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What is it about the city of New Orleans? History, location, and culture continue to link it to France while distancing it culturally and symbolically from the United States. This book explores the traces of French language, history, and artistic expression that have been present there over the last three hundred years. This volume focuses on the French, Spanish, and American colonial periods to understand the imprint that French socio-cultural dynamic left on the Crescent City. The migration of Acadians to New Orleans at the time the city became a Spanish dominion and the arrival of Haitian refugees when the city became an American territory oddly reinforced its Francophone identity. Howeve...
The first English translation of the Prison Narratives written by the seventeenth-century French mystic and Quietist, Jeanne Guyon (1648-1717). Guyon describes her confinement between 1695 and 1703 in various prisons, including the dreaded Bastille, and the introduction provides a comprehensive context for the historical, literary, and theological aspects of Guyon's writing.
From Mother to Son is an annotated translation of forty-one of the eighty-one extant full-length letters written Marie de l'Incarnation, founder of the Ursulines in Canada, to her son, Claude Martin, between 1640 and 1671. These collected letters reveal much about the early history of New France and the spiritual itinerary of one of the most celebrated mystics of the seventeenth century. Uniting these letters into a coherent whole is the distinctive and complicated relationship between an absent mother and her abandoned son.
In this compelling study of two seventeenth-century female mystics, Bo Karen Lee examines the writings of Anna Maria van Schurman and Madame Jeanne Guyon, who, despite different religious formations, came to similar conclusions about the experience of God in contemplative prayer. Van Schurman was born into a Dutch Calvinist family and became a superb scriptural commentator before undergoing a dramatic religious conversion and joining the Labadist community, a Pietistic movement. Guyon was a French layperson whose thought would be identified with Quietism—a spiritual path that was looked upon with suspicion both by the French Catholic Church and by Rome. Lee analyzes and compares the themes...
An anthology of primary texts on meditation and contemplative prayer from a wide range of religious traditions. This is the first theoretically informed and historically accurate comparative anthology of primary texts on meditation and contemplative prayer. Written by international experts on the respective texts and corresponding traditions, Contemplative Literature provides introductions to and primary sources on contemplative practice from various religious traditions. The contributors explore classical Daoist apophatic meditation, Quaker silent prayer, Jewish Kabbalah, Southern Buddhist meditation, Sufi contemplation, Eastern Orthodox prayer, Pure Land Buddhist visualization, Hindu class...
Are anxiety or dread negative stages before freedom, a confrontation with humans' own mortality and finitude? Joana Serrado inaugurates anxiousness as a category of mystical knowledge in this innovative historical and philosophical study. Based on the life and mystical writings of Joana de Jesus, a Cistercian nun, intellectual disciple of Teresa of Avila, this study shows the cultural embeddedness of anxiousness: a feeling akin to the Portuguese term »saudade« (yearning, Sehnsucht). A mystical project that reshapes feminist principles of autonomy, agency and desire.
The first Jewish Bible commentaries were written in Arabic, in medieval Islamic cities like Baghdad and Jerusalem. Jewish Piety in Islamic Jerusalem explores the construction of a new Jewish spirituality within these texts, focusing on the Lamentations commentary of Salmon ben Yeruhim. Salmon considers Lamentations to be a source of pious and ritual instruction for the Jewish community in exile. He reinterprets the Bible and traditional rabbinic teachings with the scholarly tools of his era--Arabic-Islamic models of exegesis, homily, and historiography--and develops distinctively Jewish practices of biblical scholarship, asceticism, and penitential mourning.
This book examines the nearly 400-year tradition of Quaker engagements with mystical ideas and sources. It provides a fresh assessment of the way tradition and social context can shape a religious community while interplaying with historical and theological antecedents within the tradition. Quaker concepts such as “Meeting,” the “Light,” and embodied spirituality, have led Friends to develop an interior spirituality that intersects with extra-Quaker sources, such as those found in Jakob Boehme, Abū Bakr ibn Tufayl, the Continental Quietists, Kabbalah, Buddhist thought, and Luyia indigenous religion. Through time and across cultures, these and other conversations have shaped Quaker self-understanding and, so, expanded previous models of how religious ideas take root within a tradition. The thinkers engaged in this globally-focused, interdisciplinary volume include George Fox, James Nayler, Robert Barclay, Elizabeth Ashbridge, John Woolman, Hannah Whitall Smith, Rufus Jones, Inazo Nitobe, Howard Thurman, and Gideon W. H. Mweresa, among others.
Informed reassessment of Pentecostalism as a mystical tradition of the church universal Pentecostalism, says Daniel Castelo, is commonly framed as "evangelicalism with tongues" or dismissed as simply a revivalist movement. In this book Castelo argues that Pentecostalism is actually best understood as a Christian mystical tradition. Taking a theological approach to Pentecostalism, Castelo looks particularly at the movement's methodology and epistemology as he carefully distinguishes it from American evangelicalism. Castelo displays the continuity between Pentecostalism and ancient church tradition, creating a unified narrative of Pentecostalism and the mystical tradition of Christianity throughout history and today. Finally, he uses a test case to press the question of what the interactions between mystical theology and dogmatics could look like.