Desert Spirituality and Cultural Resistance

Author: Belden Lane
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532656963
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 71

Book Description
“The wholeness of the life we seek is one that we are seldom able to envision in advance. It takes a shape that only the desert knows.” Desert Spirituality and Cultural Resistance: From Ancient Monks to Mountain Refugees is a passionate exploration of the theme of wilderness in the spiritual life. These three lectures by accomplished storyteller and theologian Belden Lane are inspirational in a way that lectures rarely are. Lane urges us to think courageously about the place of wilderness in Christian life. He contemplates the radical lives of the fourth-century Desert Fathers and Mothers, as well as the courageous example of sixteenth-century Anabaptists. He speaks of the ways in which wilderness can relate to the practice of a counter-cultural spirituality today, and he asks: Can desert and mountain gift us with a language to understand the experiences in our lives when we are taken to the edge, finding ourselves isolated and alone, both spiritually and culturally? “The wilderness is a place of suffering, out on the edge. It is a place of letting go, a place for dying, and yet also a place for coming alive. The desert is where things fall apart and where things may come together for us in an unanticipated way.”

Author:
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description

Backpacking with the Saints

Author: Belden C. Lane
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199394172
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Book Description
Carrying only basic camping equipment and a collection of the world's great spiritual writings, Belden C. Lane embarks on solitary spiritual treks through the Ozarks and across the American Southwest. For companions, he has only such teachers as Rumi, John of the Cross, Hildegard of Bingen, Dag Hammarskj?ld, and Thomas Merton, and as he walks, he engages their writings with the natural wonders he encounters--Bell Mountain Wilderness with S?ren Kierkegaard, Moonshine Hollow with Thich Nhat Hanh--demonstrating how being alone in the wild opens a rare view onto one's interior landscape, and how the saints' writings reveal the divine in nature. The discipline of backpacking, Lane shows, is a metaphor for a spiritual journey. Just as the wilderness offered revelations to the early Desert Christians, backpacking hones crucial spiritual skills: paying attention, traveling light, practicing silence, and exercising wonder. Lane engages the practice not only with a wide range of spiritual writings--Celtic, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, Hindu, and Sufi Muslim--but with the fascination of other lovers of the backcountry, from John Muir and Ed Abbey to Bill Plotkin and Cheryl Strayed. In this intimate and down-to-earth narrative, backpacking is shown to be a spiritual practice that allows the discovery of God amidst the beauty and unexpected terrors of nature. Adoration, Lane suggests, is the most appropriate human response to what we cannot explain, but have nonetheless learned to love. An enchanting narrative for Christians of all denominations, Backpacking with the Saints is an inspiring exploration of how solitude, simplicity, and mindfulness are illuminated and encouraged by the discipline of backcountry wandering, and of how the wilderness itself becomes a way of knowing-an ecology of the soul.

The Sayings and Stories of the Desert Fathers and Mothers

Author:
Publisher: Liturgical Press
ISBN: 0879072954
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 563

Book Description
The Sayings and Stories of the Desert Fathers and Mothers offers a new translation of the Greek alphabetical Apophthegmata Patrum, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. For the first time in an English translation, this volume provides: extensive background and contextual notes significant variant readings in the alphabetical manuscripts and textual differences vis-à-vis the systematic and anonymous Apophthegmata reference notes to both quotations from Scriptures and the many allusions to Scripture in the sayings and stories. In addition, there is an extensive glossary that offers information and further resources on people, places, and significant monastic vocabulary. Perfect for students and enthusiasts of the desert tradition.

Exhortation to the Monks by Hyperechios

Author:
Publisher: American University in Cairo Press
ISBN: 1649033699
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Book Description
Hyperechios's Exhortation to the Monks for the first time in English translation Hyperechios is a little-known monk of the fourth to fifth centuries, who is thought to have lived in Roman Palestine, possibly coastal Sinai. He wrote the Exhortation to the Monks, 160 short sayings, much like the apophthegmata, or sayings of the desert fathers and mothers, but also structurally very different—most of the sayings are two lines of poetry that offer instruction. The Exhortation, and early Christian monastic writings in general, teach that a spiritual life requires a life of training and practice, individually and as a neighbor and friend within one’s community. This volume studies Hyperechios’s Exhortation to better understand the moral and spiritual values in a fourth to fifth-century Christian monastic community, while reflecting also on how these are contemporary with the modern day. Drawing on modern works by scholars and placing the Exhortation in conversation with contemporary writers on the spiritual life, Tim Vivian begins with an introduction about Hyperechios, his location, the text, then a lengthy reflection on spiritual matters. He follows this with an English-language translation of the Exhortation and the Greek text, both accompanied by footnotes that offer biblical and patristic cross-references. Exhortation to the Monks by Hyperechios will be of interest to scholars and general readers of early Christianity, early monasticism, and Christian spirituality, both ancient and contemporary.

Cultural Memory

Author: Jeanette Rodríguez
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292774591
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 173

Book Description
Sangre llama a sangre. (Blood cries out to blood.)—Latin American aphorism The common "blood" of a people—that imperceptible flow that binds neighbor to neighbor and generation to generation—derives much of its strength from cultural memory. Cultural memories are those transformative historical experiences that define a culture, even as time passes and it adapts to new influences. For oppressed peoples, cultural memory engenders the spirit of resistance; not surprisingly, some of its most powerful incarnations are rooted in religion. In this interdisciplinary examination, Jeanette Rodriguez and Ted Fortier explore how four such forms of cultural memory have preserved the spirit of a particular people. Cultural Memory is not a comparative work, but it is a multicultural one, with four distinct case studies: the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe and the devotion it inspires among Mexican Americans; the role of secrecy and ceremony among the Yaqui Indians of Arizona; the evolving narrative of Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador as transmitted through the church of the poor and the martyrs; and the syncretism of Catholic Tzeltal Mayans of Chiapas, Mexico. In each case, the authors' religious credentials eased the resistance encountered by social scientists and other researchers. The result is a landmark work in cultural studies, a conversation between a liberation theologian and a cultural anthropologist on the religious nature of cultural memory and the power it brings to those who wield it.

Desert Daughters, Desert Sons

Author: Rachel Wheeler
Publisher: Liturgical Press
ISBN: 0814685005
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description
In Desert Daughters, Desert Sons, professor Rachel Wheeler argues that a new reading of the texts of the Christian desert tradition is needed to present the (often) anonymous women who inhabit the texts. Though these women may have been included by storytellers to provide a foil to the exemplary men in the stories' foreground, Wheeler demonstrates how women's persistence in places they were not welcome witnesses to truths about where wisdom may be sought and found. In this book, Wheeler allows these women's stories to critique the desert impulse that can create a spiritual life devoid of social relationships and responsibility.

Landscape of the Soul

Author: W. Vance Grace
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1725264609
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
The North American church is struggling. Our society seems to be coming apart at the seams and Christianity appears on the verge of losing its voice, its leadership, and its youth. The church’s calling is to cooperate with her Creator in the repair of the world. Instead, we struggle in the loss of the simplicity of the natural images of Jesus which compel us to engage tension, dependency, and the lesson of being on the margins. Until we learn to take our cues from a world we did not build, our actions will continue to prop up a society struggling from the weight of its own ethos. Part history, part cultural dialogue, part travelogue—always in conversation with the ancient and compelling biblical vision of shalom—Landscape of the Soul will encourage you to see beyond the shells of your constructed world to those places where dynamic spiritual rhythms can still be found.

The Poetics and Politics of the Desert

Author: Catrin Gersdorf
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9401206570
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 357

Book Description
This study explores the ways in which the desert, as topographical space and cultural presence, shaped and reshaped concepts and images of America. Once a territory outside the geopolitical and cultural borders of the United States, the deserts of the West and Southwest have since emerged as canonical American landscapes. Drawing on the critical concepts of American studies and on questions and problems raised in recent debates on ecocriticism, The Poetics and Politics of the Desert investigates the spatial rhetoric of America as it developed in view of arid landscapes since the mid-nineteenth century. Gersdorf argues that the integration of the desert into America catered to the entire spectrum of ideological and political responses to the history and culture of the US, maintaining that the Americanization of this landscape was and continues to be staged within the idiomatic parameters and in reaction to the discursive authority of four spatial metaphors: garden, wilderness, Orient, and heterotopia.

Landscapes of the Sacred

Author: Belden C. Lane
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801868382
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Book Description
This substantially expanded edition of Belden C. Lane's Landscapes of the Sacred includes a new introductory chapter that offers three new interpretive models for understanding American sacred space. Lane maintains his approach of interspersing shorter and more personal pieces among full-length essays that explore how Native American, early French and Spanish, Puritan New England, and Catholic Worker traditions has each expressed the connection between spirituality and place. A new section at the end of the book includes three chapters that address methodological issues in the study of spirituality, the symbol-making process of religious experience, and the tension between place and placelessness in Christian spirituality.