Monastic Bodies

Monastic Bodies PDF Author: Caroline T. Schroeder
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812203380
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Get Book Here

Book Description
Shenoute of Atripe led the White Monastery, a community of several thousand male and female Coptic monks in Upper Egypt, between approximately 395 and 465 C.E. Shenoute's letters, sermons, and treatises—one of the most detailed bodies of writing to survive from any early monastery—provide an unparalleled resource for the study of early Christian monasticism and asceticism. In Monastic Bodies, Caroline Schroeder offers an in-depth examination of the asceticism practiced at the White Monastery using diverse sources, including monastic rules, theological treatises, sermons, and material culture. Schroeder details Shenoute's arduous disciplinary code and philosophical structure, including the belief that individual sin corrupted not only the individual body but the entire "corporate body" of the community. Thus the purity of the community ultimately depended upon the integrity of each individual monk. Shenoute's ascetic discourse focused on purity of the body, but he categorized as impure not only activities such as sex but any disobedience and other more general transgressions. Shenoute emphasized the important practices of discipline, or askesis, in achieving this purity. Contextualizing Shenoute within the wider debates about asceticism, sexuality, and heresy that characterized late antiquity, Schroeder compares his views on bodily discipline, monastic punishments, the resurrection of the body, the incarnation of Christ, and monastic authority with those of figures such as Cyril of Alexandria, Paulinus of Nola, and Pachomius.

Monastic Bodies

Monastic Bodies PDF Author: Caroline T. Schroeder
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812203380
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Get Book Here

Book Description
Shenoute of Atripe led the White Monastery, a community of several thousand male and female Coptic monks in Upper Egypt, between approximately 395 and 465 C.E. Shenoute's letters, sermons, and treatises—one of the most detailed bodies of writing to survive from any early monastery—provide an unparalleled resource for the study of early Christian monasticism and asceticism. In Monastic Bodies, Caroline Schroeder offers an in-depth examination of the asceticism practiced at the White Monastery using diverse sources, including monastic rules, theological treatises, sermons, and material culture. Schroeder details Shenoute's arduous disciplinary code and philosophical structure, including the belief that individual sin corrupted not only the individual body but the entire "corporate body" of the community. Thus the purity of the community ultimately depended upon the integrity of each individual monk. Shenoute's ascetic discourse focused on purity of the body, but he categorized as impure not only activities such as sex but any disobedience and other more general transgressions. Shenoute emphasized the important practices of discipline, or askesis, in achieving this purity. Contextualizing Shenoute within the wider debates about asceticism, sexuality, and heresy that characterized late antiquity, Schroeder compares his views on bodily discipline, monastic punishments, the resurrection of the body, the incarnation of Christ, and monastic authority with those of figures such as Cyril of Alexandria, Paulinus of Nola, and Pachomius.

Dark Age Bodies

Dark Age Bodies PDF Author: Lynda L. Coon
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812204913
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 411

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Dark Age Bodies Lynda L. Coon reconstructs the gender ideology of monastic masculinity through an investigation of early medieval readings of the body. Focusing on the Carolingian era, Coon evaluates the ritual and liturgical performances of monastic bodies within the imaginative landscapes of same-sex ascetic communities in northern Europe. She demonstrates how the priestly body plays a significant role in shaping major aspects of Carolingian history, such as the revival of classicism, movements for clerical reform, and church-state relations. In the political realm, Carolingian churchmen consistently exploited monastic constructions of gender to assert the power of the monastery. Stressing the superior qualities of priestly virility, clerical elites forged a model of gender that sought to feminize lay male bodies through a variety of textual, ritual, and spatial means. Focusing on three central themes—the body, architecture, and ritual practice—the book draws from a variety of visual and textual materials, including poetry, grammar manuals, rhetorical treatises, biblical exegesis, monastic regulations, hagiographies, illuminated manuscripts, building plans, and cloister design. Interdisciplinary in scope, Dark Age Bodies brings together scholarship in architectural history and cultural anthropology with recent works in religion, classics, and gender to present a significant reconsideration of Carolingian culture.

Virtuous Bodies

Virtuous Bodies PDF Author: Susanne Mrozik
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198041497
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 195

Get Book Here

Book Description
Virtuous Bodies breaks new ground in the field of Buddhist ethics by investigating the diverse roles bodies play in ethical development. Traditionally, Buddhists assumed a close connection between body and morality. Thus Buddhist literature contains descriptions of living beings that stink with sin, are disfigured by vices, or are perfumed and adorned with virtues. Taking an influential early medieval Indian Mah=ay=ana Buddhist text-'S=antideva's Compendium of Training ('Sik,s=asamuccaya)-as a case study, Susanne Mrozik demonstrates that Buddhists regarded ethical development as a process of physical and moral transformation. Mrozik chooses The Compendium of Training because it quotes from over one hundred Buddhist scriptures, allowing her to reveal a broader Buddhist interest in the ethical significance of bodies. The text is a training manual for bodhisattvas, especially monastic bodhisattvas. In it, bodies function as markers of, and conditions for, one's own ethical development. Most strikingly, bodies also function as instruments for the ethical development of others. When living beings come into contact with the virtuous bodies of bodhisattvas, they are transformed physically and morally for the better. Virtuous Bodies explores both the centrality of bodies to the bodhisattva ideal and the corporeal specificity of that ideal. Arguing that the bodhisattva ideal is an embodied ethical ideal, Mrozik poses an array of fascinating questions: What does virtue look like? What kinds of physical features constitute virtuous bodies? What kinds of bodies have virtuous effects on others? Drawing on a range of contemporary theorists, this book engages in a feminist hermeneutics of recovery and suspicion in order to explore the ethical resources Buddhism offers to scholars and religious practitioners interested in the embodied nature of ethical ideals.

Life in a Modern Monastery

Life in a Modern Monastery PDF Author: Joseph McCabe
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Monastic and religious life
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Relationship Between Morality and the Body in Monastic Training According to the Śikṣāsamuccaya

The Relationship Between Morality and the Body in Monastic Training According to the Śikṣāsamuccaya PDF Author: Susanne Petra Mrozik
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Buddhism
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Get Book Here

Book Description


Reforming the Monastery

Reforming the Monastery PDF Author: Greg Peters
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1630870455
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 169

Get Book Here

Book Description
Richard Froude wrote in 1833 to John Henry Newman that "the present state of things in England makes an opening for reviving the monastic system." Seemingly original words at the time. Yet, monasticism is one of the most ancient and enduring institutions of the Christian church, reaching its zenith during the High Middle Ages. Although medieval monasteries were regularly suppressed during the Reformation and the magisterial Reformers rejected monastic vows, the existence of monasticism has remained within the Reformation churches, both as an institution and in its theology. This volume is an examination of Protestant theologies of monasticism, examining the thought of select Protestant authors who have argued for the existence of monasticism in the Reformation churches, beginning with Martin Luther and John Calvin and including Conrad Hoyer, John Henry Newman, Karl Barth, and Donald Bloesch. Looking at the contemporary church, the current movement known as the "New Monasticism" is discussed and evaluated in light of Protestant monastic history.

Soul and Body Diseases, Remedies and Healing in Middle Eastern Religious Cultures and Traditions

Soul and Body Diseases, Remedies and Healing in Middle Eastern Religious Cultures and Traditions PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004549978
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 414

Get Book Here

Book Description
Aiming to develop a less studied literary genre, this book provides a well-rounded picture of spiritual and physical diseases and their remedies as they were ingrained in the imagination and practices of Middle Eastern Abrahamic cultures, with a special emphasis of Christian communities (Greeks/Byzantines, Syrians, Armenians, Georgians, Ethiopians). The volume traces traditions dealing with the onset of a disease in the body and soul, the search for remedy, the maintenance of healing, and the engagement of these processes with faith—either through their affirmation in the public sphere or remaining within the personal framework, as in monastic traditions. A recurring presence in religious literature and the history of the intellectual world, the confrontation between disease and healing may well still be current for our modern understanding of the paths to seeking and maintaining the health of one’s body and soul, without excluding the factor of faith as a core principle.

Medieval Studies: French monasticism in 1503

Medieval Studies: French monasticism in 1503 PDF Author: George Gordon Coulton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Civilization, Medieval
Languages : en
Pages : 60

Get Book Here

Book Description


French Monasticism in 1503 ...

French Monasticism in 1503 ... PDF Author: George Gordon Coulton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Monasticism and religious orders
Languages : en
Pages : 60

Get Book Here

Book Description


Monastic Practices

Monastic Practices PDF Author: Charles Cummings
Publisher: Liturgical Press
ISBN: 0879074841
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description
For three decades, Monastic Practices has been a valued resource for English-speaking aspirants to monastic life. In this revised edition, updated and expanded, Charles Cummings, OCSO, explores the common practices of the monastic life in order to rediscover them as viable means of leading persons to a deeper encounter with God. How do monks and nuns occupy themselves throughout the day? Have they modernized their lifestyle or is it still cluttered with medieval customs? Could any of the monastic practices be of use to those outside the monastery? A certain wisdom is necessary to know how to use such practices and how to give oneself to them until they lead one to God. After long monastic experience, Cummings shows us how the ordinary things we do constitute our path to God. In the art of living life, he argues, we are always beginners, searching for God through our concrete circumstances and actions.