Reading Robert Ellsberg’s profiles of holy men and women is like throwing open a window in a stuffy old church and taking in great gulps of fresh air. Henri Nouwen has described his writing as “evocative without being pious.” He broadens the traditional vision of sanctity and calls modern readers of all stripes to claim their potential for moral and spiritual growth, courage and action. By choosing relevant models and contemporary heroes, he makes holiness accessible and attractive to ordinary people. These 101 spiritual trailblazers span the centuries from Francis and Clare to Solanus Casey and Mychal Judge, with representatives from every walk of life and corner of the world. Each entry features the essential biographical facts and adds the insight and depth only Ellsberg can provide. The author’s sharp eye for signs and stories of holiness in the gritty, messy real world informs his selections, making his work unique. Obscure lay peasants, married activists, and controversial social reformers take pride of place alongside better-known theologians, founders, and canonized saints. The audio edition of this book can be downloaded via Audible.
St. Jude, patron saint of hopeless causes, is the most popular saint of the American Catholic laity, particularly among women. This fascinating book describes how the cult of St. Jude originated in 1929, traces the rise in Jude's popularity over the next decades, and investigates the circumstances that led so many Catholic women to feel hopeless and to turn to St. Jude for help. Robert A. Orsi tells us that the women who were drawn to St. Jude--daughters and granddaughters of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and Ireland--were the first generations of Catholic women to make lives for themselves outside of their ethnic enclaves. Orsi explores the ambitions and dilemmas of these women as they dealt with the pressures of the Depression and the Second World War, made modern marriages for themselves, entered the workplace, took care of relatives in their old neighborhoods, and raised children in circumstances very different from those of their mothers and grandmothers. Drawing on testimonies written in the periodicals devoted to St. Jude and on interviews with women who felt their lives were changed by St. Jude's intervention, Orsi shows how devotion to St. Jude enabled these women to negotiate their way amid the conflicting expectations of their two cultures--American and Catholic.
An exploration of Beat spirituality--seen through excerpts from the writings of the seminal writers of Beat Generation themselves. It’s been said that Jack Kerouac made it cool to be a thinking person seeking a spiritual experience. And there is no doubt that the writers he knew and inspired—iconic figures like Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Gary Snyder, and Michael McClure—were thinkers seeking exactly that. In this re-claiming of their vision, Robert Inchausti explores the Beat canon to reveal that the movement was at heart a spiritual one. It goes deeper than the Buddhism with which many of the key figures became identified. It’s about their shared perception of an existence in which the Divine reveals itself in the ordinary. Theirs is a spirituality where real life triumphs over airy ideals and personal authenticity becomes both the content and the vehicle for a kind of refurbished American Transcendentalism.
Recognizing the need for an evangelically oriented book to guide believers dealing with the issue of Christianity's relation to society, educator Robert Webber has developed a unique approach to this subject that gives clear solutions to the Christ-culture problem from both a biblical and historical point of view. The biblical material in 'The Secular Saint' presents the social, moral, and cultural concerns of the Judeo-Christian heritage. The historical material then shows how the church in history has either separated from its culture, identified with it, or attempted to transform it. On the basis of these three historical models, Webber argues that there is more than one way for the Christian to live in a responsible relationship with the world. This is a book of principles, not a how-to guidebook. As the author states, My purpose is not to deal with contemporary problems themselves but to give the reader the biblical and historical tools needed to understand and deal with modern issues.
Star Wars, Amadeus, A Separate Place, Tender Mercies, Grand Canyon, Tootsie, Ordinary People, Empire of the Sun, Pale Rider, Red Dawn, and Dead Poets Society--all these movies show concern for deep human issues also treated in the Bible. The films provide evidence that many of the apostle Paul's themes in his New Testament letters are relevant for today. Contemporary movies, according to Robert Jewett, influence many Americans more than their formal education or religious training. And, since Paul interpreted the gospel on other people's turf, Jewett believes that today his forum would involve the movies, a primary source of discovering and debating important moral, cultural, and religious issues. Jewett treats film and biblical passages with equal respect. He brings their ideas and metaphors into relationship so that new insights emerge about both the ancient texts and the American cultural situation.
Robert de Reims, also known as “La Chievre de Rains,” was among the earliest trouvères—poet-composers who were contemporaries of the troubadours but who wrote in the dialects of northern France. This critical edition provides new translations into English and modern French of all the songs and motets ascribed to him, along with the original texts, the extant music, and a substantive introduction. Active sometime between 1190 and 1220, Robert was an influential figure in the literary circles of Arras. Thirteen compositions set to music are here attributed to him, including nine chansons and four polyphonic motets that were broadly disseminated in the thirteenth century and beyond. Robert’s work is exceptional on a number of fronts. He lavished particular care on the phonic harmony of his words. Acoustic luxuriance and expertise in rhyming, grounded in the play of echoes and variation (often extending into the music), constitute the hallmark of his poetry. Moreover, he is the earliest trouvère known to have composed a parodic sotte chanson contre Amours (silly song against Love). Located clearly at the nexus of monophonic song and polyphony, Robert’s corpus also poses the intriguing question of trouvère participation in the development of the polyphonic repertory. The case of Robert de Reims jostles and tempers the standard history of the chanson and motet. Accessible and instructive, this trilingual critical edition of his complete works makes the oeuvre of this innovative and consequential trouvère available in one volume for the first time.
Considered to be one of the definitive biographies on John Humphrey Noyes, an American preacher, radical religious philosopher, and utopian socialist who founded the Putney, Oneida, and Wallingford Communities and is credited for having coined the term “free love”.
The Feast of Saint Abraham is characterized by originality, profound scholarship (especially with regard to new manuscript sources), and by clarity and felicity of style. . . . A fine book."—Bernard McGinn, University of Chicago
This is a philosophic study of some aspects of spiritual development, broadly defined. Professor Neville has been influenced significantly by comparison between several of the world's great spiritual traditions, and he has tried to be faithful to experiences in those traditions. Readers whose interest in spiritual development come out of non-Western traditions will find this book congenial. But this is a philosophical study, and the book puts forward a philosophical theory of spiritual development, paying attention to personal, social, and metaphysical concerns, and analyzing three central images of spiritual "heroism." The central contribution attempted here is a way of understanding the quest for spiritual liberation or perfection through the models of the spiritual soldier, the sage, and the saint. At times the argument aims, not just to understand, but to promote spiritual liberation, and to do so through philosophic understanding.
In this commanding study, Dr Maryks offers a detailed analysis of early modern Jesuit confessional manuals to explore the order's shifting attitudes to confession and conscience. Drawing on his census of Jesuit penitential literature published between 1554 and 1650, he traces in these works a subtly shifting theology influenced by both theology and classical humanism. In particular, the roles of 'Tutiorism' (whereby an individual follows the law rather than the instinct of their own conscience) and 'Probabilism' (which conversely gives priority to the individual's conscience) are examined. It is argued that for most of the sixteenth century, books such as Juan Alfonso de Polanco's Directory for Confessors espousing a Tutiorist line dominated the market for Jesuit confessional manuals until the seventeenth century, by which time Probabilism had become the dominating force in Jesuit theology. What caused this switch, from Tutiorism to Probablism, forms the central thesis of Dr Maryks' book. He believes that as a direct result of the Jesuits adoption of a new ministry of educating youth in the late 1540s, Jesuit schoolmasters were compelled to engage with classical culture, many aspects of which would have resonated with their own concepts of spirituality. In particular Ciceronian humanitas and civiltà, along with rhetorical principles of accommodation, influenced Jesuit thinking in the revolutionary transition from medieval Tutiorism to modern Probabilism. By integrating concepts of theology, classical humanism and publishing history, this book offers a compelling account of how diverse forces could act upon a religious order to alter the central beliefs it held and promulgated. This book is published in conjunction with the Jesuit Historical Institute series 'Bibliotheca Instituti Historici Societatis Iesu'.
A STUNNING, PROVOCATIVE PERSPECTIVE ON THE DISCIPLE PETER AS DEPICTED BY MATTHEW "In this highly controversial work on Peter, Robert Gundry's intellectual gifts and remarkable powers of analysis are displayed to an even higher degree than in his previous publications. . . One need not agree with Gundry's conclusions to acknowledge that the penetrating exegesis presented here and the nature of the argumentation as a whole demand serious reflection and engagement. Those who pay close attention to this brief but unusually weighty book will not be able to read Matthew in quite the same way that they did before." --MOISES SILVA author of Biblical Words and Their Meaning "Peter, long thought to be 'prince of the apostles' and one of the heroes of the Gospel of Matthew, is shown here to be neither. This extraordinarily closely argued volume by Robert Gundry offers a compelling case that Matthew constructs the figure of Peter as a failed disciple and an apostate. . . A courageous book that will require scholars to reassess how the Peter of Matthew came to be, in Gundry's words, 'airbrushed' and turned into a model of disciple and central figure in ecclesiastical memory." --JOHN S. KLOPPENBORG University of Toronto "If Bob Gundry is known for anything, it is for his dogged pursuit of the meaning of Scripture. Here he once again provides fresh, penetrating analysis--in the present case, leading to an unsettling conclusion. Provocative, as he can often be, Gundry is never boring but always instructive and well worth a careful reading." --DONALD A. HAGNER Fuller Theological Seminary
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