Passionate Spirituality explores the roots and meanings of passion in Western culture, and then examines how passion is expressed in the works of two medieval women mystics - Hildegard of Bingen and Hadewijch of Brabant - and in the lives of contemporary Christians seeking to deepen their own spiritual journeys. Too often, the term "passion' is associated only with steamy films, sexual, sin, and emotional excess - cutting off the breadth of its meaning and expression for positive good. But the great mystics succeed precisely because they hold together both the affective and the intellectual aspects of the spiritual life in creative and convincing ways. Their accounts of their mystical experience are important resources for information and understanding about how to talk about God more formally, and for what it means to be passionately in love with God and the world."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Western theology is frequently criticized for not having a fully developed pneumatology. According to these critics, preoccupation with Christology and an excessive focus on the nature and unity of God have come at the expense of a full theology of the three persons. While admitting that there is some truth to these criticisms, Elizabeth Dreyer maintains that those who level them base their conclusions on a narrow range of texts and thus fail to establish a true neglect of the Holy Spirit. Medieval authors offer a wealth of creative language and insight that speaks to the role of the Holy Spirit in contemporary spirituality and contributes to a renewed pneumatology for the twenty-first century. Book jacket.
For too long, says Elizabeth Dreyer, the kind of spirituality taught to Christian lay people has been clerical and monastic. It has not been grounded in the ways of living actually experienced by lay people - incorporating sexuality, childraising, work, the marketplace and the earth. A major effort is being made in our day to reformulate spirituality in a way that makes sense to ordinary Christians. More than anything else, this new attitude proclaims that God is best discovered not in the withdrawal from everyday life but in the act of living it." "Earth Crammed with Heaven is a pioneering attempt to articulate the paradigm shift in attitudes toward lay spirituality. It is written for persons who are on an intentional spiritual journey that has everyday existence and the entire world as its focal points. It maintains that baptized Christians do not have to change their daily activities in order to become saints. The potential for sainthood is located in the depth and intentionality of ordinary living."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
In this seven-day retreat, Living the Truth in Love, your director is Catherine of Siena, the fourteenth-century Italian laywoman with the strong will and staunch commitment to carry out what she thought God was directing her to do. Catherine, declared Doctor of the Church in 1970, clung to the truth, lived by the truth and sought after the truth throughout her life. With her we will meet the God whom she called "Gentle Truth", struggle with the sin and glory of our own truth and ponder the fruits of truth -- discernment, freedom and wisdom.
This lively and wonderful book probes the presence of grace ("Grace is everywhere"), garners the timeless teachings of the New Testament and theologians, and discusses grace in the light of contemporary beliefs and needs.
When Indians kill her husband on the trail to Kentucky, Livi Talbot and her two young children bury him then continue their trek on the Wilderness Road to what David promised would be their new home. While Livi settles into the wilderness cabin David built with his own hands, Reid Campbell, David's best friend and Livi's nemesis, arrives. A wanderer who spends more time with Indians than whites, Reid produces a document stating all holdings revert to him, in the case of David's death. Reid insists Livi and the children return to Virginia, but Livi refuses. She's too far along in her pregnancy with David's last child, to travel. Summer ensues, filled with hard work, danger from Indian raids and a constant battle of wills between Livi and Reid. As winter deepens, Reid helps Livi deliver David's son. Reid knows he should gift the cabin and land to Livi and walk away, but his heart has finally found a family and a place called home. REVIEWS: "...stirs the reader's emotions. A story of a remarkable women's desire to forge her own destiny and follow her heart. A novel to remember." ~Kathe Robin Romantic Times "...keeps you reading to the exclusion of all else. This is probably the best book on the period I have ever read." ~Rendezvous "This lady can spin a tale of historical magic. She does that and more in this beautiful story of Livi Talbot and her long road to happiness." ~The Readers' Voice THE WOMEN'S WEST SERIES, in series order So Wide the Sky Color of the Wind A Place Called Home Painted by the Sun Moon on the Water Bride of the Wilderness
Prehistoric inhabitants of southeastern Colorado constructed permanent milling spaces on exposed bedrock outcrops and sandstone boulders in rockshelters and protective overhangs. These bedrock milling spaces are well-known and wide spread throughout the region, but very little is known about them. In many archaeological narratives and descriptions constructed milling features are simply noted as bedrock mortars or bedrock mutates and go unrecorded. Where they exist on the Southern Plains, stationary milling surfaces (most commonly referred to as bedrock mortars, metates, or slicks) are rarely considered to be a significant part of the cultural configuration derived from archaeology. The stationary milling sites are hard to date and their function is difficult to establish as no ethnographic context exists; as a result they become "isolates" that are left out of the overall picture of an archaeological culture--other than to say that people ground things there. Throughout North America prehistoric peoples created and maintained permanent milling facilities amid resource procurement landscapes or near homes and villages. Distinct from portable milling artifacts by their permanence and formally constructed environment, stationary milling areas offer a unique opportunity to understand how prehistoric peoples socialized their traditional landscapes and created spaces that reinforced social values and cultural knowledge. Formally constructed stationary milling features occur within household and village settings and facilitate social food processing that may include groups of grinders working together or supporting each other's labor, mothers with young children, or communal groups of grinders and their extended kinship groups. Ethnographic and archaeological evidence for bedrock ground stone features elsewhere in North America indicate that fixed milling sites were created for a number of purposes, ranging from communal production of food resources for household consumption, to staple foods ritually processed for culturally significant occasions such as puberty ceremonies or harvest festivals. An important aspect of bedrock acorn milling features from California is the social significance of the space within which collective labor was organized and cultural knowledge was conveyed between generations along with the social expectations and sense of self. The preferential use of bedrock milling spaces for processing food resources in California crossed cultural and linguistic boundaries reflecting a common reliance on a similar staple food resources (acorns) and a preferred mechanism (communal food processing) for ensuring the transmission of social and cultural values and norms of the group. Bedrock milling spaces in southeastern Colorado have the potential to provide insight into regional social spaces and prehistoric landscape use. Although resistant to direct dating, archaeological remains in close association with bedrock milling features suggest an extended period of use from the Archaic (3000 to 1850 B.P.) to the Late Prehistoric (1850 to 500 B.P.), during which time hunter-gatherers lived in small band-level groups and made extensive use of the abundant food resources in the canyonlands. Through time local populations increased and the use of canyons became more extensive, habitations shifted from rockshelters to the upper canyon rims. To concentrate on the organization and distribution of social milling spaces, this dissertation employs an intensive, landscape approach to canyon survey. A stratified terrace survey provides a landscape driven construction of bedrock milling spaces. This dissertation focuses on the design and organization of bedrock milling surfaces, the differences and similarities between features and the placement of in one tributary canyon (1 km2). Standard ground stone recording methods are enhanced to record bedrock features in the field and new techniques are used to analyze and interpret data, such as the use of sub-features to group related ground stone surfaces on features. Dissertation results support the hypothesis that bedrock ground stone features are constructed, built environments that are similar to architectural features acting as a focal point for human activity. The results show differences between bedrock grinding features: some were committed food processing features while others were probably tool production locales. This dissertation documents difference in feature construction and surface distribution throughout the canyon. Bedrock ground stone spaces represent conceptual and ideational landscapes. The features are localized expressions of milling activity that included family level involvement to extended family involvement. As a focal point for social interaction, the features were hubs of social networking, reproduction of cultural norms and values, and fundamental places at which individuals learned and managed their social identity.
Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis examines the theory and politics of representation in narrative film. Questioning current accounts of cinema's pleasures for men and women, Elizabeth Cowie draws on the psychoanalytic theory of Freud and Lacan to propose a new understanding of the relation of identification, fantasy and the drives, and of voyeurism and fetishism to the pleasures of cinema and to the making of the feminine and masculine spectators of film.
Fame is notoriously fickle. Her methods are many and varied, and all do not receive a like treatment at her hands. The names of those who have done the most, by laborious and scientific pursuits, alike injurious to their health and happiness, to smooth the thorny paths of their fellow-creatures, are perhaps allowed to lapse into utter oblivion. While others, whose claim to immortality rests on a more slender base, are celebrated among their posterity. Lady Holland’s claim to renown rests upon the later years of her life. She is known to the readers of memoirs and historical biographies of her time as the domineering leader of the Whig circle; as a lady whose social talents and literary accomplishments drew to her house the wits, the politicians, and the cognoscenti of the day. She is known as the hostess who dared to give orders to such guests as Macaulay and Sydney Smith, and, what is more, expected and exacted implicit obedience. As yet, however, little has been written of her earlier years, and on these her Journal will throw much light. It is a record of the years of her unhappy marriage to Sir Godfrey Webster; and after her marriage with Lord Holland the narrative is continued with more or less regularity until 1814. The chief point which at once strikes home in reading the account of her younger days is an entire absence of any system of education, to use the words in their modern application. Everything she learnt was due to her own exertions. She did not receive the benefit of any course of early teaching to prepare her to meet on equal terms the brightest stars of a period which will compare favourably with any other in the annals of this country for genius and understanding. ‘My principles were of my own finding, both religious and moral, for I never was instructed in abstract or practical religion, and as soon as I could think at all chance directed my studies.... Happily for me, I devoured books, and a desire for information became my ruling passion.’ Her own words thus describe how she gained the general knowledge which was subsequently of such use to her. Lectures on geology, courses of chemistry with the savants whom she met on her travels, and hours of careful reading snatched whenever practicable, seem to have been the solace and the recreation of those early years of her married life. By her own efforts she thus became fitted, with the aid of undoubted beauty and a natural liveliness of disposition, to take her place in Whig society, into which her marriage with Lord Holland had thrown her. Without the same opportunities, her salon in later days succeeded and far surpassed in interest that presided over by the beautiful Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Thus said Charles Greville: ‘Tho’ everybody who goes there finds something to abuse or to ridicule in the mistress of the house, or its ways, all continue to go. All like it more or less; and whenever, by the death of either, it shall come to an end, a vacuum will be made in society which nothing can supply. It is the house of all Europe; the world will suffer by the loss; and it may be said with truth that it will “eclipse the gaiety of nations.”’ But her sway over her associates was the rule of fear, not of love; and with age the imperiousness of her demeanour to her intimates grew more marked. Each one of her visitors was liable to become a target for the venom of her wit or the sharpness of her tongue.
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