'I have a confession to make. My secret inner reaction to claims of anomalous phenomena is usually this: we haven't yet converged to even a half-decent ontology to explain the ordinary, why bother with the extra-ordinary? What this fascinating book does, however, is to disrupt our attempts to draw neat and smooth boundaries around what we consider real. The damned facts discussed in it spoil our elegant tentative models. Frankly, it's damn annoying. But books like this are also crucially important to keep us honest, insofar as our pursuit is for the truth, not merely intellectual reassurance.'... View More...
This brief, accessibly written volume introduces key figures, texts, and themes of the mystical tradition and shows how and why the mystics can speak to the church today. Jason Baxter, an expert educator and storyteller, explains that the mystical tradition offers a more robust understanding of God than our current shallow conceptions. Featuring engagement with primary sources and suitable for use in a variety of courses, this book argues that the mystics have much to say to contemporary Christians searching for authentic modes of spirituality. View More...
As a cobbler in Gorlitz, Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) came into contact with many great thinkers who sought refuge from the Roman Church and Reformation groups in post-Luther Germany. Gradually he became one of the most influential mystics of the Reformation era. This anthology provides an introduction to Boehme's wide-ranging thought and his wisdom grounded in revelation, as well as newly translated Boehme letters. View More...
Boehme was born in 1575. He received little if any formal education and was apprenticed to a shoemaker at Goerlitz in Saxony. From an early age he seems to have been devoted to the study of the Bible as well as having a growing, inner, sense of the reality of God. Walking one day in the fields, when he was twenty-five years old, the mystery of creation was suddenly opened to him, and 'in a quarter of an hour I saw and knew more than if I had been many years at the university ... and thereupon Iturned my heart to praise God for it.' He puzzled as to why such revelations should be given to him, ... View More...
'It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrow. There is no sorrowing. For sorrowing is a thing swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness.' Jacob Boehme's mystical pantheism and dialectical conception of God - in which good and evil are rooted in one and the same being - soon brought him into conflict with Lutheran orthodoxy. It is in 'The Signature of all Things' (Signatura Rerum) that the tenets of Boehme's theosophy are related in their greatest detail. Casting the reader into the vortex of his cosmological un... View More...
Here, for the spiritual adventurers of our own age, is an accessible introduction to one of the most important of the Christian mystical writers. Jakob Boehme (1575-1624) was a humble shoemaker of G rlitz in eastern Germany who, in response to the visionary experiences that began for him as a teenager, wrote a series of theosophical treatises that explore the nature of God and humanity. His ability to give words to the ineffable has never been surpassed, and his influence can be felt in the generations of mystics who followed him, as well as in Pietists, German Romantics, Quakers, and American... View More...
There are no unsacred places, the poet Wendell Berry has written. "There are only sacred places and desecrated places." What might it mean to behold the world with such depth and feeling that it is no longer possible to imagine it as something separate from ourselves, or to live without regard for its well-being? To understand the work of seeing things as an utterly involving moral and spiritual act? Such questions have long occupied the center of contemplative spiritual traditions. In The Blue Sapphire of the Mind, Douglas E. Christie proposes a distinctively contemplative approach to ecologi... View More...
Almost exactly contemporary with Palamas, the Dominican monk and preacher Eckhart may have a great deal more in common with Palamas than historical time: Eckhart's theological method was apophatic, and was analyzed positively by Vladimir Lossky, the contemporary Orthodox theologian who was also a perceptive student of Palamas. Though a loyal son of the Catholic Church, some of Eckhart's teachings edged toward a pantheistic tone that provoked a detailed condemnation by the Pope. The generous selection of material herein will allow the reader to judge this controversial mystic for himself. Prefa... View More...
The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781472453983, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivative 4.0 license.Experiences of hearing the voice of God (or angels, demons, or other spiritual beings) have generally been understood either as religious experiences or else as a feature of mental illness. Some critics of traditional religious faith have dismissed the visions and voices attributed to biblical characters and saints as evidence of mental disorder. However, it is now known that many ordinary people, wit... View More...
Following the early church's tradition of monastic ascent -- Praktikos, Theoretikos and Gnostikos (here translated Purification, Illumination and Union) -- this compilation gathers an ecumenical host of sources with the intention of supplying a devotional map of Christian mystical teaching. This is not simply a sampling of literature or a survey text introducing the history of Christian mysticism. In fact, if we have a complaint about the book it's that the two to three page excerpts leave us wanting more from the works from which they were extracted. However, James Cutsinger, a theology and p... View More...
The history of Christian Mysticism is a fascinating journey through the minds of the world's greatest thinkers, a journey which began over two thousand years ago, from the philosophers of the ancient world through to the mystics of the Middle Ages. This beautifully illustrated volume contains magnificent paintings, artefacts and stunning illuminated manuscripts. It also reveals the lives of such celebrated philosophers as Plato, St Paul and Julian of Norwich, explaining their work and their all-consuming quest for communion with the divine. View More...
New copy, but has suffered rough handling in Publisher warehouse. Multiple copies available. All copies show multiple creases to the covers and soiling/smudging to textblock edges. Texts themselves are pristine, bindings firm. View More...
