Download or read book The First Cistercian Spiritual Writers written by Marie-André Fracheboud and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2000 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Befriending Silence written by Carl McColman and published by Ave Maria Press. This book was released on 2015-11-20 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2016 Georgia Author of the Year: Inspirational-religious books. Respected speaker, author, and Patheos blogger Carl McColman introduces Cistercian spirituality as "the hidden jewel of the Church," presenting a surprisingly contemporary path grounded in monastic tradition. This accessible and comprehensive guide highlights a unique focus on simplicity, living close to the earth, and contemplative prayer, all of which make Cistercian spirituality relevant today. Steeped in chant and silence, grounded in down-to-earth work and service, and immersed in the mystical wisdom of teachers ancient (Bernard of Clairvaux) and modern (Thomas Merton), Cistercian spirituality's beautifully humble path has for centuries made monasteries places of rest, retreat, and renewal. Now, Carl McColman offers the first practical introduction to this ancient, contemplative spirituality for all people. Hailed by reviewers of his many books as playful, and profound, McColman draws on his experience as a lay Cistercian to provide insight into the relevance of the tradition to contemporary issues and spiritual practice. He explains how silence, simplicity, stability, stewardship of the earth, contemplation, ongoing conversion, and devotion to Mary combine to offer a rich and unique path to discipleship and intimacy with God.
Download or read book Creating Cistercian Nuns written by Anne E. Lester and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-22 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Creating Cistercian Nuns, Anne E. Lester addresses a central issue in the history of the medieval church: the role of women in the rise of the religious reform movement of the thirteenth century. Focusing on the county of Champagne in France, Lester reconstructs the history of the women’s religious movement and its institutionalization within the Cistercian order. The common picture of the early Cistercian order is that it was unreceptive to religious women. Male Cistercian leaders often avoided institutional oversight of communities of nuns, preferring instead to cultivate informal relationships of spiritual advice and guidance with religious women. As a result, scholars believed that women who wished to live a life of service and poverty were more likely to join one of the other reforming orders rather than the Cistercians. As Lester shows, however, this picture is deeply flawed. Between 1220 and 1240 the Cistercian order incorporated small independent communities of religious women in unprecedented numbers. Moreover, the order not only accommodated women but also responded to their interpretations of apostolic piety, even as it defined and determined what constituted Cistercian nuns in terms of dress, privileges, and liturgical practice. Lester reconstructs the lived experiences of these women, integrating their ideals and practices into the broader religious and social developments of the thirteenth century—including the crusade movement, penitential piety, the care of lepers, and the reform agenda of the Fourth Lateran Council. The book closes by addressing the reasons for the subsequent decline of Cistercian convents in the fourteenth century. Based on extensive analysis of unpublished archives, Creating Cistercian Nuns will force scholars to revise their understanding of the women’s religious movement as it unfolded during the thirteenth century.
Download or read book Monastic Sermons written by Bernard of Clairvaux and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2016-08-18 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saint Bernard was born in 1090 near Dijon, France. He joined the fifteen-year-old monastery of Cîteaux in 1113. In 1115 he became the founding abbot of Clairvaux Abbey, whence his name, Bernard of Clairvaux. Saint Bernard was a gifted and prolific writer of theological treatises, Scriptural commentaries, letters, and many sermons. The sermons in the collection published here, styled Sermones de diversis (Sermons about Various Topics), lack the specific point of departure that characterizes his other sermons. That is, whereas the sermons on the Song of Songs are a verse-by-verse commentary on that biblical book and his Sermons for the Year follow the liturgical calendar, this collection of sermons deals with his various pastoral concerns. Since Scripture is always Bernard’s point of departure and inspiration, the sermons often read like a Scripture study, but what comes through equally is the voice of an understanding spiritual father who is a masterful student of Scripture, biblical language, and the needs of his monks.
Download or read book Jesus as Mother written by Caroline Walker Bynum and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Introduction, by Caroline Walker Bynum: The opportunity to rethink and republish several of my early articles in combination with a new essay on the thirteenth century has led me to consider the continuity-both of argument and of approach-that underlies them. In one sense, their interrelationship is obvious. The first two address a question that was more in the forefront of scholarship a dozen years ago than it is today: the question of differences among religious orders. These two essays set out a method of reading texts for imagery and borrowings as well as for spiritual teaching in order to determine whether individuals who live in different institutional settings hold differing assumptions about the significance of their lives. The essays apply the method to the broader question of differences between regular canons and monks and the narrower question of differences between one kind of monk--the Cistercians--and other religious groups, monastic and nonmonastic, of the twelfth century. The third essay draws on some of the themes of the first two, particularly the discussion of canonical and Cistercian conceptions of the individual brother as example, to suggest an interpretation of twelfth-century religious life as concerned with the nature of groups as well as with affective expression. The fourth essay, again on Cistercian monks, elaborates themes of the first three. Its subsidiary goals are to provide further evidence on distinctively Cistercian attitudes and to elaborate the Cistercian ambivalence about vocation that I delineate in the essay on conceptions of community. It also raises questions that have now become popular in nonacademic as well as academic circles: what significance should we give to the increase of feminine imagery in twelfth-century religious writing by males? Can we learn anything about distinctively male or female spiritualities from this feminization of language? The fifth essay differs from the others in turning to the thirteenth century rather than the twelfth, to women rather than men, to detailed analysis of many themes in a few thinkers rather than one theme in many writers; it is nonetheless based on the conclusions of the earlier studies. The sense of monastic vocation and of the priesthood, of the authority of God and self, and of the significance of gender that I find in the three great mystics of late thirteenth-century Helfta can be understood only against the background of the growing twelfth- and thirteenth-century concern for evangelism and for an approachable God, which are the basic themes of the first four essays. Such connections between the essays will be clear to anyone who reads them. There are, however, deeper methodological and interpretive continuities among them that I wish to underline here. For these studies constitute a plea for an approach to medieval spirituality that is not now--and perhaps has never been--dominant in medieval scholarship. They also provide an interpretation of the religious life of the high Middle Ages that runs against the grain of recent emphases on the emergence of "lay spirituality." I therefore propose to give, as introduction, both a discussion of recent approaches to medieval piety and a short sketch of the religious history of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, emphasizing those themes that are the context for my specific investigations. I do not want to be misunderstood. In providing here a discussion of approaches to and trends in medieval religion I am not claiming that the studies that follow constitute a general history nor that my method should replace that of social, institutional, and intellectual historians. A handful of Cistercians does not typify the twelfth century, nor three nuns the thirteenth. Religious imagery, on which I concentrate, does not tell us how people lived. But because these essays approach texts in a way others have not done, focus on imagery others have not found important, and insist, as others have not insisted, on comparing groups to other groups (e.g., comparing what is peculiarly male to what is female as well as vice versa), I want to call attention to my approach to and my interpretation of the high Middle Ages in the hope of encouraging others to ask similar questions.
Download or read book Spiritual Direction in the Early Christian East written by Irénée Hausherr and published by Burns & Oates. This book was released on 1990 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Cistercian Stories for Nuns and Monks written by Martha G. Newman and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2020-11-27 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Around the year 1200, the Cistercian Engelhard of Langheim dedicated a collection of monastic stories to a community of religious women. Martha G. Newman explores how this largely unedited collection of tales about Cistercian monks illuminates the religiosity of Cistercian nuns. As did other Cistercian storytellers, Engelhard recorded the miracles and visions of the order's illustrious figures, but he wrote from Franconia, in modern Germany, rather than the Cistercian heartland. His extant texts reflect his interactions with non-Cistercian monasteries and with Langheim's patrons rather than celebrating Bernard of Clairvaux. Engelhard was conservative, interested in maintaining traditional Cistercian patterns of thought. Nonetheless, by offering to women a collection of narratives that explore the oral qualities of texts, the nature of sight, and the efficacy of sacraments, Engelhard articulated a distinctive response to the social and intellectual changes of his period. In analyzing Engelhard's stories, Newman uncovers an understudied monastic culture that resisted the growing emphasis on the priestly administration of the sacraments and the hardening of gender distinctions. Engelhard assumed that monks and nuns shared similar interests and concerns, and he addressed his audiences as if they occupied a space neither fully sacerdotal nor completely lay, neither scholastic nor unlearned, and neither solely male nor only female. His exemplary narratives depict the sacramental value of everyday objects and behaviors whose efficacy relied more on individual spiritual formation than on sacerdotal action. By encouraging nuns and monks to imagine connections between heaven and earth, Engelhard taught faith as a learned disposition. Newman's study demonstrates that scholastic questions about signs, sacraments, and sight emerged in a narrative form within late twelfth-century monastic communities.
Download or read book The Spirit of Simplicity written by Jean-Baptiste Chautard and published by Ave Maria Press. This book was released on 2017-11-10 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few people have ever seen or heard of The Spirit of Simplicity: it has been hidden for almost seventy years after quietly being published by the Abbey of Gethsemani in 1948. Anonymously translated and annotated by a young monk named Thomas Merton, the book’s author—who also is not mentioned by name in the original edition—is Jean-Baptiste Chautard, the famous French Cistercian whose only other book, The Soul of the Apostolate, has been a favorite of modern saints and popes, including Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Every generation struggles with the question of simplicity. In the history of our faith, there have been no more eloquent voices calling us back to simplicity than the monks of the Cistercian Order, from Bernard of Clairvaux to Chautard to Merton—all of whom contribute to this powerful book. Merton surrounds Chautard’s text with his own remarks on simplicity, translations of classic texts by St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and commentary that allows readers to pursue the themes of simplicity in their own lives. "Only a very inadequate idea of exterior simplicity can be arrived at if we do not trace it back to its true source: interior simplicity. Without this, our resolution to practice exterior simplicity would be without light, without love …," Chautard wrote at the beginning of the book. He is writing to his fellow Cistercians, but he might as well be speaking to twenty-first century Christians. He goes on to lay out the best disciplines that a monk—or anyone—might practice to find the elusive simplicity, with quotations from St. Benedict, St. Bernard, and other pillars of monastic life and spirituality. A dozen photographs of Cistercian architecture illustrate how principles of simplicity are incorporated into Cistercian daily life. In Part 2, Merton opens up the teachings of St. Bernard, a great mystic and doctor of the Church, offering excerpts from St. Bernard’s writings on the original simplicity in the Garden of Eden, the difficulty of intellectual simplicity, the simplicity of the will (obedience), and other kindred topics. Merton also offers personal reflections from the perspective of one who had recently exchanged an active life in pursuit of worldly things for the solitude of a monk.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Cistercian Order written by Mette Birkedal Bruun and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents the Order's figureheads, practical life and spiritual horizon, and its contribution to medieval Europe's religious, cultural and political climate.
Download or read book Monastery Mornings written by Michael Patrick O'Brien and published by Paraclete Press. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A love letter to a community of Trappist monks who provided family when it was needed the most. This warmhearted memoir describes how a small, insecure boy with a vibrant imagination found an unlikely family in the company of monks at Holy Trinity Abbey, in the mountains of rural Latter-day Saint Utah. Struggling with his parents' recent divorce, Michael O'Brien discovered a community filled with warmth, humor, idiosyncrasies, and most of all, listening ears. Filled with anecdotes and delightful "behind the scenes" descriptions of his experiences living alongside the monks as they farmed, prayed, buried their dead, ate, and shared the joys of life, Monastery Mornings speaks to the value of spiritual fatherhood, the lasting impact of positive mentoring, and the stability that the spiritual life can offer to people of all ages and walks of life.
Download or read book The Great Beginning of C teaux written by Konrad (Abbot of Eberbach) and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 649 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the closing decades of the twelfth century the Cistercian Order found itself in a world rather different from the one in which it had been founded and began to thrive. The Order was justifiably proud of its achievements and unparalleled diffusion across Europe. It had become an important ecclesiastical and economic power in Europe and developed an institutional structure meant to sustain a large, widespread organization. Yet it had lost its influential spokesman, Bernard of Clairvaux, and as the century drew to a close, religious sensibilities were changing. The new mendicant orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, and the impulses they embodied, were to shift the center of gravity in Christian religious life for centuries to come.
Download or read book The First Life of Bernard of Clairvaux written by William of Saint-Thierry and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2015-12-07 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The First Life of Bernard of Clairvaux, traditionally known as the Vita Prima, originated to prepare the case for canonization of Bernard, first abbot of Clairvaux. The work was begun by William of Saint-Thierry, continued by Arnold of Bonneval, and completed by Geoffrey of Auxerre. When the initial case put forth for Bernard was rejected by Innocent II, Geoffrey undertook a revision of the original vita (Recension A) and submitted another version (Recension B) to Pope Alexander III, who declared Bernard a saint in 1174. This work emphasizes the deep love in which Bernard was held during his life by his monks and the people of France and Italy as well as his role as a powerful public figure. This book contains the first English translation of Recension B, drawn from what is apparently the only manuscript of the work found today in a Cistercian monastery, Mount Saint Bernard Abbey. The introduction begins with the story of how this manuscript came to Mount Saint Bernard, so fixing this translation of the Vita prima within Cistercian life from the twelfth century to today.
Download or read book Cistercian Fathers and Forefathers written by Thomas Merton and published by New City Press. This book was released on 2018-09-15 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of previously uncollected studies makes a notable contribution to Merton's extensive and influential legacy. This volume includes pieces on eleventh- and twelfth-century monastics by Thomas Merton, perhaps the most significant American Catholic spiritual writer of the twentieth century. The essays are difficult to locate elsewhere, the conference transcriptions are available only here.
Download or read book The Spiritual Teachings of Bernard of Clairvaux written by John R. Sommerfeldt and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Five Models of Spiritual Direction in the Early Church written by George E. Demacopoulos and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2007-11-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In late antiquity the rising number of ascetics who joined the priesthood faced a pastoral dilemma. Should they follow a traditional, demonstrably administrative, approach to pastoral care, emphasizing doctrinal instruction, the care of the poor, and the celebration of the sacraments? Or should they bring to the parish the ascetic models of spiritual direction, characterized by a more personal spiritual father/spiritual disciple relationship? Five Models of Spiritual Direction in the Early Church explores the struggles of five clerics (Athanasius, Gregory Nazianzen, Augustine of Hippo, John Cassian, and Pope Gregory I) to reconcile their ascetic idealism with the reality of pastoral responsibility. Through a close reading of Greek and Latin texts, George E. Demacopoulos explores each pastor's criteria for ordination, his supervision of subordinate clergy, and his methods of spiritual direction. He argues that the evolution in spiritual direction that occurred during this period reflected and informed broader developments in religious practices. Demacopoulos describes the way in which these authors shaped the medieval pastoral traditions of the East and the West. Each of the five struggled to balance the tension between his ascetic idealism and the realities of the lay church. Each offered distinct (and at times very different) solutions to that tension. The diversity among their models of spiritual direction demonstrates both the complexity of the problem and the variable nature of early Christianity. Scholars and students of late antiquity, the history of Christianity, and historical theology will find a great deal of interest in Five Models of Spiritual Direction in the Early Church. The book will also appeal to those who are actively engaged in Christian ministry.
Download or read book The Cistercian Reform and the Art of the Book in Twelfth Century France written by Diane Reilly and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-24 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a study of the programmatic oral performance of the written word and its impact on art and text. Communal singing and reading of the Latin texts that formed the core of Christian ritual and belief consumed many hours of the Benedictine monk's day. These texts-read and sung out loud, memorized, and copied into manuscripts-were often illustrated by the very same monks who participated in the choir liturgy. The meaning of these illustrations sometimes only becomes clear when they are read in the context of the texts these monks heard read. The earliest manuscripts of Cîteaux, copied and illuminated at the same time that the new monastery's liturgy was being reformed, demonstrate the transformation of aural experience to visual and textual legacy.
Download or read book Spirituality Of The Premonstratensians written by François Petit and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frana§ois Petit's study of the spirituality of the medieval Premonstratensians (Norbertines), published in the aftermath of the Second World War, remains the definitive treatment of the early centuries of the order of canons founded by Norbert of Xanten in 1121. Petit's attention to the texts, community life, and devotional practice of this Order of Pramontra anticipates recent scholarship in emphasizing the nexus of theology and lived religious experience. It demonstrates both the grandeur of Philip of Harvengt and Adam Scot as spiritual authors and the distinctiveness they share with others in the Norbertine tradition. This English translation renders Petit's magisterial work, long out of print, accessible to a wide international audience.
