Mystic And Pilgrim

A biography of the medieval English religious pilgrim Margery Kempe and a social and cultural history of her world.

This is the first paperback edition of the standard biography of Mary Ward.Mary Ward founded the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the 17th Century, an order devoted to the education of women so they could play their part in the Church and the World. Her view and aims were revolutionary in their time and a whole of network of Catholic schools remain in place today run by members of Mary Ward`s order.Mary Ward was born in 1585. She listened to the call of God at a time when the Church was reluctant to accept that God would speak directly to a woman, and died in obscurity in 1645.At a time when the IBVM is, like many religious orders, struggling to redefine its purpose in the modern world, and at a time when Mary Ward may herself be canonised by the present Pope, this book is quite exceptionally important.

Aleksander Mikhailovich Dobrolubov was a successor to a long line of wanderers or pilgrims in Russia's history. Such people abandoned their secular associates, means of income, permanent home, family, and subjection to the state, and departed into society as religious nomads, working wherever work would be offered them. This was their moral self-perfection, Christian self-realization, departure from sin and attainment of holiness. Dobrolubov was Russia's mystic pilgrim, preaching his version of Christian spirituality in central Russia, Siberia and central Asia, during the early years of Soviet Russia. Living the Holy Spirit, walking and thinking in the Holy Spirit, every day and in every activity, this was Aleksandr Dobrolubov. This volume includes an original translation from the Russian of Dobrolubov's book, From the Invisible Book, a compilation of his divine poetry, visions and revelations, and his concept of the Holy Spirit life. Born in 1876, he died in about 1943.

From Hero to Servant to Mystic addresses both the initial and ongoing formation of priests by tracing three significant stages in how their spiritual lives unfold. Fr. Scott Detisch offers seminarians, priests, spiritual directors, and clergy personnel directors a way of understanding the whole gamut of spiritual growth and development in priests by focusing on three major clusters of energies within men—the Hero, the Servant, and the Mystic. By recognizing the difficulties that may arise within the inner life and outer world of a priest, Detisch offers helpful methods for navigating through those challenging periods. By applying these energies to their spiritual lives, priests will experience a different form of relationship with the person of Christ—the Hero, who offers his life for Christ; the Servant, who ministers with Christ; and the Mystic, who lives his life in Christ.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1999 Karma Lochrie demonstrates that women were associated not with the body but rather with the flesh, that disruptive aspect of body and soul which Augustine claimed was fissured with the Fall of Man. It is within this framework that she reads The Book of Margery Kempe, demonstrating the ways in which Kempe exploited the gendered ideologies of flesh and text through her controversial practices of writing, her inappropriate-seeming laughter, and the most notorious aspect of her mysticism, her "hysterical" weeping expressions of religious desire. Lochrie challenges prevailing scholarly assumptions of Kempe's illiteracy, her role in the writing of her book, her misunderstanding of mystical concepts, and the failure of her book to influence a reading community. In her work and her life, Kempe consistently crossed the barriers of those cultural taboos designed to exclude and silence her. Instead of viewing Kempe as marginal to the great mystical and literary traditions of the late Middle Ages, this study takes her seriously as a woman responding to the cultural constraints and exclusions of her time. Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh will be of interest to students and scholars of medieval studies, intellectual history, and feminist theory.

Revealing what it means in this modern age to believe, an award-winning writer, poet, and radio commentator relates her inspiring journey of physical and spiritual healing in the American Southwest.

A fresh account of the medieval mystic, traveling pilgrim, and pioneering memoirist Margery Kempe. This is a new account of the medieval mystic and pilgrim Margery Kempe. Kempe, who had fourteen children, traveled all over Europe and recorded a series of unusual events and religious visions in her work The Book of Margery Kempe, which is often called the first autobiography in the English language. Anthony Bale charts Kempe’s life and tells her story through the places, relationships, objects, and experiences that influenced her. Extensive quotations from Kempe’s Book accompany generous illustrations, giving a fascinating insight into the life of a medieval woman. Margery Kempe is situated within the religious controversies of her time, and her religious visions and later years put in context. And lastly, Bale tells the extraordinary story of the rediscovery, in the 1930s, of the unique manuscript of her autobiography.

Christianity centers on the life and death of Jesus as Christ. Often Christians focus on the importance of Christ's Sacrifice as the means of human salvation, and the faithful are encouraged to imitate this suffering through self-sacrifice and self-denial. More than a few Christians, particularly women, have found such encouragement to self-sacrifice to be a means for continuing oppression--men over women, colonizers over the colonized, the powerful over the powerless. In The Satisfied Life, Jane McAvoy constructs a feminist theology of atonement--or satisfaction for sin--that draws on the insights of six medieval women mystics: Julian of Norwich, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Hildegard of Bingen, Margery Kempe, Hadewijch of Brabant, and Catherine of Siena. These Christian writers reveal alternatives to a theology of oppression. Salvation, for them, means experiencing the death and resurrection of Christ not as life-denying, but as a life-affirming celebration of God's love for us through the sustaining love of Jesus.