In a radical vision for the future of Christianity, American Conservative columnist Rod Dreher calls on American Christians to prepare for the coming Dark Age by embracing an ancient Christian way of life. From the inside, American churches are hollowed out by the departure of young people and by an insipid pseudo-Christianity. From the outside, they are beset by challenges to religious liberty in a rapidly secularizing culture. Keeping Hillary Clinton...

The institution of the lay brotherhood was not original to the Cistercians, but they developed it to its fullest extent. Although lay, the conversi were under the same vows as monks and represented a new form of religious life. While monks were bound to the recitation of the Divine Office, the lay brothers were dedicated to a life of toil and acted as the monks' auxiliaries. Their contribution to the spiritual and material life of the Cistercian Order...

Para poder amar hay que derribar murallas divisorias: antipatías, agresividades y toda violencia compensadora; liberarse de la imagen inflada de sí mismo, de narcisismos y de cualquier apropiación. Es necesario superar la ansiedad, la angustia y las depresiones, e imponer las convicciones de fe sobre las reacciones primarias. Redimidos los impulsos, la vía oblativa nos llevará a la Pascua fraterna. Amar es respetarse, adaptarse, perdonarse, comprenderse,...

Argues that true sustainability must be based in spirituality and looks at religious communities dedicated to the environment. This groundbreaking book explores the inherent interconnectedness of sustainability and spirituality, acknowledging the dependency of one upon the other. John E. Carroll contends that true ecological sustainability, in contrast to the cosmetic attempts at sustainability we see around us, questions our society's fundamental...

A young men's fellowship group is formed in Joliet, IL, in 1987. The four college students and a young professor began reading Greek and Russian Orthodox books on aestheticism and plan to visit Mount Athos, a peninsula in Northern Greece devoted to monastic communities and still governed under Byzantine law. The first half of the book describes the misadventures of the boys as they perform clean-up operations at Greek food festivals in the Chicago...

"In medieval Ireland, a boy named Kevin is taken to a monastery by parents who can no longer afford to keep him, though they promise to bring him home when times are better. Meanwhile, Kevin works for the monks, who teach him hymns, prayers, and reading. He is content, though happiest when his work is done and he can roam the countryside, befriending wild creatures. As he grows older, the monks order him to stay indoors more, but Kevin longs for sunlight....

This volume brings together texts of the twelfth-century Hildegard of Bingen and the early-thir­teenth-century Francis of Assisi to represent religious spirituality after the Gregorian Reform and just prior to or simultaneous with the formation of universities in Western Europe. In an extraordinary way, Hildegard embodies monastic theology and spirituality and provides a contrast to the new thing that would be created with the study of theology in...

This new book by Sister Aquinata Böckmann discusses the Prologue and chapters 1, 2, and 3 of the Rule of St. Benedict. In a lectio regulae, she plumbs the depths of Benedict's vision. Listen, the first word of the Prologue, is a keyword that describes the main stance of the individual monastic, the superior, and the entire community. Listening to the Scriptures and in them to Christ guides individuals and the community on how to 'run on the way...

Light in the Shoe Shop offers readers a unique and intimate glance into the day-to-day experience of living the cloistered life in feminine mode. In her “cobbler's contemplations"—no metaphor here: the author did indeed make and mend her sisters' shoes for many years. Mother Agnes reveals the very simple secret of monastic life, a secret she shows to be an inseparable combination of mindfulness and fidelity. It is continual mindfulness of God's...

The Sun at Midnight offers a splendid, easily accessible summary of mystical theology in the Cistercian school. Bernardo Olivera, a master of both the theology and the practice of the spiritual life, analyzes this tradition first in its rich human, biblical, and doctrinal connotations, and then according to its most typical expressions as they are lived among Cistercian mystics, with reference also to other Christian men and women. Olivera explores...