Religious communities and monasticism Books

The monk Grimlaicus (ca. 900) wrote a rule for those who, like himself, pursued the solitary life within a monastic community. Never leaving their cell yet participating in the liturgical life of the monastery through a window into the church, these...

Try a Little Tenderness might have been a nicer title for this book had the songwriter not claimed it first. Benedictine spirituality is known for the gentleness with which it patiently massages away at the monk's hardness of heart. The flowing robes...

BERNARD DE GIVE, for many years a member of the Society ofJesus, was for eight years a seminary professor, first in SriLanka then in India, before pursuing oriental studies at Oxford,where he formed friendships with Tibetan monks.Since becoming a...

The spirituality and lives of the desert fathers and mothers are often seen as the beginning and end of Christian monastic life. Their stories and messages inspire not only the most devout Christians but also the "nones" and the "dones...

When St. Benedict compiled his Rule for Monasteries in the early decades of the sixth century, the Buddhist monastic code had already been in existence for about nine hundred years. Since monastic life is shaped by spiritual practices that are very...

Le livre ""C�����r�����monial de la V������ture et de la Profession : Dans les Monast�����res de la Congr�����gation de France de l'Ordre de Saint Beno�����t"" (1897) de l'�����glise catholique est un guide complet des rituels et des c�����r�����monies...

In Reading Matthew with Monks, Derek Olsen seeks to evaluate whether earlymedieval monastic biblical interpreters can serve as effective conversationpartners for modern readers who are committed to broadening their reading ofScripture. Olsen puts the...

This new commentary by Sister Aquinata Böckmann discusses the Prologue andchapters 1, 2, and 3 of the Rule of St. Benedict. In a lectio regulae she plumbsthe depths of Benedict's vision. Listen, the first word of the Prologue, is akeyword that describes...

Lectio divina is a way of praying by sustained immersion into a revelatory text. While Scripture is the classic place of encounter with God, the text could also be the book of life or the book of nature.In Lectio Matters, respected spiritual guide...

Listen in as the first Western monk to live on Mt. Athos wrestles with historical differences between Christianity's East and West, learns the Orthodox practice of "the prayer of the heart," and explores a monastic republic like no other place on earth.

This early work by Anglo-American Catholic writer Thomas Merton is both expensive and hard to find in its first edition. It contains a wealth of information on spiritual direction and how to learn the art of meditation. This fascinating work is...

Monks, nuns, friars, sisters . . . who are they? How do they live? Why have they followed that way of life? Of Bells and Cells explains to the young reader what religious life is all about. Beautifully illustrated, this is a book for all the family to...

St Martin the Bishop of Tours is a saint from France from the 5th century A.D. He was a solider in the Roman army till he was attracted to the monastic life. He was later ordained a priest then a bishop of the city of Tours. The Coptic Church celebrates...

The word Guru is easy to explain.Gu means darkness and Ru means light.So Guru means going from darkness to light and therefore whenever you tune into the teachers around you, you are moving from darkness into lightMaybe, it's just a bit of learning about...

This book is an exploration of the ideals and values of the ascetic and monastic life, as expressed through clothes. Clothes are often seen as an extension of us as humans, a determinant of who we are and how we experience and interact...

Followers of the way of Jesus Christ through two millennia have engaged in the joyful yet life 'costing struggle of responding to the challenge of being transformed into his likeness. This further volume of Carthusian Novice Conferences offers the father...

A monk and a scholar generally recognized as the keenest philosophical and theological mind of his time, Anselm, abbot of Bec, found himself forcibly and unwillingly invested as Archbishop of Canterbury on 6 March 1093. It was the first of many sharp...

Armand-Jean de Rancé (1626-1700), the reforming abbot of la Trappe, was a prolific writer in a verbose age. Until he was in his thirties, he enjoyed the life of a young man about town, but then, after experiencing a dramatic conversion, he left the world...

Taking up Saint Bernard's unfinished sermon-commentary, Gilbert ruminates on verse 3:1-5:10 in forty-eight sermons, leaving the task to be finished by John of Ford.This volume contains sermons 33 through 48.To encounter a person who makes holiness...

In Desert Daughters, Desert Sons, professor Rachel Wheeler argues that a new reading of the texts of the Christian desert tradition is needed to present the (often) anonymous women who inhabit the texts. Though these women may have been included by...

St. Benedict has been called the Father of Western Monasticism and Patron of Europe. In this masterful work, Christopher Derrick brings forward the relevance of the values in the Rule of St. Benedict for the temporal as well as the spiritual future of...

These eighty-six sermons are among the most famous and most beautiful examples of medieval scriptural exegesis. In them the modern reader can catch a glimpse of the genius an entire generation found irresistible.This volume contains sermons 47 through 66...

The Abbot General of the Trappist Order (Cistercians of the Strict Observance) reflects on the martyrdom in 1996 of seven of his monks, kidnapped from the Algerian monastery of Our Lady of alas and executed by a radical faction of the Groupe Islamique...

The Sayings and Stories of the Desert Fathers and Mothers offers a new translation of the Greek alphabetical Apophthegmata Patrum, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. For the first time in an English translation, this volume provides: extensive...

A vocation is an extremely mysterious reality. The call of God is not something extrinsic; it penetrates to the most intimate centre of the heart. We are what we are on account of this call.The Call of Silent Love is a profound and eloquent examination...

What is Carthusian life really like?What actually goes on in a Charterhouse?Is the Order's ancient mixture of carefully regulated solitary and community life a hoepless harking back to the Middle Ages, or is it relevant to modern lifestyles and...

Annali Camaldulenses ordinis sancti BenedictiD è un'opera storica che esplora la vita e le opere degli ordini monastici, con un focus particolare sull'ordine di San Benedetto. L'autore, Giovanni Benedetto Mittarelli,offre una guida completa sulla storia...

This series of books is intended to provide a unique fully illustrated record of monastic houses in the British Isles, with gazetteer, description and photographs of the most interesting and elaborate architectural remains, and brief historic coverage of...

Descriptions of Pachomian monastic communities from a variety of ancient sources, including the Lausiac History and A History of the Monks in Egypt, and full translations of the Rule of Saint Pachomius and the Regulation of his successor, Horsiesios...

In the flood of christian ascetics who left the world to seek God alone, Simeon chose a novel withdrawal. He mounted a pillar and remained there the rest of his life. To him came supplicants with all kinds of problems: personal anguish, sickness and...

Cristiana Piccardo was the long-time abbess of an unusual Cisterciancommunity in Italy. "We have always believed," she writes, "that themonastic charism can be a precious 'talent' offered to our contemporaryworld, and there are moments in history when...

There is more in Benedict s Rule than meets the eye. Based on the rules of life of John Cassian and Saint Basil, Benedict invites us to go further back to the scriptural basis of all Christian and monastic living and pursue our spiritual journey by the...

The Life Of Samuel Of Kalamun is a hagiographical account of the life of a Coptic monk who lived between about 597 and 695 AD. He entered the monastery of Scetis at the age of 18 but when the Emperor Heraclius sent an agent to impose a new Christological...

This is a book about the tensions between Christian ideals of love and the concrete realities of everyday monastic life. Based on a study of Cistercian monasteries in France, it develops a novel conceptualization of fraternal relations and addresses how...

Fr. Pimen was a great monk, an ardent lover of thewilderness, a good role model for monks, a teacher ofgenerations, who was long-suffering, patient, givingthanks to God in the most difficult conditions of hisillness."The honor of the dead is his burial,...

Monastic life declares to the whole world the possibility of living a life of purity and righteousness on this earth despite all its worldly temptations. It declares that Christ our Lord can still live in people's hearts, people of this earth, not of...

A full spiritual life goes beyond Sunday mornings and bedtime prayers, encompassing the way we work and play, eat and breathe, love and learn. Since ancient times monastic communities have recognized this and used guidelines to focus on the sacred in all...

Book II: Admonitions Concerning Interior Things.Thomas a'Kempis advises those who want to follow Jesus to go deeper by clearing out space within themselves to find friendship with Jesus. That friendship requires an emptying of self and an acceptance of...

Medieval monastic literature provides a fascinating window into the minds and attitudes of religious communities in the Middle Ages. This new edition of Johannes Monachus' 'Liber de Miraculis' offers fresh insight into the monastic world, shedding light...

There were two Bernards of Clairvaux. The first was the genuine Bernard who lived from 1090 to 1153, and wrote letters, sermons, and treatises that are of major consequence in the history of the twelfth century. The second is a host of writers, most of...

Dom André Louf (+2010) was abbot of the Trappist-Cistercianmonastery of Mont-des-Cats in northern France from 1963 to 1997.This book brings together talks given to a variety of audiences inwhich he shared his spiritual experience from both his life of...

Born in Galatia in the 360s, Palladius enrolled as a monk on the Mount of Olives in his early twenties. As a monk, he traveled to Alexandria, the desert of Nitria, the Cells, Palestine, Rome, and the Thebaid. During his travels he encountered Rufinus of...

The Benedictine Way is a mentality, an attitude characteristic of the monastic life. It consists of certain elements that are essential to the life: continual prayer, lectio divina, community life, the opus Dei, work, separation from the world, and the...

Calm and spirituality—the true hallmarks of Carthusian writings—distinguish this book. The first part sets out the principles of the interior life; the second works out a method of prayer. There follow eleven sermons, originally given to...