The Hackett edition of Teresa of Avila's spiritual autobiography features Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez's authoritative translation of The Book of Her Life with a new Introduction by Jodi Bilinkoff that will prove especially valuable to students of Early Modern Spain, the history of Christian spirituality, and classic women writers. A map, chronology, and index are also included.

Integrating the wisdom of Christian tradition and recent psychological findings on effective decision-making, this book presents a view of Christian discernment that honors the body-spirit unity of the person and the broad and mysterious ways we can be led by the spirit of God in our life-choices. Going beyond discernment skills and concrete practices, this book presents a coherent theoretical understanding of discernment that grounds the many spiritual practices used by Christians today. By providing a broad and inclusive understanding of the multiple ways God can provide guidance to individuals, this book helps individuals to honor the unique and idiosyncratic way that they receive divine guidance, as well as provides guidelines that guard against possible self-deception and personal blind-spots. While including anecdotal accounts and practical elements or Christian discernment, this book provides a conceptual understanding of discernment that will be helpful for those training to be professional ministers, pastors, priests, religious counselors, and spiritual directors. It is unique in applying Christian tradition and contemporary psychological insights to the process of discernment.

Mystics and Miracles offers twenty-four compelling biographies that explore the lives of ordinary people chosen by God to do his extraordinary work. From visions and healing to prophecies and miracles, mystics provide a direct connection between the human and the divine.

The Soul as Virgin Wife presents the first book-length study to give a detailed account of the theological and mystical teachings written by women themselves, especially by those known as beguines, which have been especially neglected. Hollywood explicates the difference between the erotic and imagistic mysticism, arguing that Mechthild, Porete, and Eckhart challenge the sexual ideologies prevalent in their culture and claim a union without distinction between the soul and the divine. The beguines' emphasis in the later Middle Ages on spiritual poverty has long been recognized as an important influence on subsequent German and Flemish mystical writers, in particular the great German Dominican preacher and apophatic theologian Meister Eckhart. In The Soul as Virgin Wife, Amy Hollywood presents the first book-length study to give a detailed textual account of these debts. Through an analysis of Magdeburg's The Flowing Light of the Godhead, Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls, and the Latin commentaries and vernacular sermons of Eckhart, Hollywood uncovers the intricate web of influence and divergence between the beguinal spiritualities and Eckhart.

One of the world's foremost spiritual guides responds to the modern hunger for self-awareness and holistic living with a series of spiritual exercises blending psychology, spiritual therapy, and practices drawn from both Eastern and Western traditions of meditation.

St. John (San Juan de la Cruz) is one of the greatest mystics and poets in any language. This is a new introduction and translation of St. John's poetry (presented in both Spanish and English) and prose commentaries that includes his biography, providing an integrated vision that resurrects the power of his poetic voice.

Burns & Oates are proud to reissue Ruth Burrows' critically acclaimed work of spiritual theology, "Guidelines for Mystical Prayer". When first published in 1976, spiritual theology as reflection on spiritual experience was a growing trend; but at the same time there was a new interest in, and a return to, the classical Carmelite theology of prayer, with an effort to formulate that theology in contemporary thought categories. "Guidelines for Mystical Prayer" embodies both tendencies. It offers a personal narrative, a reflection on the spiritual history of two gifted people, St Teresa and St John of the Cross; and yet it speaks clearly out of the Carmelite tradition, and in the language of today. Strong interest in Carmelite theology of prayer and the spiritual life has continued into the present; the recent success of Burrows' "Essence of Prayer" is testament to this.

If the western world knows anything about Zen Buddhism, it is down to the efforts of one remarkable man, D.T. Suzuki. The twenty-seven-year-old Japanese scholar first visited the west in 1897, and over the course of the next seventy years became the world's leading authority on Zen. His radical and penetrating insights earned him many disciples, from Carl Jung to Allen Ginsberg, from Thomas Merton to John Cage. In Mysticism Christian and Buddhist Suzuki compares the teachings of the great Christian mystic Meister Eckhart with the spiritual wisdom of Shin and Zen Buddhism. By juxtaposing cultures that seem to be radically opposed, Suzuki raises one of the fundamental questions of human experience: at the limits of our understanding is there an experience that is universal to all humanity? Mysticism Christian and Buddhist is a book that challenges and inspires; it will benefit readers of all religions who seek to understand something of the nature of spiritual life.

This is the extraordinary story of Knight and Lomas's fourteen year quest to uncover the secret teachings buried beneath Roslin Chapel near Edinburgh. Their quest ends with extraordinary revelations about early human history - the origins of Christianity, of Freemasonry and of science. They show that all were charged with a belief in a secret cosmic code, linking, for example, the Exodus from Egypt, the founding of Solomon's Temple and the Star of Bethlehem. This book reveals for the first time why there were such high expectations of a Messiah at the time of the birth of Jesus Christ. The Book of Hiram will change everything you thought you knew about both the Bible and Freemasonry.

The apparent disappearance of mysticism in the Protestant world after the Reformation used to be taken as an example of the arrival of modernity. However, as recent studies in history and literary history reveal, the "Reformation" was not experienced in such a drastically transformative manner, not least because the later Middle Ages itself was marked by a series of reform movements within the Catholic Church in which mysticism played a central role. In Mysticism and Reform, 1400-1750, contributors show that it is more accurate to characterize the history of early modern mysticism as one in which relationships of continuity within transformations occurred. Rather than focus on the departures of the sixteenth-century Reformation from medieval traditions, the essays in this volume explore one of the most remarkable yet still under-studied chapters in its history: the survival and transformation of mysticism between the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. With a focus on central and northern Europe, the essays engage such subjects as the relationship of Luther to mystical writing, the visual representation of mystical experience in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century art, mystical sermons by religious women of the Low Countries, Valentin Weigel's recasting of Eckhartian gelassenheit for a Lutheran audience, and the mysticism of English figures such as Gertrude More, Jane Lead, Elizabeth Hooten, and John Austin, the German Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg, and the German American Marie Christine Sauer.

Bernard McGinn's The Presence of God series is one of the most respected histories of Christian mysticism in print today. In this new book, Bernard and Patricia McGinn draw from the series to take a closer, personal look at the mystical vision of 12 great spiritual masters living before the Reformation. What were the deep insights of these early mystics? How can we apply their wisdom to our lives today? Chapters include Hildegard of Bingen on cosmic vision, John Cassian on prayer and purity of heart, and Bernard of Clairvaux on spousal love.

How does the mind experience the sacred? What biological mechanisms are involved in mystical states and trances? Is there a neurological basis for patterns in comparative religions? Does religion have an evolutionary function? This pathbreaking work by two leading medical researchers explores the neurophysiology of religious experience. Building on an explanation of the basic structure of the brain, the authors focus on parts most relevant to human experience, emotion, and cognition. On this basis, they plot how the brain is involved in mystical experiences. Successive chapters apply this scheme to mythmaking, ritual and liturgy, meditation, near-death experiences, and theology itself. Anchored in such research, the authors also sketch the implications of their work for philosophy, science, theology, and the future of religion.

The great German mystic Meister Eckhart remains one of the most fascinating figures in Western thought. Revived interest in Eckhart's mysticism has been matched, and even surpassed, by the study of the women mystics of the late13th century. This book argues that Eckhart's thought cannot be fully be understood until it is viewed against the background of the breakthroughs made by the women mystics who preceded him.

Margery Kempe, a middle-class English housewife at the turn of the fifteenth century, was called to weep and to pray for her fellow Christians and to adopt an unconventional way of life. Separating herself from her husband and many children, she became a pilgrim travelling around England and as far away as Jerusalem. In old age, she dictated to scribes an autobiography that recounts her extraordinary intimacy with Christ as well as her intense, commotion-filled life. At first glance, she does not seem very saintly in character or disposition, and her spiritual experiences can easily appear to be extreme or egotistical. To appreciate and interpret Margery Kempe's life and spirituality properly, one must go beyond conventional categories of social and religious history.

In Mystic and Pilgrim, Clarissa Atkinson does this from six perspectives: the character of Margery's autobiography, her mysticism and pilgrim way of life, her social and family environment, her relations with her church and its clergy, the tradition that shaped her piety, and the context of late medieval female sanctity. Margery's Book was shaped by the writings of famous holy women and by pressures on memory and motivation that come with age.

The vocation that called Margery to mysticism and pilgrimage made her unusual, therefore open to suspicion. It required her to leave her husband and children, to dress in white (a color usually reserved for virgins), to go on pilgrimage as a way to participate in Christ's earthly life and death. It graced her with a conspicuous gift: tears she could not control or resist. Her domestic and social background (she came from a powerful merchant family) gave her the courage to persist in her strange vocation and unpopular way of life. She met scorn from most of her relatives, but found encouragement in Christ, the saints, and the representatives of the Church. During Margery's lifetime the Church displayed intense anxiety over the related issues of religious enthusiasm, discernment of spirits, and female visionaries. Yet many church officials, including Dame Julian of Norwich, advised Margery to accept what God sent her and judged her feelings to be "the work of the Holy Ghost."

Having examined these aspects of Margery's life and piety, Atkinson goes on to make an original and significant contribution by explaining their specific spiritual context. It is in the tradition of affective piety and of late medieval female sanctity, she argues, that Margery's religious emotions and expressions can best be understood. From Anselm of Canterbury, through Francis of Assisi, to Nicolas Love, affective writers and preachers aimed to promote intense feelings. Principal among these were compassion and contrition. Margery incorporated these feelings in her own devotional life: identification with the human Christ, conspicuous humility inspired by Saint Francis, and "boistrous" emotion in sympathy with Mary grieving at the Cross.

Against this background, the religious life of Margery Kempe seems neither aberrant nor even very unusual. Rather, it is her unique response to a tradition established by great saints. Among the saintly persons of late medieval Europe were many women: Catherine of Siena, Birgitta of Sweden, Joan of Arc, Julian of Norwich. They characteristically saw visions, communicated directly with God, found scribes or biographers who publicized their experiences. An increasing number of them were wives and mothers who struggled, like Margery, with the married state and eventually transcended it, becoming in effect "honorary" virgins through their holiness and by God's special favor. Traveling widely, speaking publicly, departing from traditional women's roles, these women were a new creation of the late Middle Ages.

This study reveals how women's visionary texts played a central role within medieval discourses of authorship, reading, and devotion. From the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, women across northern Europe began committing their visionary conversations with Christ to the written word. Translating Christ in this way required multiple transformations: divine speech into human language, aural event into textual artifact, visionary experience into linguistic record, and individual encounter into communal repetition. This ambitious study shows how women's visionary texts form an underexamined literary tradition within medieval religious culture. Barbara Zimbalist demonstrates how, within this tradition, female visionaries developed new forms of authorship, reading, and devotion. Through these transformations, the female visionary authorized herself and her text, and performed a rhetorical imitatio Christi that offered models of interpretive practice and spoken devotion to her readers. This literary-historical tradition has not yet been fully recognized on its own terms. By exploring its development in hagiography, visionary texts, and devotional literature, Zimbalist shows how this literary mode came to be not only possible but widespread and influential. She argues that women's visionary translation reconfigured traditional hierarchies and positions of spiritual power for female authors and readers in ways that reverberated throughout late-medieval literary and religious cultures. In translating their visionary conversations with Christ into vernacular text, medieval women turned themselves into authors and devotional guides, and formed their readers into textual communities shaped by gendered visionary experiences and spoken imitatio Christi. Comparing texts in Latin, Dutch, French, and English, Translating Christ in the Middle Ages explores how women's visionary translation of Christ's speech initiated larger transformations of gendered authorship and religious authority within medieval culture. The book will interest scholars in different linguistic and religious traditions in medieval studies, history, religious studies, and women's and gender studies.

One day in 1917, while cooking dinner at home in Manhattan, Margaret Reilly (1884-1937) felt a sharp pain over her heart and claimed to see a crucifix emerging in blood on her skin. Four years later, Reilly entered the convent of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd in Peekskill, New York, where, known as Sister Mary of the Crown of Thorns, she spent most of her life gravely ill and possibly exhibiting Christ's wounds. In this portrait of Sister Thorn, Paula M. Kane scrutinizes the responses to this American stigmatic's experiences and illustrates the surprising presence of mystical phenomena in twentieth-century American Catholicism. Drawing on accounts by clerical authorities, ordinary Catholics, doctors, and journalists - as well as on medicine, anthropology, and gender studies - Kane explores American Catholic mysticism, setting it in the context of life after World War I and showing the war's impact on American Christianity. Sister Thorn's life, she reveals, marks the beginning of a transition among Catholics from a devotional, Old World piety to a newly confident role in American society.

In 1998, John Randolph Price experienced a mystical revelation from which came specific steps to higher consciousness - a ladder to climb to a new dimension where the illusions of sickness, scarcity and discord are shattered and a world of wholeness, abundance and right relations is revealed. He was also given a glimpse of the future as we move into the third millennium, and how lasting peace will finally come to Earth. This is the story of that revelation.

Apart from the introduction by Fr Steuart, The Mystical Doctrine of St John of the Cross consists wholly of passages from St John's own writings. It sets out in continous and convenient form all the essential points in his teachings. St John of the Cross was born near Avila in 1542 and dies at Ubeda in 1591. A Carmelite friar he was an enthusiastic supporter of St Teresa's campaign to restore the original and strict rule. His untiring work to spread the reform led to imprisonment, during which he wrote his first poem. He was canonized in 1726 and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1926.