Author: Benedicta Ward
Publisher: Liturgical Press
ISBN: 9780879076061
Category : Christian biography
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Beauty consuming itself like incense burnt before God in solitude: these stories of penitent women from the fourth- century egyptian desert fascinated Christians in antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages.
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers
Author:
Publisher: Liturgical Press
ISBN: 0879079592
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 308
Book Description
`Give me a word, Father', visitors to early desert monks asked. The responses of these pioneer ascetics were remembered and in the fourth century written down in Coptic, Syriac, Greek, and later Latin. Their Sayings were collected, in this case in the alphabetical order of the monks and nuns who uttered them, and read by generations of Christians as life-giving words that would help readers along the path to salvation.
Publisher: Liturgical Press
ISBN: 0879079592
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 308
Book Description
`Give me a word, Father', visitors to early desert monks asked. The responses of these pioneer ascetics were remembered and in the fourth century written down in Coptic, Syriac, Greek, and later Latin. Their Sayings were collected, in this case in the alphabetical order of the monks and nuns who uttered them, and read by generations of Christians as life-giving words that would help readers along the path to salvation.
Discover Your Spiritual Type
Author: Corinne Ware
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1566995094
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 156
Book Description
From Urban T. Holmes's spiritual typology and her own experience as a spiritual director and pastoral counselor, Ware provides a framework for people to name and understand their spiritual experience-in much the same way the Myers-Briggs typology provides a framework for understanding personality types. Readers explore four spiritual types--head, heart, mystic, and Kingdom--and exercises allow individuals and groups to assess their type. Additional information for clergy to use this tool with congregations is included, which will help them gain greater understanding of how members learn about, worship, and celebrate God--and why there may be tension about such issues as the form or content of the worship service.
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1566995094
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 156
Book Description
From Urban T. Holmes's spiritual typology and her own experience as a spiritual director and pastoral counselor, Ware provides a framework for people to name and understand their spiritual experience-in much the same way the Myers-Briggs typology provides a framework for understanding personality types. Readers explore four spiritual types--head, heart, mystic, and Kingdom--and exercises allow individuals and groups to assess their type. Additional information for clergy to use this tool with congregations is included, which will help them gain greater understanding of how members learn about, worship, and celebrate God--and why there may be tension about such issues as the form or content of the worship service.
The Sacred Body
Author: David Jasper
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280
Book Description
Continuing the work began in The Sacred Desert, David Jasper here turns his attention to the body, seeking a profound understanding of what it means to be in the flesh. A deeply autobiographical journey through disparate written texts (in literature, philosophy, theology and religion), art, and cinema, The Sacred Body rigorously and artfully pursues the body of the Christian tradition of "the Word made flesh"--a body torn and crucified, resurrected, and divinized, embracing both deep suffering and profound joy. Engaging ascetic traditions that began among fourth-century desert monastics, as well as George Herbert, Simone Weil, Meister Eckhart, James Joyce and others, David Jasper once again provides a bold, learned, and original theological exploration.
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280
Book Description
Continuing the work began in The Sacred Desert, David Jasper here turns his attention to the body, seeking a profound understanding of what it means to be in the flesh. A deeply autobiographical journey through disparate written texts (in literature, philosophy, theology and religion), art, and cinema, The Sacred Body rigorously and artfully pursues the body of the Christian tradition of "the Word made flesh"--a body torn and crucified, resurrected, and divinized, embracing both deep suffering and profound joy. Engaging ascetic traditions that began among fourth-century desert monastics, as well as George Herbert, Simone Weil, Meister Eckhart, James Joyce and others, David Jasper once again provides a bold, learned, and original theological exploration.
The Sex Lives of Saints
Author: Virginia Burrus
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812200721
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Book Description
Has a repressive morality been the primary contribution of Christianity to the history of sexuality? The ascetic concerns that pervade ancient Christian texts would seem to support such a common assumption. Focusing on hagiographical literature, Virginia Burrus pursues a fresh path of interpretation, arguing that the early accounts of the lives of saints are not antierotic but rather convey a sublimely transgressive "countereroticism" that resists the marital, procreative ethic of sexuality found in other strands of Christian tradition. Without reducing the erotics of ancient hagiography to a single formula, The Sex Lives of Saints frames the broad historical, theological, and theoretical issues at stake in such a revisionist interpretation of ascetic eroticism, with particular reference to the work of Michel Foucault and Georges Bataille, David Halperin and Geoffrey Harpham, Leo Bersani and Jean Baudrillard. Burrus subsequently proceeds through close, performative readings of the earliest Lives of Saints, mostly dating to the late fourth and early fifth centuries—Jerome's Lives of Paul, Malchus, Hilarion, and Paula; Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Macrina; Augustine's portrait of Monica; Sulpicius Severus's Life of Martin; and the slightly later Lives of so-called harlot saints. Queer, s/m, and postcolonial theories are among the contemporary discourses that prove intriguingly resonant with an ancient art of "saintly" loving that remains, in Burrus's reading, promisingly mobile, diverse, and open-ended.
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812200721
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Book Description
Has a repressive morality been the primary contribution of Christianity to the history of sexuality? The ascetic concerns that pervade ancient Christian texts would seem to support such a common assumption. Focusing on hagiographical literature, Virginia Burrus pursues a fresh path of interpretation, arguing that the early accounts of the lives of saints are not antierotic but rather convey a sublimely transgressive "countereroticism" that resists the marital, procreative ethic of sexuality found in other strands of Christian tradition. Without reducing the erotics of ancient hagiography to a single formula, The Sex Lives of Saints frames the broad historical, theological, and theoretical issues at stake in such a revisionist interpretation of ascetic eroticism, with particular reference to the work of Michel Foucault and Georges Bataille, David Halperin and Geoffrey Harpham, Leo Bersani and Jean Baudrillard. Burrus subsequently proceeds through close, performative readings of the earliest Lives of Saints, mostly dating to the late fourth and early fifth centuries—Jerome's Lives of Paul, Malchus, Hilarion, and Paula; Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Macrina; Augustine's portrait of Monica; Sulpicius Severus's Life of Martin; and the slightly later Lives of so-called harlot saints. Queer, s/m, and postcolonial theories are among the contemporary discourses that prove intriguingly resonant with an ancient art of "saintly" loving that remains, in Burrus's reading, promisingly mobile, diverse, and open-ended.
Sacred Fictions
Author: Lynda L. Coon
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812201671
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253
Book Description
Late antique and early medieval hagiographic texts present holy women as simultaneously pious and corrupt, hideous and beautiful, exemplars of depravity and models of sanctity. In Sacred Fictions Lynda Coon unpacks these paradoxical representations to reveal the construction and circumscription of women's roles in the early Christian centuries. Coon discerns three distinct paradigms for female sanctity in saints' lives and patristic and monastic writings. Women are recurrently figured as repentant desert hermits, wealthy widows, or cloistered ascetic nuns, and biblical discourse informs the narrative content, rhetorical strategies, and symbolic meanings of these texts in complex and multivalent ways. If hagiographers made their women saints walk on water, resurrect the dead, or consecrate the Eucharist, they also curbed the power of women by teaching that the daughters of Eve must make their bodies impenetrable through militant chastity or spiritual exile and must eradicate self-indulgence through ascetic attire or philanthropy. The windows the sacred fiction of holy women open on the past are far from transparent; driven by both literary invention and moral imperative, the stories they tell helped shape Western gender constructs that have survived into modern times.
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812201671
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253
Book Description
Late antique and early medieval hagiographic texts present holy women as simultaneously pious and corrupt, hideous and beautiful, exemplars of depravity and models of sanctity. In Sacred Fictions Lynda Coon unpacks these paradoxical representations to reveal the construction and circumscription of women's roles in the early Christian centuries. Coon discerns three distinct paradigms for female sanctity in saints' lives and patristic and monastic writings. Women are recurrently figured as repentant desert hermits, wealthy widows, or cloistered ascetic nuns, and biblical discourse informs the narrative content, rhetorical strategies, and symbolic meanings of these texts in complex and multivalent ways. If hagiographers made their women saints walk on water, resurrect the dead, or consecrate the Eucharist, they also curbed the power of women by teaching that the daughters of Eve must make their bodies impenetrable through militant chastity or spiritual exile and must eradicate self-indulgence through ascetic attire or philanthropy. The windows the sacred fiction of holy women open on the past are far from transparent; driven by both literary invention and moral imperative, the stories they tell helped shape Western gender constructs that have survived into modern times.
Prostitutes and Polygamists
Author: David T. Lamb
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 0310518482
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 209
Book Description
Jacob and Solomon were polygamists. Tamar and Rahab were prostitutes. What are polygamists and prostitutes doing on the pages of Holy Scripture? And God told the prophet Hosea to marry a prostitute. What about Cain—did he really marry his sister? Abraham did, and he was also a polygamist. Lot offered his daughters up for rape, David committed adultery (or rape?) and the Bible calls both men righteous. Love, Old Testament style, was bizarre. As readers of the Old Testament encounter these weird, confusing, and horrific “love” stories they ask, “What’s up with sex in the Old Testament?” The church often ignores the R-rated bits of the Bible, so it’s hard for people to find answers to their disturbing questions about sex in Scripture, which can lead people to give up on God and God’s word. However, these stories were included in the Bible for a reason, to reveal an even more shocking “love” story. When humans behave badly, God behaves graciously. God not only forgives people with sexual baggage, but also redeems their lives and includes them in his mission. God’s word records their story to benefit us. Just as sex was not often ideal in the Old Testament, it’s often not ideal today. Instead of ignoring these stories, Prostitutes and Polygamists engages, discusses, and learns from them.
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 0310518482
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 209
Book Description
Jacob and Solomon were polygamists. Tamar and Rahab were prostitutes. What are polygamists and prostitutes doing on the pages of Holy Scripture? And God told the prophet Hosea to marry a prostitute. What about Cain—did he really marry his sister? Abraham did, and he was also a polygamist. Lot offered his daughters up for rape, David committed adultery (or rape?) and the Bible calls both men righteous. Love, Old Testament style, was bizarre. As readers of the Old Testament encounter these weird, confusing, and horrific “love” stories they ask, “What’s up with sex in the Old Testament?” The church often ignores the R-rated bits of the Bible, so it’s hard for people to find answers to their disturbing questions about sex in Scripture, which can lead people to give up on God and God’s word. However, these stories were included in the Bible for a reason, to reveal an even more shocking “love” story. When humans behave badly, God behaves graciously. God not only forgives people with sexual baggage, but also redeems their lives and includes them in his mission. God’s word records their story to benefit us. Just as sex was not often ideal in the Old Testament, it’s often not ideal today. Instead of ignoring these stories, Prostitutes and Polygamists engages, discusses, and learns from them.