ABSTRACT
Defining spirituality remains one of the most challenging tasks for academics from various disciplines. Often, at the beginning of many publications, we find attempts at defining spirituality that solely suit the purposes of their authors and quickly realize that we are far from any final or exhaustive proposal. We need tools to understand the confusing state of research into spirituality. In a concise way, this chapter describes both historical and diverse current ways of defining spirituality, concluding with the proposal of a new typology that helps to understand the present situation in this field of study. Finally, the concept of self- transcendence will be examined in light of this new classification.
