Ursula King's Christian Mystics tells the story of sixty men and women whose mystical devotion to God transformed the times in which they lived and still affects our present-day search for spiritual meaning. Moving from key figures of the early Christian age to the great mystics of modern times, special emphasis is given to the great high points of mysticism in the medieval, early modern and Eastern Orthodox traditions. The lives of visionaries, including Clement of Alexandria, Saint Bonaventure, Blaise Pascal and Simone Weil are studied in detail. It reveals the richly diverse expressions that mystical experience has found during two thousand years of Christian history and shows how it underpins Christian ritual and doctrine as a source of spiritual inspiration for all believers. Beautifully illustrated and written by a prominent name in the British academic world, this significant text has received high acclaim and is the only book to feature biographies of key mystics.

This innovative critical volume brings the study of Margery Kempe into the twenty-first century. Structured around four categories of 'encounter' - textual, internal, external and performative - the volume offers a capacious exploration of The Book of Margery Kempe, characterised by multiple complementary and dissonant approaches. It employs a multiplicity of scholarly and critical lenses, including the intertextual history of medieval women's literary culture, medical humanities, history of science, digital humanities, literary criticism, oral history, the global Middle Ages, archival research and creative re-imagining. Revealing several new discoveries about Margery Kempe and her Book in its global contexts, and offering multiple ways of reading the Book in the modern world, it will be an essential companion for years to come. -- .

Jacob 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 to have had 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, of which he later said that "in one quarter of an hour I saw and knew more than if I had been many years at the university . . . and thereupon I turned my heart to praise God for it." As experiences of this kind came more frequently, he puzzled much as to why such knowledge should be given to him, of all men, who sought only the love of God and was quite unlearned in the ordinary sense. Some ten years later he began to record what he received, as a help to his own memory, and thus was born The Aurora, his first book, finished in 1612. From then on he found both friends and enemies of his work. Due to persecution in his hometown, Boehme later settled in Dresden, where he died in 1624. Mysterium Magnum, written by Boehme the year before he died and at a time when his powers of expression had developed to their full, is perhaps central to his work in some thirty-one or thirty-two original volumes. Taking the general form of an interpretation of Genesis, it far outstrips such apparent confines, touching among other matters upon the meaning of the New Testament and, from the first sentence, leading to the heart of the universal experience of all mystics: When we consider the visible world with its essence, and consider the life of the creatures, then we find therein the likeness of the invisible, spiritual world, which is hidden in the visible world as the soul in the body; and we see thereby that the hidden God is nigh unto all and through all, and yet wholly hidden to the visible essence. Among those who have acknowledged the spiritual stature of Boehme are Hegel, William Law, St. Martin (le Philosophe Inconnu), Dean Inge, and Nicolas Berdyaev.

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.

Routledge is now re-issuing this prestigious series of 204 volumes originally published between 1910 and 1965. The titles include works by key figures such asC.G. Jung, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Otto Rank, James Hillman, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney and Susan Isaacs. Each volume is available on its own, as part of a themed mini-set, or as part of a specially-priced 204-volume set. A brochure listing each title in the "International Library of Psychology" series is available upon request.

St Symeon was the most important teacher of mystical experience of God in the Orthodox Church. This book seeks to place the teaching of the discourses in their proper context, both among Symeon's other writings and with regard to his sources in the Tradition. Included is a sketch of Symeon's life and times, together with an extensive discussion of this thought, particularly against its background in the ascetical, mystical and theological literature of the Christian East prior to the 10th century.

Moments of Our Nights and Days is a companion book to Saying Goodbye, a resource book for funerals, also published by Wild Goose Publications. Ruth Burgess is the author of several other worship resource books for the various seasons and festivals, including Candles and Conifers, Hay and Stardust, Eggs and Ashes, Fire and Bread, Bare Feet and Buttercups and Acorns and Archangels.

This innovative critical volume brings the study of Margery Kempe into the twenty-first century. Structured around four categories of 'encounter' - textual, internal, external and performative - the volume offers a capacious exploration of The Book of Margery Kempe, characterised by multiple complementary and dissonant approaches. It employs a multiplicity of scholarly and critical lenses, including the intertextual history of medieval women's literary culture, medical humanities, history of science, digital humanities, literary criticism, oral history, the global Middle Ages, archival research and creative re-imagining. Revealing several new discoveries about Margery Kempe and her Book in its global contexts, and offering multiple ways of reading the Book in the modern world, it will be an essential companion for years to come. -- .

In 1981, six children in the small village of Medjugorje claimed that Our Lady had appeared to them. Since then millions of pilgrims have traveled from across the world to pray in this special place. In conversation with Finbar O'Leary, Vicka, one of the six, tells of her special relationship with Our Lady and relays many of the messages which she says the `Queen of Peace' has given to her. Vicka also discusses her own sufferings and the journeys on which Our Lady has brought her.

Translation and facing text of an important female-authored work from the late middle ages. A Revelation of Purgatory was written by an unnamed woman, almost certainly an anchoress, in Winchester in 1422. It details from a first-person perspective a series of terrifying visions experienced by the author in which she witnesses the purgatorial sufferings of a former friend named Margaret who makes her way through the blazing fires of purgatory tormented by devils, the "worm of conscience", and - uniquely - her two former pets, a fierce little cat and dog. Through her prayer and the prayers she elicits from her own circle of influential priests, the anchoress is eventually able to deliver Margaret to the doors of the heavenly Jerusalem. Made available here in accessible parallel-text format with extended introduction and annotation, the Revelation is an important text: not only does it testify to popular and religious concerns with the afterlife in the late Middle Ages but also underscores the significant role played by women in mitigating the suffering of souls in purgatory by means of their personal interventions. The text also bears witness to female friendship, effective intergender dialogue, and the central role played by an anchoress in those communities with which she interacted, be they spiritual, institutional or personal. Liz Herbert McAvoy is Professor of Medieval Literature at Swansea University.

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, Abu 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.

Who am I? Everyone asks that question, no matter their age or status in life. If we truly are supposed to be real with others, shouldn’t that start with learning how to be real with ourselves? We think so. But we have to be willing to look inside and ask, "Okay, God, who am I? What is it that I don’t see about myself that you see?"

A Book Called YOU will help us learn about:

• Who we are as individuals
• How a biblical view of self-discovery can improve every part of our lives.
• Assigns Enneagram numbers to biblical characters
• Provides heartfelt, humorous, and prescriptive Enneagram perspective
• Helps readers be more authentic and honest with God, themselves, and others.

Based on his widely successful teaching series "A Series Called You" and his personal experience using the Enneagram personality assessment tool in his marriage and other personal relationships, pastor Matt Brown offers a groundbreaking, entertaining, and heartfelt guide that highlights biblical truths alongside the Enneagram to help us better understand ourselves and how we relate to the people around us.

Thomas Merton's life, especially once he had become a writer, was to a great extent one of dialogue with people who were distant, both geographically and historically. In these probing and perceptive studies, Rowan Williams looks closely at the key intellectual and spiritual relationships that emerge in Merton's writings, exploring the impact on him of thinkers as diverse as Hannah Arendt, Karl Barth, William Blake, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Olivier Clement, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Paul Evdokimov, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Vladimir Lossky, John Henry Newman, Boris Pasternak and St John of the Cross.

By 1791, the French Revolution had spread to Haiti, where slaves and free blacks alike had begun demanding civil rights guaranteed in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man. Enter Romaine-la-Prophetesse, a free black Dominican coffee farmer who dressed in women's clothes and claimed that the Virgin Mary was his godmother. Inspired by mystical revelations from the Holy Mother, he amassed a large and volatile following of insurgents who would go on to sack countless plantations and conquer the coastal cities of Jacmel and Leogane. For this brief period, Romaine counted as his political adviser the white French Catholic priest and physician Abbe Ouviere, a renaissance man of cunning politics who would go on to become a pioneering figure in early American science and medicine. Brought together by Catholicism and the turmoil of the revolutionary Atlantic, the priest and the prophetess would come to symbolize the enlightenment ideals of freedom and a more just social order in the eighteenth-century Caribbean. Drawing on extensive archival research, Terry Rey offers a major contribution to our understanding of Catholic mysticism and traditional African religious practices at the time of the Haitian Revolution and reveals the significant ways in which religion and race intersected in the turbulence and triumphs of revolutionary France, Haiti, and early republican America.

St Symeon the New theologian was abbot of the monastery of St Mamas in Constantinople in the 11th century. He was a forceful advocate of the mystical experience of God in the history of the Byzantine Church. His writings survived in the Orthodox Church continuing to play an important role in the renewals of spiritual life and prayer within the Church. This is the second of a three-volume set translating "The Ethical Discourses" into English. It addresses the traditional language of Eastern Christian asceticism in the light of St Symeon's message on the Church, the sacrament and the "Day of the Lord" as found in Volume I. St Symeon asserts that "Apatheia", or "dispassion", the ancient term for freedom from sinful passion, denotes the real possibility of a transfigured life. Elsewhere in the book St Symeon takes up the role of the "tools of asceticism" - fasting, vigils, poverty, in order to underline their function as instruments enabling conformity to the Cross of Christ. Other discourses dwell on: the character and signs of the saint; faith and love; and on ascetic retreat. Throughout the volume St Symeon anticipates the 14th-century movement of Byzantine hesychasm, as well as the monastic renaissance of 18th-century Athos and 19th-century Russia.

Twelve papers focus on mysticism as an experience and on the work of individual mystics. The proceedings of the fifth meeting include: studies of medieval mystics in continental Europe; clarification of the nature of Bridgettine spirituality through examination of the thinking that governed the practical details of their daily routine and their religous instruction; analyses of the distinctively creative quality of the writings of Julian of Norwich and of the status of visionary autobiography as a literary genre; comparison between modern philosophical understanding and that of a medieval mystic; enquiry as to what books were available and to whom in fourteenth-century Cambridge; radical questioning of the identity of the translator of the text known as Benjamin Minor traditionally ascribed to the author of the Cloud of Unknowing. Contributors: JOHN CLARK, TARJEI PARK, OLIVER DAVIES, VINCENT GILLESPIE, MAGGIE ROSS, NICHOLAS WATSON, KATHRYN KERBY FULTON, SASKIA MURK JANSEN, ULLA SANDER OLSEN, VERONICA LAWRENCE, GUNNEL CLEVE, SONYA SIKKA, ROGER ELLIS.

"The fiery life of divine wisdom" captured in the writings of this twelfth-century Christian mystic, visionary and healer can be a companion on your own spiritual journey.

Hildegard of Bingen (1098 1179) was a Christian mystic, visionary, abbess, composer, dramatist, poet and healer. The brilliance and passion of her writings including inscriptions of her visions, letters, liturgical antiphons, hymns, a morality play and medical and scientific works speak to readers within the church as well as those who are not formally religious but have an interest in mysticism, the spiritual life, the relationship between spirituality and creativity, feminist and eco-spiritualities and the arts. Though considered a controversial figure in her day, she was recently canonized and proclaimed a doctor of the church, an honor extended to only three other women saints in Christian history.

This groundbreaking introduction to her rich and varied writings presents a wide range of Hildegard's works grouped by theme, providing a deeper understanding of this influential spiritual figure than single-themed collections can. Insightful and instructive annotations provide the reader with suggestions for how to read or listen to medieval mystical texts as well as how to engage fully with Latin chants, allowing readers to effectually begin a dialogue between the world of this twelfth-century mystic and our own."

Interdisciplinary studies on medieval mystics and their cultural background. Contemplative life in the middle ages has been the focus of much recent critical attention. The Symposium papers collected in this volume illuminate the mystical tradition through examination of written texts and material culturein the medieval period. A particular focus is on Celtic modes of witnessing to comtemplative vision from Ireland and Wales: an eighth-century account of voyages to wonders beyond the known world of Irish monasticism, and the workof Christian bards in medieval Wales. Distinctions within the mystical tradition in England are also explored both within differing Religious Orders and bewtween individuals engaged with the contemplative life. Dr MARION GLASSCOE teaches in the School of English and American Studies at the University of Exeter. Contributors: THOMAS O'LOUGHLIN, OLIVER DAVIES, R. IESTYN DANIEL, RUTH SMITH, VALERIE EDDEN, DENISE N. BAKER, DENIS RENEVEY, E.A. JONES, RICHARD LAWES, NAOE KUKITA YOSHIKAWA, C. ANNETTE GRISE, JAMES HOGG

Is the Christian mystical tradition a relic of another time, shaped by celibates for celibates, unable to engage meaningfully with people of our time who embrace their corporeality and sexuality as crucial aspects of their journey towards union with God? This book reflects in serious theological depth and detail on the spiritual and sexual journeys of gay men of mature and committed Christian faith, employing the Christian mystical tradition as the lens and the interlocutor in this process. This study examines the major themes and stages of the mystical tradition as outlined by Evelyn Underhill, but also including more recent work by Ruth Burrows, Thomas Merton and Constance Fitzgerald. Using methods of qualitative research, it then considers the texts of in-depth interviews conducted with men, most of whom are theologians or spiritual leaders with a deep Catholic faith, and all of whom are openly, self-affirmingly gay. Finally, it employs Ricoeur's hermeneutical theory to engage in a creative theological conversation between the traditional mystical stages and themes and these men's lives, as described in their interviews. This is a unique study that brings together ancient spirituality with contemporary lived religion. As such, it will be of interest to scholars of religious studies, theology, Christian mysticism and spirituality, and queer studies. It will be of particular interest to those teach spiritual direction and to all who seek new ways to engage with the spiritual lives of LGBTIQ+ people.

The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism brings together a team of leading international scholars to explore the origins, evolution, and contemporary debates relating to Christian mystics, texts, and the movements they inspired. * Provides a comprehensive and engaging account of Christian mysticism, from its origins right up to the present day * Draws on the best of current scholarship by bringing together a collection of newly-commissioned readings by leading scholars * Considers examples of mysticism in both Eastern and Western Christianity * Offers a brilliant synthesis of the key figures and historical periods of mysticism; its core themes, such as heresy, gender, or aesthetics; and its theoretical considerations, including theological, literary, social scientific, and philosophical approaches * Features chapters on current debates such as neuroscience and mystical experience, and inter-religious dialogue