Demons and the Making of the Monk

Demons and the Making of the Monk PDF Author: David BRAKKE
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674028651
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
In this finely written study of demonology and Christian spirituality in fourth- and fifth-century Egypt, David Brakke examines how the conception of the monk as a holy and virtuous being was shaped by the combative encounter with demons. Drawing on biographies of exceptional monks, collections of monastic sayings and stories, letters from ascetic teachers to their disciples, sermons, and community rules, Brakke crafts a compelling picture of the embattled religious celibate.

Demons and the Making of the Monk

Demons and the Making of the Monk PDF Author: David BRAKKE
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674028651
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 323

Get Book

Book Description
In this finely written study of demonology and Christian spirituality in fourth- and fifth-century Egypt, David Brakke examines how the conception of the monk as a holy and virtuous being was shaped by the combative encounter with demons. Drawing on biographies of exceptional monks, collections of monastic sayings and stories, letters from ascetic teachers to their disciples, sermons, and community rules, Brakke crafts a compelling picture of the embattled religious celibate.

Talking Back

Talking Back PDF Author: Evagrius Of Pontus
Publisher: Liturgical Press
ISBN: 0879079681
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
How did the monks of the Egyptian desert fight against the demons that attacked them with tempting thoughts? How could Christians resist the thoughts of gluttony, fornication, or pride that assailed them and obstructed their contemplation of God? According to Evagrius of Pontus (345 '399), one of the greatest spiritual directors of ancient monasticism, the monk should talk back to demons with relevant passages from the Bible. His book Talking Back (Antirrhêtikos)lists over 500 thoughts or circumstances in which the demon-fighting monk might find himself, along with the biblical passages with which the monk should respond. It became one of the most popular books among the ascetics of Late Antiquity and the Byzantine East, but until now the entire text had not been translated into English. From Talking Back we gain a better understanding of Evagrius's eight primary demons: gluttony, fornication, love of money, sadness, anger, listlessness, vainglory, and pride. We can explore a central aspect of early monastic spirituality, and we get a glimpse of the temptations and anxieties that the first desert monks faced. David Brakke is professor and chair of the Department of Religious Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences of Indiana University. He studied ancient Christianity at Harvard Divinity School and Yale University. Brakke is the author of Athanasius and Asceticism and Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity, and he edits the Journal of Early Christian Studies.

Wandering, Begging Monks

Wandering, Begging Monks PDF Author: Daniel Folger Caner
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520344561
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
An apostolic lifestyle characterized by total material renunciation, homelessness, and begging was practiced by monks throughout the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. Such monks often served as spiritual advisors to urban aristocrats whose patronage gave them considerable authority and independence from episcopal control. This book is the first comprehensive study of this type of Christian poverty and the challenge it posed for episcopal authority and the promotion of monasticism in late antiquity. Focusing on devotional practices, Daniel Caner draws together diverse testimony from Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, and elsewhere—including the Pseudo-Clementine Letters to Virgins, Augustine's On the Work of Monks, John Chrysostom's homilies, legal codes—to reveal gospel-inspired patterns of ascetic dependency and teaching from the third to the fifth centuries. Throughout, his point of departure is social and cultural history, especially the urban social history of the late Roman empire. He also introduces many charismatic individuals whose struggle to persist against church suppression of their chosen way of imitating Christ was fought with defiant conviction, and the book includes the first annotated English translation of the biography of Alexander Akoimetos (Alexander the Sleepless). Wandering, Begging Monks allows us to understand these fascinating figures of early Christianity in the full context of late Roman society.

The Gnostics

The Gnostics PDF Author: David Brakke
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674066030
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
Who were the Gnostics? And how did the Gnostic movement influence the development of Christianity in antiquity? Is it true that the Church rejected Gnosticism? This book offers an illuminating discussion of recent scholarly debates over the concept of ÒGnosticismÓ and the nature of early Christian diversity. Acknowledging that the category ÒGnosticismÓ is flawed and must be reformed, David Brakke argues for a more careful approach to gathering evidence for the ancient Christian movement known as the Gnostic school of thought. He shows how Gnostic myth and ritual addressed basic human concerns about alienation and meaning, offered a message of salvation in Jesus, and provided a way for people to regain knowledge of God, the ultimate source of their being. Rather than depicting the Gnostics as heretics or as the losers in the fight to define Christianity, Brakke argues that the Gnostics participated in an ongoing reinvention of Christianity, in which other Christians not only rejected their ideas but also adapted and transformed them. This book will challenge scholars to think in news ways, but it also provides an accessible introduction to the Gnostics and their fellow early Christians.

The Monk

The Monk PDF Author: Matthew Gregory Lewis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Madrid (Spain)
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
The classic, late-eighteenth-century horror novel described as lewd and libidinous at the time of its original publication in 1796 tells the story of a monk-turned-serial killer who rapes and kills women, is sentenced to death by the Inquisition, and sells his soul to the devil.

Hermes Explains

Hermes Explains PDF Author: Peter Forshaw
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
ISBN: 9048542855
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Few fields of academic research are surrounded by so many misunderstandings and misconceptions as the study of Western esotericism. For twenty years now, the Centre for History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents (University of Amsterdam) has been at the forefront of international scholarship in this domain. This anniversary volume seeks to make the modern study of Western esotericism more widely known beyond specialist circles, while addressing a range of misconceptions, biases, and prejudices that still tend to surround it. Thirty major scholars in the field respond to questions about a wide range of unfamiliar ideas, traditions, practices, problems, and personalities that are central to the field. By challenging many taken-for-granted assumptions about religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, this volume demonstrates why the modern study of esotericism leads us to reconsider much that we thought we knew about the story of Western culture.

Demons in Late Antiquity

Demons in Late Antiquity PDF Author: Eva Elm
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110630621
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
Since the perception of demons in antiquity depended on particular cultural and religious milieus, the authors in this volume take into view various texts – ranging from amulets, spells, apocalypses, martyrdom literature to hagiography – and focus specifically on literary aspects of the transformation of demons and their contextualization. Are specific conceptions of demons characteristic for a certain genre or, rather, for particular religious contexts, so that they appear as topoi independent of genre? Do certain representations of demons prevail in pagan, Jewish and Christian circles alike, irrespective of religious background? How do notions of demons function in apocalypses, hymns, hagiographies or texts from healing procedures and what interdependencies of genre and social context can be traced? These questions are analysed from diverse disciplinary perspectives that offer some fresh and surprising answers.

The Letters of St. Antony

The Letters of St. Antony PDF Author: Samuel Rubenson
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9780800629106
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
This book revolutionizes our understanding of the life and thought of the great anchorite father of the Egyptian desert. It is a signal contribution to our knowledge of Egyptian Christianity in the third and fourth centuries.—Birger Pearson, Institute for Antiquity and Christianity Samuel Rubenson, by means of a fresh analysis of the letters of St. Antony, exposes the distortion of the picture of early Christian monks as unlettered and primitive. Rubenson describes the desert monasteries as centers of theological reflection in Egypt, showing how they combined the speculative philosophy of the Greeks and the biblical tradition. Included in this volume is a new translation of the letters themselves, which are shown to be authentic and an important source for the study of the desert fathers and the early monastic tradition. The later image of Antony is demonstrated to be influenced by church politics of the latter part of the fourth century. Samuel Rubenson is Associate Professor at Lund University, Lund, Sweden.

To Serve God and Wal-Mart

To Serve God and Wal-Mart PDF Author: Bethany Moreton
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674256468
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
In the decades after World War II, evangelical Christianity nourished America’s devotion to free markets, free trade, and free enterprise. The history of Wal-Mart uncovers a complex network that united Sun Belt entrepreneurs, evangelical employees, Christian business students, overseas missionaries, and free-market activists. Through the stories of people linked by the world’s largest corporation, Bethany Moreton shows how a Christian service ethos powered capitalism at home and abroad. While industrial America was built by and for the urban North, rural Southerners comprised much of the labor, management, and consumers in the postwar service sector that raised the Sun Belt to national influence. These newcomers to the economic stage put down the plough to take up the bar-code scanner without ever passing through the assembly line. Industrial culture had been urban, modernist, sometimes radical, often Catholic and Jewish, and self-consciously international. Post-industrial culture, in contrast, spoke of Jesus with a drawl and of unions with a sneer, sang about Momma and the flag, and preached salvation in this world and the next. This extraordinary biography of Wal-Mart’s world shows how a Christian pro-business movement grew from the bottom up as well as the top down, bolstering an economic vision that sanctifies corporate globalization. The author has assigned her royalties and subsidiary earnings to Interfaith Worker Justice (www.iwj.org) and its local affiliate in Athens, GA, the Economic Justice Coalition (www.econjustice.org).

Mystics

Mystics PDF Author: William Harmless
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198041108
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Mystics are path-breaking religious practitioners who claim to have experience the infinite, word-defying Mystery that is God. Many have been gifted writers with an uncanny ability to communicate the great realities of life with both a theologian's precision and a poet's lyricism. They use words to jolt us into recognizing ineffable mysteries surging beneath the surface of our lives and within the depths of our hearts and, by their artistry, can awaken us to see and savor fugitive glimpses of a God-drenched world. In Mystics, William Harmless, S.J., introduces readers to the scholarly study of mysticism. He explores both mystics' extraordinary lives and their no-less-extraordinary writings using a unique case-study method centered on detailed examinations of six major Christian mystics: Thomas Merton, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hildegard of Bingen, Bonaventure, Meister Eckhart, and Evagrius Ponticus. Rather than presenting mysticism as a subtle web of psychological or theological abstractions, Harmless's case-study approach brings things down to earth, restoring mystics to their historical context. Harmless highlights the pungent diversity of mystical experiences and mystical theologies. Stepping beyond Christianity, he also explores mystical elements within Islam and Buddhism, offering a chapter on the popular Sufi poet Rumi and one on the famous Japanese Zen master Dogen. Harmless concludes with an overview of the century-long scholarly conversation on mysticism and offers a unique, multifaceted optic for understanding mystics, their communities, and their writings. Geared toward a wide audience, Mystics balances state-of-the-art scholarship with accessible, lucid prose.