The book began in 2014 as a research project for Maria Tattu Bowen of Together in the Mystery, a spiritual direction supervision training program. After completing the one-year course, I asked Maria how I might stay involved. She invited me to research the beginnings of spiritual direction supervision as we know it today. I accepted, focusing on two early training programs: the Center for Religious Development (CRD) and Wernersville's program in the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises.

After posting the findings on her website in 2016, the project went quiet. Then in a late 2021 webinar, Lucy Abbott Tucker mentioned the Institute for Spiritual Leadership (ISL). My research ears perked up. There was another spiritual direction training center in the 1970s besides CRD and Shalem?

In July 2022, I followed the ISL trail to archive boxes in Chicago. That visit, and those that followed, opened a flood of new material: more about ISL and CRD, much more about Shalem, and unexpected discoveries like the Guild for Spiritual Guidance (GSG) and Duquesne's program.

I also found the people behind these programs. These were figures I came to call the "hidden heroes" of spiritual direction history, whose voices had been largely lost to time: Sister Irene Dugan rc at ISL, Father William Connolly SJ at CRD, Father Adrian van Kaam CSSp at Duquesne, John Yungblut at GSG, and Father Shaun McCarty ST at Shalem. These leaders made contributions to the practice and theory of spiritual direction that we still draw on today. What kept me going was the significance of what they had done, and how little of it had ever been told.

While the archival work was essential, interviews were the lifeblood of this book. Conversations with former students and faculty brought these programs to life in ways documents alone couldn't. I ended every interview the same way: "Who else should I talk to?" Those referrals wove the web of stories that binds this book together.

After two years of research, I brought in writing coach and editor Jill Spivey Caddell in January 2024. Meeting on Zoom every two weeks, we worked through a first draft of Section II, the heart of the book telling the story of each training program, in about a year.

Finishing Section II raised a new question: I had documented how these programs started, but not why. And I hadn't explained why they emerged all at once in the late 1960s and '70s. This question sent me back to the archives for another year. The tension between psychology and spirituality emerged as central, the changing role of religion in American life came into focus, and the key role of the Jesuits in reviving the original intent of Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises became abundantly clear. This research became the Introduction and Section I.

With the history in place, a final question surfaced: so what? What does all of this mean for today's practice and the questions ahead? Section III, where my own voice becomes more present, brings this history to bear on current practices. I weigh the pros and cons of emerging approaches like somatic direction and virtual direction, and take a fresh look at the evolving role of supervision. As I read and reread the chapters, I began to see new layers of connection: questions about a director's authority, the tension between formation and training, Father McCarty's thinking on "dimensions," and the often-overlooked role of theology. What began as a modest research project had, somewhere along the way, become a story I felt compelled to tell.