The call to contemplative Christianity is not an easy one. Those who answer it set themselves to a sometimes arduous task of self-reformation through rigorous study and practice, learned through the teachings of monks and nuns and the writings of ancient Christian mystics, often in isolation from family and friends. Those who are dedicated can spend hours every day in meditation, prayer, liturgy, and study. Why do they come? Indeed, how do they find their way to the door at all? Based on nearly four years of research among semi-cloistered Christian monastics and a dispersed network of non-monastic Christian contemplatives around the United States, The Monk's Cell shows how religious practitioners in both settings combined social action and intentional living with intellectual study and intensive contemplative practices in an effort to modify their ways of knowing, sensing, and experiencing the world. Organized by the metaphor of a seeker journeying towards the inner chambers of a monastic chapel, The Monk's Cell uses innovative "intersubjective fieldwork" methods to study these opaque interiorized, often silent communities, in order to show how practices like solitude, chant, contemplation, attention, and a paradoxical capacity to combine ritual with intentional "unknowing" develop and hone a powerful sense of communion with the world.

Virtually unknown of First Nations in Canada, the Arrow Lakes or Sinixt Interior Salish of the North American Columbia Plateau have been declared officially extinct. This book investigates why this circumstance came about and how contemporary Sinixt have responded.

Most of the Arrow Lakes people have lived in diaspora for a hundred years or more, due in part to destructive mining activity in their historical territory. Since 1989, many have made pilgrimages to an ancient burial ground and village site at Vallican, British Columbia, where they have worked against many obstacles to protect ancestral remains exhumed by archaeologists and road-builders. Paula Pryce explores this history, showing how time is culturally imbedded in the land. Social memory, time perspectives, sense of place, and the act of reburial have enhanced cultural continuity, meaning, and identity among the Lakes people.

While telling a troubling story of dispossession and diaspora, grave sites and reburials, this powerful narrative also looks at the complex process of the construction and re-construction of identity in a world of constantly shifting boundaries. It is the first book devoted to the story of the Sinixt.