul’s progress. This structured routine teaches patience and reflection; one asks oneself, “What do I truly need to share? What is ripe for sharing?” Similarly, Sufi circles often emphasize adab, or courtesy, in speech – one does not simply dump one’s emotions on others without regard for their state. The effect is that when transparency occurs, it carries weight and grace. It is thoughtful, intentional truth-telling. Contrast this with the contemporary phenomenon of oversharing on social media, where intimate details are sometimes broadcast impulsively to people who have neither the context nor commitment to hold them. That kind of exposure can leave a person feeling more lonely and violated. By contrast, transparency in spiritual friendship is measured and reciprocal. Each friend both reveals and conceals in due season, like alternating currents. Indeed, some opacity is preserved: privacy is not the enemy of intimacy here, but its subtle companion. There may be things even close friends hold back or veil until the relationship has further matured – not out of deceit, but out of wisdom. In certain mystical traditions, even the closest of spiritual companions acknowledge a holy privacy: a “secret of the heart” that ultimately only God knows. Friends are not fused into one being; each retains individuality and a direct relationship with the divine or with their own conscience. Thoughtful transparency respects that each soul has depths perhaps immeasurable, and one shares from those depths only what edifies the friendship.
Notably, Aelred of Rievaulx advised that affection in friendship must be “led by reason, moderated by a sense of honor, and ruled by justice”[19]. This medieval counsel aligns with our point: love (affection) should be joined to reason in guiding a friendship. Part of that reason is knowing when to speak and when to be silent. Moderation and temperance were virtues he specifically named at the very beginning of a spiritual friendship[20]. In modern terms, we might say: even in transparency, there are healthy boundaries. For instance, if one friend is struggling severely with, say, a mental health issue, thoughtful transparency might mean they do share this with their friend (so as not to hide something crucial), but they also might seek a therapist or wider support rather than expect the friend alone to handle it. They are truthful about their condition but also prudent about the friend’s role. The friend, for their part, is honest about what support they can or cannot give. This honesty about limits is itself a form of transparency that protects the relationship from collapse under unrealistic expectations. In sum, thoughtful transparency ensures that truth-telling in the friendship serves growth and deeper love, not melodrama or harm. It is truth with love and wisdom – a far cry from the naïve idea that “true friends tell each other absolutely everything with no filter.” On the contrary, true friends tell each other the right truths at the right time, in the spirit of mutual uplift.
Rare and Precious: A Moral Possibility, Not a Mandate
By now it should be clear that spiritual friendship, as we have described it, is an exceptional kind of bond. It is rare, and it thrives only under certain conditions of safety, time, and mutual willingness. This is not an easy friendship to find or maintain, and it would be unrealistic (even oppressive) to demand that everyone pursue such depth with all their friends. As Aristotle observed over two millennia ago, the highest form of friendship – one based on virtue and the mutual love of the good – is scarce because people of that caliber are themselves rare[21]. “It is natural that such friendships should be infrequent,” he noted, “for such [people] are rare.” Indeed, not everyone one meets is capable of or interested in this kind of transparent, attentive relating. And even two well-intentioned people may not have the opportunity to develop a spiritual friendship if their life circumstances don’t permit the necessary time and trust-building.
Modern life, with its ceaseless busyness and virtual distractions, is often inhospitable to patient friendship cultivation. Deep trust requires duration: long conversations, shared silence, weathering conflicts, showing up consistently – all of which can be hard to come by when work hours are long or when geographic mobility cuts friendships short. Moreover, conditions of safety are paramount. People who live under constant threat – whether due to war, an abusive environment, or severe social marginalization – may find it nearly impossible to let their guard down enough to form a spiritual friendship. It is telling that many examples we’ve drawn on (monastic friendships, Sufi companions, close-knit activist circles) occur in contexts where a protected space was carved out for trust: a monastery’s enclosure, a Sufi lodge, a shared struggle in a movement that forges unbreakable bonds. These conditions allow vulnerability to bloom. In contrast, someone constantly on the run for survival has little luxury to sit and share their soul. As a queer author reflecting on community noted, “Growing up shamed, isolated, and fearful, the discovery of queer community can feel like the greatest blessing… for those of us who are lucky enough, our stories do not end with death-dealing theologies” but instead with finding chosen family[22][23]. The phrase “lucky enough” is key: it underscores that finding a friend who can truly be a soul friend is partly a matter of grace and fortune, not just personal virtue.
Therefore, it would be a mistake to turn the ideal of spiritual friendship into a moral imperative for all. Not everyone will have this kind of friend, and that does not mean their lives are less meaningful or that all their ordinary friendships are failures. Spiritual friendship is best thought of as a shining possibility on the horizon of human relations – a kind of friendship we can aspire to when circumstances allow, and which we can recognize and nurture if we are fortunate to encounter it. It’s also something one can prepare for in oneself: by cultivating the virtues we’ve discussed (attention, empathy, discretion, honesty, patience), we make ourselves more ready to be a true friend should the occasion arise. But forcing intimacy prematurely or expecting every acquaintance to be a spiritual confidant would cheapen the concept and likely cause harm. The beauty of this friendship lies in its voluntariness and reciprocity; it cannot be legislated or mass-produced.
In acknowledging its rarity, we also avoid an overly idealistic picture. Even genuine spiritual friendships are not perfect utopias. They are subject to human limitations: misunderstandings occur, one friend might grow or change in ways the other struggles to understand, external pressures can intrude. Transparency, even thoughtful, sometimes leads to moments of hurt – perhaps an honesty that stings or a trust that wavers. Spiritual friends can disappoint each other; they can drift apart due to life changes. The difference is that because of the commitment to care and truth, such friendships often have resources to repair and forgive. They strive for an ideal, but they practice compassion when the ideal isn’t fully met. In that sense, these friendships carry a kind of grace. They are in the world but not of it, to recall our book’s title: they exist within ordinary life (two embodied people with flaws), yet they are not of it in that they orient towards a higher love that transcends ego and utility.
To conclude, spiritual friendship as described in this chapter stands as a testament to what human relationships can be at their finest. It shows us an “economy of thoughtful transparency” where truth is exchanged like a sacred currency – sparingly, meaningfully, and in trust – rather than flung about or hoarded. In a spiritual friendship, two people create an intimate world where both opacity and clarity have their place: certain private depths are respected (opacity), even as much of the soul is freely shared (clarity). The transparency here is ethical and beautiful because it is governed by love. Such friendship may be rare, but its value is immense – like a rare gem, it catches the light and shows us new colors of the human spirit. Knowing this possibility exists can inspire us to seek more attentive, loving relationships in our own lives. And if one is ever blessed to say of someone, “Here, at last, is a friend with whom I can be in the world but not of it”, then one has indeed found a treasure worth more than gold. In the gentle, watchful eyes of such a friend, one’s soul can be transparent and yet remain safe, seen and yet truly free.[7][10]
[1] Jan 22 “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” | Poetry Blog: “A Work Day in Hard Times”
[2] [8] [9] Simone Weil and the Sacred Work of Doubt by Stefani Ruper
[3] [4] [5] [6] [17] [18] [19] [20] The Grace of Spiritual Friendship – Catholic Journal
[7] journals.ku.edu
[10] Microsoft Word – Caver WPSA Paper 2017.docx
[11] (PDF) Queering Family Scholarship” Theorizing from the Borderlands
[12] [22] [23] On Learning from Queer Kin – Good Faith Media
[13] [14] [15] [16] Sacred Relationships and Friendships in Sufism | Spirituality+Health
[21] Understanding Friendship through the Eyes of Aristotle – Antigone
Jonathan Johnson-Swagel 
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