Author: Swami Tyagananda
Publisher: Sri Ramakrishna Math
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 182
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Book Description
Every religion provides for monastics. Monasticism may be a way of life only for a few, but the spirit of monasticism must animate the soul of every spiritual seeker. This collection of essays explains the ideals of monasticism and its practice in various eastern and western traditions.Contributors include: Swamis Vivekananda, Lokeswarananda, and Swahananda along with western writers Stuart Elkman and Father Gregory Elmer, O.S.B. These articles were originally published in the 1990 Special Number of the Vedanta Kesari and are now presented in book form so that its message may reach a wider audience.
Author: Katherine Smith
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1843838672
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252
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Book Description
"An extremely interesting and important book... makes an important contribution to the history of medieval monastic spirituality in a formative period, whilst also fitting into wider debates on the origins, development and impact of ideas on crusading and holy war." Dr William Purkis, University of Birmingham Monastic culture has generally been seen as set apart from the medieval battlefield, as "those who prayed" were set apart from "those who fought". However, in this first study of the place of war within medieval monastic culture, the author shows the limitations of this division. Through a wide reading of Latin sermons, letters, and hagiography, she identifies a monastic language of war that presented the monk as the archetypal "soldier of Christ" and his life of prayer as a continuous combat with the devil: indeed, monks' claims to supremacy on the spiritual battlefield grew even louder as Church leaders extended the title of "soldier of Christ" to lay knights and crusaders. So, while medieval monasteries have traditionally been portrayed as peaceful sanctuaries in a violent world, here the author demonstrates that monastic identity was negotiated through real and imaginary encounters with war, and that the concept of spiritual warfare informed virtually every aspect of life in the cloister. It thus breaks new ground in the history of European attitudes toward warfare and warriors in the age of the papal reform movement and the early crusades. Katherine Allen Smith is Assistant Professor of History, University of Puget Sound.
Author: Linda Woodhead
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199687749
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 145
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Book Description
This is a short, accessible analysis of Christianity that focuses on its social and cultural diversity as well as its historical dimensions.
Author: Steven Vanderputten
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801468108
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 263
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Book Description
The history of monastic institutions in the Middle Ages may at first appear remarkably uniform and predictable. Medieval commentators and modern scholars have observed how monasteries of the tenth to early twelfth centuries experienced long periods of stasis alternating with bursts of rapid development known as reforms. Charismatic leaders by sheer force of will, and by assiduously recruiting the support of the ecclesiastical and lay elites, pushed monasticism forward toward reform, remediating the inevitable decline of discipline and government in these institutions. A lack of concrete information on what happened at individual monasteries is not regarded as a significant problem, as long as there is the possibility to reconstruct the reformers’ ‘‘program.’’ While this general picture makes for a compelling narrative, it doesn’t necessarily hold up when one looks closely at the history of specific institutions. In Monastic Reform as Process, Steven Vanderputten puts the history of monastic reform to the test by examining the evidence from seven monasteries in Flanders, one of the wealthiest principalities of northwestern Europe, between 900 and 1100. He finds that the reform of a monastery should be studied not as an "exogenous shock" but as an intentional blending of reformist ideals with existing structures and traditions. He also shows that reformist government was cumulative in nature, and many of the individual achievements and initiatives of reformist abbots were only possible because they built upon previous achievements. Rather than looking at reforms as "flashpoint events," we need to view them as processes worthy of study in their own right. Deeply researched and carefully argued, Monastic Reform as Process will be essential reading for scholars working on the history of monasteries more broadly as well as those studying the phenomenon of reform throughout history.
Author: Alison I. Beach
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108770630
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 1244
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Book Description
Monasticism, in all of its variations, was a feature of almost every landscape in the medieval West. So ubiquitous were religious women and men throughout the Middle Ages that all medievalists encounter monasticism in their intellectual worlds. While there is enormous interest in medieval monasticism among Anglophone scholars, language is often a barrier to accessing some of the most important and groundbreaking research emerging from Europe. The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West offers a comprehensive treatment of medieval monasticism, from Late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages. The essays, specially commissioned for this volume and written by an international team of scholars, with contributors from Australia, Belgium, Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States, cover a range of topics and themes and represent the most up-to-date discoveries on this topic.
Author: Jeffrey Samuels
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824860624
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 201
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Book Description
An idealized view of the lifestyle of a Buddhist monk might be described according to the doctrinal demand for emotional detachment and, ultimately, the cessation of all desire. Yet monks are also enjoined to practice compassion, a powerful emotion and equally lofty ideal, and live with every other human feeling—love, hate, jealousy, ambition—while relating to other monks and the lay community. In this important ethnography of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Jeffrey Samuels takes an unprecedented look at how emotion determines and influences the commitments that laypeople and monastics make to each other and to the Buddhist religion in general. By focusing on "multimoment" histories, Samuels highlights specific junctures in which ideas about recruitment, vocation, patronage, and institution-building are dynamically negotiated and refined. Positing a nexus between aesthetics and affect, he illustrates not only how aesthetic responses trigger certain emotions, but also how personal and shared emotions, at the local level, shape notions of beauty. Samuels uses the voices of informants to reveal the delicately negotiated character of lay-monastic relations and temple management. In the fields of religion and Buddhist studies there has been a growing recognition of the need to examine affective dimensions of religion. His work breaks new ground in that it answers questions about Buddhist emotions and the constitutive roles they play in social life and religious practice through a close, poignant look at small-scale temple and social networks. Throughout, Samuels makes the case for the need to account for emotions in making intelligible the behavior of religious participants and practitioners. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork that includes numerous interviews as well as an examination of written and visual sources, Attracting the Heart conveys the manner in which Buddhists describe their own histories, experiences, and encounters as they relate to the formation and continuation of Buddhist monastic culture in contemporary Sri Lanka. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of religion, Buddhist studies, anthropology, and South and Southeast Asian studies.
Author: Swami Bhajanananda
Publisher: Advaita Ashrama (A Publication House of Ramakrishna Math, Belur Math)
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 61
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Book Description
This book discusses the traditional modes of monasticism and compares them with the modern monastic way of life as seen in the Ramakrishna Order. With the changing times, monasticism too has to grow and assume new forms to adapt to the new situations. Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda brought about this change in the outward form of Indian monasticism without deviating from the eternal principles. Here the readers will get an overview of monasticism in general, and the Ramakrishna monasticism in particular. Published by Advaita Ashrama, a publication house of Ramakrishna Math, Belur Math, India.
Author: Daniel Folger Caner
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520344561
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
An apostolic lifestyle characterized by total material renunciation, homelessness, and begging was practiced by monks throughout the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. Such monks often served as spiritual advisors to urban aristocrats whose patronage gave them considerable authority and independence from episcopal control. This book is the first comprehensive study of this type of Christian poverty and the challenge it posed for episcopal authority and the promotion of monasticism in late antiquity. Focusing on devotional practices, Daniel Caner draws together diverse testimony from Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, and elsewhere—including the Pseudo-Clementine Letters to Virgins, Augustine's On the Work of Monks, John Chrysostom's homilies, legal codes—to reveal gospel-inspired patterns of ascetic dependency and teaching from the third to the fifth centuries. Throughout, his point of departure is social and cultural history, especially the urban social history of the late Roman empire. He also introduces many charismatic individuals whose struggle to persist against church suppression of their chosen way of imitating Christ was fought with defiant conviction, and the book includes the first annotated English translation of the biography of Alexander Akoimetos (Alexander the Sleepless). Wandering, Begging Monks allows us to understand these fascinating figures of early Christianity in the full context of late Roman society.
Author: Church of England
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780977709304
Category : Anglican Communion
Languages : en
Pages : 887
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Book Description
Author: William M. Johnston
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113678716X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 2000
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Book Description
First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
