A Strange Tongue

This book is the product of both historical and personal interest in the grounds of religious conviction. It deals with the practice and development of the tradition of 'discernment of spirits' in the late fourteenth-century England and sixteenth-century Spain as reflected in the classical texts of the mystics of the periods; Julian of Norwich, the Cloud Author and Walter Hilton in England and Ignatius of Loyola and John of the Cross in Spain. The tradition of 'discernment' came into being at the very beginning of the Church's history and has been appropriated, adapted and developed throughout its history. The book explores how the tradition is expanded and maintains continuity with its origins and suggests that it reaches some apogee in sixteenth-century Spain for Christian lives of apostolic mission and contemplation. It illustrates how the cultural circumstances of the times moulded the manner in which the experiences of the mystics were perceived. 'Discernment of Spirits' is about how Christians reach some conviction that the stirrings within consciousness which seem to originate so strangely, and yet beckon so persistently, are 'real' in the sense of authentically divine. They are stirrings which call for a response in the lives of mystics. Rowan Williams at the beginning of his influential book, The Wound of Knowledge, refers to 'the intractable strangeness of the ground of belief that must constantly be allowed to challenge the fixed assumptions of religiosity; it is a given whose question to each age is fundamentally one and the same'. This book illustrates how the question is addressed in the texts of the mystics. In our own time the strange stirrings which intimate the question tend to be drowned by a multiplicity of competing voices. The suggestion is made that when we listen to the voices of the past we may be encouraged to wonder about the question posed by the stirrings within our own consciousness, hitherto unheard or dismissed as simply 'strange'.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1859. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.

First published in 1984, Native Tongue earned wide critical praise, and cult status as well. Set in the twenty-second century after the repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment, the novel reveals a world where women are once again property, denied civil rights, and banned from public life. In this world, Earth’s wealth relies on interplanetary commerce, for which the population depends on linguists, a small, clannish group of families whose women breed and become perfect translators of all the galaxies’ languages. The linguists wield power, but live in isolated compounds, hated by the population, and in fear of class warfare. But a group of women is destined to challenge the power of men and linguists. Nazareth, the most talented linguist of her family, is exhausted by her constant work translating for the government, supervising the children’s language education in the Alien-in-Residence interface chambers, running the compound, and caring for the elderly men. She longs to retire to the Barren House, where women past childbearing age knit, chat, and wait to die. What Nazareth does not yet know is that a clandestine revolution is going on in the Barren Houses: there, word by word, women are creating a language of their own to free them of men’s domination. Their secret must, above all, be kept until the language is ready for use. The women’s language, Láadan, is only one of the brilliant creations found in this stunningly original novel, which combines a page-turning plot with challenging meditations on the tensions between freedom and control, individuals and communities, thought and action. A complete work in itself, it is also the first volume in Elgin’s acclaimed Native Tongue trilogy.