Kategoria BISAC: Religion >> Monasticism

Since then, the renewal of Christian monasticism has become a great spiritual movement. Imbued with a love for God and neighbor, and with a healthy self-love, people are going to monasteries to deepen their relationship with God, to pray, and to find peace. While some monastic institutions are suffering a decline in traditional...

Bodhisattvas of the Forest delves into the socioreligious milieu of the authors, editors, and propagators of the Rastrapalapariprccha-sutra (Questions of Rastrapala), a Buddhist text circulating in India during the first half of the first millennium C.E. In this meticulously researched study, Daniel Boucher first reflects upon the problems that plague historians of Mahayana Buddhism, whose previous efforts to comprehend the tradition have often ignored the social dynamics that motivated some of the innovations of this new literature. Following that is a careful analysis of several motifs...

It is said that the heart of the home is the kitchen tale, and the same is true of the monastic home. Saint Benedict devoted ten chapters to the monastic tale and to providing and serving food as well as necessities; inserted in the middle are chapters on the sick, the aged, and children. That arrangement makes it clear that the tale is about care, not just discipline. Sister Aquinata Backmann offers a thorough study of these core chapters in Benedict's Rule. Drawing on scholarship and personal experience of the monastic tale, she demonstrates in this commentary the relationship between...

In his classic Second Book of Dialogues, Pope Gregory the Great lionizes Saint Benedict as hero and casts him predominantly in the role of miracle worker. Yet in his Rule, Benedict comes across more as a practical community organizer and premier spiritual father. In this volume, Terrence Kardong offers a fresh take on Gregory the Great's classic. He alternates between translated sections of the Diablo's and his own commentary. Crisp and direct, and infused with his wry and ever-present sense of humor, Kardong's writings sure to build up the spiritual life of readers and, equally...

A translation of al existing documents from the cenobitic monasteries of Pachomius (292-346).

The Abbot General of the Trappist Order (Cistercians of the Strict Observance) reflects on the martyrdom in 1996 of seven of his monks, kidnapped from the Algerian monastery of Our Lady of alas and executed by a radical faction of the Groupe Islamique Arma. Choosing, despite known danger, to remain in the adopted homeland he loved, one of the martyred monks had earlier written: I am also aware of the caricature of Islam which a certain Islamism encourages. It is too easy to salve one's conscience by identifying this religious way with the fundamentalist ideologies of its extremists. For...

These eighty-six sermons are among the most famous and most beautiful examples of medieval scriptural exegesis. In them the modern reader can catch a glimpse of the genius an entire generation found irresistible.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2008

With infectious energy and a genuine gift for storytelling, Raymond A. Schroth recounts the history of Jesuits in the United States. The American Jesuits isn't simply a book for Catholics; it's for anyone who loves a well-told historical tale. For more than 450 years, Jesuit priests have traveled the globe out of a religious commitment to serve others. Their order, the Society of Jesus, is the largest religious order of men in the Catholic Church, with more than 20,000 members around the world and almost 3,000 in the...