The Insurmountable Darkness Of Love

This text is a reflection on the meaning of spiritual darkness - especially those difficult places in human experience where meaning seems to elude us, where we are emptied out and are compelled to dig deeper into who we truly are. Douglas E. Christie takes up this facet of experience, in ordinary human experience, but also in relation to the Christian contemplative and mystical traditions, where such experience is often understood to be both painful and transformative, allowing the mind and heart to open in love.

Teaching and researching the Gospel of John for thirty years has led author Mary L. Coloe to an awareness of the importance of the wisdom literature to make sense of Johannine theology, language, and symbolism: in the prologue, with Nicodemus, in the Bread of Life discourse, with Mary and Lazarus, and in the culminating “Hour.” She also shows how the late Second Temple theology expressed in the books of Sirach and Wisdom, considered deuterocanonical and omitted from some Bible editions, are essential intertexts. Only the book of Wisdom speaks of “the reign of God” (Wis 10:10), “eternity life” (Wis 5:15), and the ambrosia maintaining angelic life (Wis 19:21)—all concepts found in John’s Gospel. While the Gospel explicitly states the Logos was enfleshed in Jesus, this is also true of Sophia. Coloe makes the case that Jesus’s words and deeds embody Sophia throughout the narrative. At the beginning of each chapter Coloe provides text from the later wisdom books that resonate with the Gospel passage, drawing Sophia out of the shadows.

2022 Catholic Media Association honorable mention in scripture: academic studies Teaching and researching the Gospel of John for thirty years has led author Mary L. Coloe to an awareness of the importance of the wisdom literature to make sense of Johannine theology, language, and symbolism: in the prologue, with Nicodemus, in the Bread of Life discourse, with Mary and Lazarus, and in the culminating “Hour.” She also shows how the late Second Temple theology expressed in the books of Sirach and Wisdom, considered deuterocanonical and omitted from some Bible editions, are essential intertexts. Only the book of Wisdom speaks of “the reign of God” (Wis 10:10), “eternity life” (Wis 5:15), and the ambrosia maintaining angelic life (Wis 19:21)—all concepts found in John’s Gospel. While the Gospel explicitly states the Logos was enfleshed in Jesus, this is also true of Sophia. Coloe makes the case that Jesus’s words and deeds embody Sophia throughoutthe narrative. At the beginning of each chapter Coloe provides text from the later wisdom books that resonate with the Gospel passage, drawing Sophia out of the shadows.

In this refreshing collection, one of our best writers on desert places, Gary Paul Nabhan, challenges traditional notions of the desert. Beautiful, reflective, and at times humorous, Nabhan’s extended essay also called “The Nature of Desert Nature” reveals the complexity of what a desert is and can be. He passionately writes about what it is like to visit a desert and what living in a desert looks like when viewed through a new frame, turning age-old notions of the desert on their heads. Nabhan invites a prism of voices—friends, colleagues, and advisors from his more than four decades of study of deserts—to bring their own perspectives. Scientists, artists, desert contemplatives, poets, and writers bring the desert into view and investigate why these places compel us to walk through their sands and beneath their cacti and acacia. We observe the spines and spears, stings and songs of the desert anew. Unexpected. Surprising. Enchanting. Like the desert itself, each essay offers renewed vocabulary and thoughtful perceptions. The desert inspires wonder. Attending to history, culture, science, and spirit, The Nature of Desert Nature celebrates the bounty and the significance of desert places. Contributors Thomas M. Antonio Homero Aridjis James Aronson Tessa Bielecki Alberto Búrquez Montijo Francisco Cantú Douglas Christie Paul Dayton Alison Hawthorne Deming Father David Denny Exequiel Ezcurra Thomas Lowe Fleischner Jack Loeffler Ellen McMahon Rubén Martínez Curt Meine Alberto Mellado Moreno Paul Mirocha Gary Paul Nabhan Ray Perotti Larry Stevens Stephen Trimble Octaviana V. Trujillo Benjamin T. Wilder Andy Wilkinson Ofelia Zepeda

Called in a special way to listen to God's whispers, the mystics amplify not only what it means to be baptized into the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ 'and to having the Trinity living in them 'but also what is deepest in the human spirit. Mystics experience themselves as an infinite question to which only God is the answer; as an immense longing that only Love can quench; as a nothing in the face of the No-Thing. They are God's fools, troubadours 'the great artists and poets of the interior life whose learned ignorance" articulates the art of loving God, neighbor, self, the Church, and the world. In Soundings in the Christian Mystical Tradition Harvey Egan draws on fifty years of reading and teaching the mystics to sketch the varieties and passion of the mystical life across more than two millennia. Through their stories and words Egan reveals that all were conscious of the paradox of human identity 'supremely and unsurpassably manifested in the God-Man 'that the genuinely human is disclosed only through surrender to God and that the search for God cannot bypass the genuinely human.

Queer Theology makes an important contribution to public debate about Christianity and sex. A remarkable collection of specially commissioned essays by some of the brightest and best of Anglo-American scholars Edited by one of the leading theologians working at the interface between religion and contemporary culture Reconceptualizes the body and its desires Enlarges the meaningfulness of Christian sexuality for the good of the Church Proposes that bodies are the mobile products of changing discourses and regimes of power.

CrossCurrents connects the wisdom of the heart with the life of the mind and the experiences of the body. The journal is operated through its parent organization, the Association for Public Religion and Intellectual Life (APRIL), an interreligious network of academics, activists, artists, and community leaders seeking to engage the many ways religion meets the public. Contributions to the journal exist at the nexus of religion, education, the arts, and social justice. In the June 2019 issue of CrossCurrents: "The Insurmountable Darkness of Love: Contemplative Practice in a Time of Loss" by Douglas E. Christie "Field Notes from Standing Rock: Non-Extraction as Spiritual Practice" by Lily Oster "Responding to Freud: A Brief Sketch of Contemporary Shame Studies" by Wenwen Guo "Gitanjali's Weak Theology: The Poetics of Tagore and Caputo" by Bharatwaj Iyer "The Concept of A Non-Material Reality: Its Implications for Science and Religion" by Eugene P. Trager "On Reverence and its Discontents" by Thomas White "The Fourth Last Thing Revisited" by Peter Heinegg "A Sinful People" by Peter Heinegg

Connecting Ecologies focuses on the environmental aspects of Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’ and the challenge to care for our common home. It considers how best to devise and implement the new societal models needed to tackle the ecological problems facing the world today. The book addresses the need for and complexity of an integral ecology, one that looks not only at physical and biological processes but also allows for the contributions of theology, philosophy, spirituality, and psychology, including the implications for the human and social sciences. The contributions document four categories of resonances, resources, requirements, and responses evoked by a reading of Laudato Si’ and include consideration of other faith traditions. They reflect on how care for our common home motivates people in different places, cultures, and professions to cooperate for myriad goods in common. The volume is particularly relevant for scholars working in religious studies and theology with an interest in ecology, the environment, and the Anthropocene.