Introduction Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman Part I. Contexts: 1. Early monasticism Douglas Burton-Christie 2. Song, experience, and the book in Benedictine monasticism Amy Hollywood 3. New religious movements in medieval western Europe Walter Simons 4. Early modern reformations Edward Howells Part II. Key Terms: 5. Apophatic and cataphatic theology Andrew Louth 6. Lectio divina E. Ann Matter 7. Meditatio/meditation Thomas Bestul 8. Oratio/prayer Rachel Fulton Brown 9. Visio/vision Veerle Fraeters 10. Raptus/rapture Dyan Elliott 11. Unio mystica/mystical union Bernard McGinn 12. Actio et contemplatio/action and contemplation Charlotte Radler Part III. Contemporary Questions: 13. Latin and the vernaculars Barbara Newman 14. Transmission Sara S. Poor 15. Writing Charles M. Stang 16. The body and its senses Patricia Dailey 17. Mysticism and visuality Jeffrey Hamburger 18. Emotions Fiona Somerset 19. Authority Mary Frohlich 20. Gender Alison Weber 21. Sexuality Constance Furey 22. Time and memory Patricia Dailey.

The Cambridge companion to Christian mysticism

Even though human racial difference has been a longstanding topic of the school biology curriculum, there is little evidence that contemporary biology textbooks challenge stereotypical racial beliefs that are based in biological thinking. Rather, the modern biology curriculum may be a place where such beliefs about race are perpetuated unwittingly. Drawing upon a theoretical framework of racial conceptualization based in psychological essentialism, this paper argues that biology textbook curricula ought to directly challenge problematic and unscientific racial beliefs to increase understanding of human genetic variation and decrease racial beliefs associated with prejudice.

Reclaiming Race as a Topic of the U.S. Biology Textbook Curriculum

This volume brings together for the first time some of the world’s leading authorities on the German mystic Jacob Boehme, to illuminate his thought and its reception over four centuries for the benefit of students and advanced scholars alike. Boehme’s theosophical works have influenced Western culture in profound ways since their dissemination in the early 17th Century, and these interdisciplinary essays trace the social and cultural networks as well as the intellectual pathways involved in Boehme’s enduring impact. The chapters range from situating Boehme in the 16th Century Radical Reformation, to discussions of his significance in modern theology. They explore the major contexts for Boehme’s reception including the Pietist movement, Russian religious thought and Western esotericism, as well as focusing more closely on important readers: the religious radicals of the English Civil Wars and the later English Behmenists; literary figures such as Goethe and Blake, and great philosophers of the modern age, among them Schelling and Hegel. Together, the chapters illustrate the depth and variety of Boehme’s influence and a concluding chapter addresses directly an underlying theme of the volume – asking why Boehme matters today, and how readers in the present might be enriched by a fresh engagement with his apparently opaque and complex writings.

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An Introduction to Jacob Boehme: Four Centuries of Thought and Reception

The terminology of “apophatic” and “cataphatic” theologies, that is, the use of negation ( apophasis ) and affirmation ( kataphasis ) in our ways of talking about God, was introduced into Christian theology by the probably early-sixth-century author who wrote under the pseudonym of the Apostle Paul’s convert, Dionysius the Areopagite (generally referred to as Pseudo-Dionysius). It was, however, only terminology that Dionysius introduced; the use of negation and affirmation in relation to God had a long history, longer even than Christianity, reaching back into the traditions of the Hebrew scriptures and classical Greek philosophy to which Christian theology had early laid claim. Human beings have always affirmed something of God, either as a result of speculation about the divine or as an affirmation of revelation about God – the Hebrew scriptures contain records claiming to be God’s self-revelation, and followers of other religious traditions have both claimed similar revelations and celebrated the divine in hymnic aretalogies, that is, lists of divine virtues. But this affirmation of the divine has always been hedged about by a sense of the mysteriousness of the divine, leading to the negating of any affirmations about God, thereby bearing testimony to the inadequacy of any human conception of God. So a Hebrew prophet exclaims in God’s name, “To whom then will you compare me, that I should be like him? says the Holy One” (Is 40:25) and even the revelation of God’s name to Moses – “I am that I am” (Ex 3:14) – is an affirmation about God inviting or even requiring an apophatic interpretation. Similarly, within the Greek philosophical tradition, we find Plato asserting in the Timaeus that “to discover the Father and Maker of the universe would be some task, and it would be impossible to declare what one had found to everyone” and in The Republic that the Idea of the Good, for Plato the highest reality, is “beyond being.”

Apophatic and Cataphatic Theology

The various forms of monastic life that emerged in the third and fourth centuries of the Common Era all claimed to provide the space in which the life of Christian perfection might be most effectively pursued. The monks and nuns who became the self-described spiritual elite of Christianity lived under rules that told them when, why, where, and how to act. The most successful of these rules in Western Christianity, the sixth-century Rule of Benedict , is often praised for its flexibility and moderation, yet within it every aspect of the daily lives of the monks is carefully ordered. If we understand ritual as the repeated and formalized practice of particular actions within carefully determined times and places, the moment in which what we believe ought to be the case and what is the case in the messy realm of everyday action come together, then the Benedictine’s life is one in which the monk or nun strives to make every action a ritual action. Between 400 and 700 CE at least thirty regula , or “rules of life,” were written in Latin. All of these Latin rules were grounded in earlier attempts to legislate the form of monasticism in which men or women – and sometimes men and women together – lived in an enclosed community under the leadership of an abbot or abbess. Known as cenobitic monasticism, this way of pursuing the ideal Christian life is described and prescribed in texts associated with Pachomius in Egypt (d. ca. 346), Basil the Great in Cappadocia (d. 379), and the North African bishop, Augustine of Hippo (d. 430). But it was the Rule of Benedict , together with variants written for the use of women, that became the centerpiece of monastic life in Western Europe during the Middle Ages.

Phyllis Mack

Papers

Religious Dissenters in Enlightenment England