Spiritual Reading Research Articles

English

This analysis of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi examines extraordinary elements of this famed novel; it examines it as an avant-garde montage, a new fable, A tableau of the weird and fantastic—in other words, a book outside the realm of normal novelistic portrayal and exposition. In one important sense, this novel is a combination of the fictional and the factual, which can be understood as transacting modes in a single paradigm, with fictional and non-fictional assets overlapping onto each other. But there is much more in this work, for the book is as well an essentially unfinished, enigmatic, and deeply spiritual exploration of the godhead and what this means for human existence. It is all a “theology of introspection and experience, beyond human capacity,” as discussed in this analysis. In these ways, this book is much more than simply a fiction, an ordinary novel, and it becomes a new kind of spiritual reading experience. Readers should note that this is an independent philosophical and technical analysis, and the writer makes little effort to cite from and regurgitate other works. This work is a new examination of reality, spirituality and fiction. This is then a sovereign investigation, and unlike typical literary analysis, it will only minimally refer to other writers, theorists and analysts. Key words: Life of Pi, spirituality, the Godhead, religion, love, the divine.

Philo of Alexandria: A model for early Christian ‘spiritual readings’ of the Scriptures

Philo of Alexandria represents a Hellenistic tradition of reading the Scriptures in which reading is seen as a spiritual exercise together with other spiritual exercises, like attention, thorough investigation of the issues, self-mastery, detachment, etcetera (see Her. 253; Leg. 3:18), which has as aim the transformation and growth of the person towards the good and happy life. Interaction with the spiritual wealth of the Greek philosophical traditions was seen as a fruitful asset and challenge. This article highlights some of the key themes of Philo’s philosophical or spiritual reading of the Scriptures: the priority of God and of the health of the soul, the importance of human progress, the recognition of one’s nothingness in order to know God, the necessity to choose, human effort and divine achievement, as well as harmony with God, nature and the self as the aims of the good life. Christian spiritual writers, like Origen, found in Philo’s approach to the Scriptures and in his reflections on the spiritual journey a very inspiring model.

Monastic Practices Countering a Culture of Consumption

Monastic Practices Countering a Culture of Consumption

Strategies for Incorporating Spirituality as Part of Recovery-Oriented Practice: Highlighting the Voices of those with a Lived Experience

Spirituality has received attention as a potential recovery-enhancing resource for people with psychiatric disabilities, yet practice guidelines for addressing spirituality among this population remain underdeveloped. This article presents the perspectives of those with the lived experience of serious mental illness regarding what constitutes effective practice for addressing spirituality. In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 18 adults with psychiatric disabilities who had diverse spiritual beliefs. Participants recommended a variety of provider strategies ranging from nondirective (e.g., effective listening) to increasingly directive (e.g., recommending spiritual readings). Participants also expressed the need for providers to be able to address spiritually related challenges, including spiritual abuse, stigma, and delusions with religious content. The study is relevant for recovery-oriented social workers and related mental health professionals.

The Universe of Oz: Essays on Baum's Series and Its Progeny (review)

Reviewed by: The Universe of Oz: Essays on Baum's Series and Its Progeny Walter Squire (bio) The Universe of Oz: Essays on Baum's Series and Its Progeny. Edited by Kevin K. Durand and Mary K. Leigh. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. In "Ask the Clock of the Time Dragon," Randall Auxier's contribution to The Universe of Oz, the author asks, "Why does the Marvelous Land of Oz keep re-inventing itself in our culture?" (121). Auxier's answer, "we love to remember Oz, we love to re-experience it, and we love to anticipate it" (134), seems to depend upon an already existing multiplicity of Ozian texts, a multiplicity well represented in the seventeen essays comprised by The Universe of Oz. Versions of Oz covered in those essays include L. Frank Baum's 1900 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as well as his sequels to this novel; the 1939 MGM musical The Wizard of Oz; the 1975 stage musical The Wiz and its subsequent 1978 Motown film adaptation; Tina Landau's 1994 play 1969; Shelley Jackson's 1995 hypertext Patchwork Girl; Gregory Maguire's The Wicked Years trilogy (now a tetralogy); Wicked, the 2003 stage musical based upon the first of Maguire's Oz novels; and Tin Man, a 2007 miniseries broadcast on the Syfy channel. The range of Ozian texts covered in The Universe of Oz is matched by the diversity of critical approaches taken by contributors. For instance, Ronald [End Page 513] Zank examines Landau's 1969 and Emily A. Mattingly looks at Jackson's Patchwork Girl through the lens of queer theory, whereas Paula Kent considers the novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Jené Gutierrez deems the movie The Wizard of Oz examples of Joseph Campbell's monomyth. Most complexly, Randall Auxier reveals the parallels between Gregory Maguire's treatment of time in The Wicked Years and the theories of Friedrich Nietzsche, Alfred North Whitehead, and Henri Bergson. Another significant contribution is Kevin Tanner's "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: Religious Populism and Spiritual Capital"; after providing a quick summary of Oz history, Tanner covers arguments regarding the degree to which The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a populist allegory. Noting that current critical consensus rejects any link between this book and late nineteenth-century populism, Tanner shifts to a spiritual reading of the novel, stressing Baum's Methodist upbringing and his later participation in theosophy during the 1890s, the decade previous to The Wonderful Wizard's publication. Considering that several contributions to The Universe of Oz attempt to connect Oz to a philosophy or another text, the book resembles The Wizard of Oz and Philosophy, a 2008 volume edited by Randall E. Auxier and Phillip S. Seng, the latter work composed of essays connecting Ozian texts to philosophers ranging from Socrates to David Lewis. In his preface to The Universe of Oz, editor Kevin K. Durand indicates that a possible pitfall of such an approach of linking texts with other texts or with philosophies is that "one uses [The Wizard of] Oz or any other popular culture artifact as a vehicle for illustrating a text other than itself" (6). The best essays in The Universe of Oz avoid this pitfall by not merely using Oz as a starting point to discuss something else, instead revealing how particular Ozian texts themselves embody principles and tendencies applicable to other texts and to genres overall. This approach is best exemplified by "Dorothy and Cinderella: The Case of the Missing Prince and the Despair of the Fairy Tale." Coauthors Agnes B. Curry and Josef Velazquez move from noting how the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz deviates from Vladimir Propp's morphology of folktales to establishing a generalized taxonomy of modern fairy tales, revealing that the latter frequently include a nonmagical heroine within a magical world. A second trend Curry and Velazquez extrapolate from The Wizard of Oz is that "the Prince will not be available to" (40) the nonmagical heroine, thus indicating a shift away from marriage in modern fairy tales with female protagonists. While this shift might seem connected to increasing gender equality over the past century, whereby females have become less defined by their...

Wpływy monastyczne w życiu rodzinnym w Galii w IV-VI wieku

It is generally known that in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries, monastic ideas influenced family life in the Roman Empire. This article relates especially to prayer before and after meals, and to reading during meals. We have informa­tion on this matter in the works by saint Jerome, Palladius and Theodoret of Cyr. Saint Basil wrote about prayer and about reading during meals. Saint Benedict wrote about spiritual readings but not during meals. According to authors such as Sidonius Apollinaris and Hilary of Arles, the tradition of readings during meals was also practiced in families. The purpose of listening to spiritual reading during meal was to nourish at the same time body and soul. Listening to a reading in the monastic refectory was a way of avoiding conversations among monks. As far as we know, the tradition of reading during meals was practiced in monasteries; how­ever, it seems that there were not many families following this tradition at home. After the fall of the Roman Empire, monasteries kept this tradition, because there were monks who were able to read out loud in Latin; and in monasteries there were books on spiritual matters. Lay people, in spite of their attachment to the Christian faith, could not continue reading during meals because the number of people having the ability to read was progressively diminishing; and books were more expensive and more difficult to find. In our times, reading during meals is still practiced in monastic communities, but not in families; many Christian fami­lies still pray before meals.

Reading Scripture through a mystical lens

In addition to the unprecedented interest in spirituality in recent decades, both at a popular level and also as an academic discipline, there has also been a resurgence of research dealing with spirituality and scripture. It is readily acknowledged that the hegemony of the historical-critical method is no longer tenable. As a method which sees the text as an artifact of history, there is minimal, if any, attempt to understand the experience of those who produced the text; it concentrates on a literal interpretation, at the expense of the polysemous nature of scripture. Contemporary scriptural studies, however, have witnessed a sea-change in interpretive methods of such magnitude, that it is difficult to keep up with current scholarship in this field. Within this paradigm shift, the importance of a spiritual reading of scripture has now come to the fore. More specifically, reading scripture through a mystical lens, as originally seen, inter alia, in the works of Origen, has taken its place, if not centre stage, at least on the stage, and no longer in the wings. Utilising the insights of a French Carmelite, Elisabeth Catez, a mystical reading of Paul exemplifies this new, yet ancient, hermeneutical method.

Exegetical analyses and spiritual readings of the story of the annunciation (Luke 1:26-38)

In this paper, four readings of Luke 1:26-38 are presented, together with evaluations regarding their possibilities for spirituality. The first reading is that of Lohfink. In his approach, the focus falls mainly on Jesus. Hardly any attention is accorded to the other characters: God, Gabriel and Mary. The second reading offers analyses in terms of which Mary is viewed as a prototype of liberation spirituality. This reading is informed by semiotic analysis and the sociology of literature. The third reading, which is based on narrative criticism, focuses on what happens to the characters of the story. The fourth reading is an intertextual one, which shows how the quotation of Gen 18:14 becomes an expression of one of the specific topics relating to the spirituality of the Gospel of Luke. The conclusion is that it is not the use of a specific method that is decisive for spirituality, but rather the openness of the researcher.

Margaret Jewett Burland, Strange Words: Retelling and Reception in the Medieval Roland Textual TraditionStrange Words: Retelling and Reception in the Medieval Roland Textual Tradition. Margaret Jewett Burland. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Pp. ix+332.

<i>Margaret Jewett Burland</i>, Strange Words: Retelling and Reception in the Medieval Roland Textual Tradition<i>Strange Words: Retelling and Reception in the Medieval Roland Textual Tradition</i>. Margaret Jewett Burland. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Pp. ix+332.

From Letter to Spirit

AbstractReformation polemics and modern historical‐critical scholarship has encouraged us to see the spiritual sense of Scripture as remote from the literal sense. However, a close examination of the traditional methods of spiritual interpretation shows that the literal sense plays an important role in expositions of the spiritual sense. Traditional methods both anchor and motivate spiritual readings by recourse to the letter of Scripture, and as a consequence the speculative stretch toward the spiritual is saturated with the literal.

The Vespertine (review)

Reviewed by: The Vespertine Kate Quealy-Gainer, Assistant Editor Mitchell, Saundra. The Vespertine. Harcourt, 2011. [304p]. ISBN 978-0-547-48247-7 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 8–12. Seventeen-year-old Amelia van den Broek is quite sure that when her austere brother shipped her off to the city to stay with her cousin while finding a suitable marriage prospect, he did not intend for her to be holding spiritual readings with [End Page 384] Baltimore’s leading ladies as Maine’s Own Mystic. When several of the visions visited upon her at sunset come to fruition, however, Amelia’s cousin and bosom buddy Zora insists that she use her considerable talents for the benefits of gossip and romance. Adding salt to her poor brother’s wound, Amelia has also taken up with Nathaniel Witherspoon, a lowly painter with no money and no prospects. As their romance heats up, Amelia’s powers grow, but soon she finds herself the bearer of bad news as her visions point toward a tragedy that will destroy lives and unravel her relationship with Zora. Mitchell, author of the ghostly thriller Shadowed Summer (BCCB 2/09), moves her gothic from Southern to Victorian in this richly conceived historical romance. Amelia relates her tale from the prison of her brother’s house where she is forced to return a ruined woman with no friends—as such, the prose is appropriately hyperbolic, complete with flowery metaphors and melodrama. The romance is, in a word, hot, and while it never quite reaches bodice-ripping levels, Nathaniel’s forbidden charms will most certainly have readers swooning. Though details of Victorian courting rituals bog down the book’s pace a bit, there’s still considerable fun to be had here, and Amelia’s supernatural power is believably portrayed. Fans of Libba Bray’s A Great and Terrible Beauty (BCCB 5/04) will find themselves enchanted by this atmospheric tale. Copyright © 2011 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The word that moves

This essay investigates the role of the Bible in spirituality by looking at the relationship between academic exegesis and spiritual reading, mysticism and language, Bible reading as an event in the relationship between God and human beings and liturgy as a mystagogical process.

Tocqueville and Robinson in Defense of the Puritans’ Sunday

There is little less fashionable today than praising the Puritans, especially for their egalitarian political idealism, their promotion of genuine humane and liberating learning, and their capacity for enjoyment and human happiness. Praising the Puritans is especially difficult for us because even our Protestants have abandoned them. When a European calls us Puritanical we do not say, “yes, thanks a lot, you’re right.” We either deny it, saying we have moved way beyond those days. Or we admit it, saying that, “yes, we should be less capitalistic, less repressed, and more free thinking, just like you.” As far as I can tell, the most able and astute of the unfashionably pro-Puritan writers about America are Alexis de Tocqueville and Marilynne Robinson. The French author Tocqueville, of course, wrote the best book on America and the best book on democracy—Democracy in America, published in two volumes (1835, 1940). And Robinson— author of the celebrated novels Housekeeping, Gilead (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), and the just published Home—might be the best American writer around right now. It is less known that Robinson is quite the theologian, historian, and essayist, and she has devoted herself to recovering—pretty much on her own and against every grain—our authentic Puritan/Calvinist tradition. My modest goal here is to use these two authors to restore the Puritanical case for Sunday today, the case for once again exempting one day from business and for spiritual reflection and reading, for celebrating who we really are. Tocqueville’s Democracy in America almost begins by showing us how much our democracy owes the Puritans. He tells us that the Puritans established colonies with lords— without, in fact, economic classes. And these founders differed from, say, the founders of Virginia by not at all being solitary adventurers. They were not out to get rich or even improve their economic condition; they were in no way driven by material necessity. Their lives were structured by morality; they came to America as family men, bringing their wives and children. They were also extremely educated men—on the cutting edge, in many ways, of European enlightenment. They were, Tocqueville observes, animated by “a purely intellectual need.” Their goal was “to make an idea triumph” in this world. That idea was fundamentally Biblical. And it had radically egalitarian and idealistic political consequences. Tocqueville even says that the Puritans were completely free from the political prejudices that governed their and almost every other age. A democracy more perfect than the wildest dreams of the ancients emerged “fully grown and fully armed from the midst of the old feudal society.” Puritan practice was even better than the Platonic city in speech, because the “air of antiquity” was improved by “a sort of biblical perfume.” The result was that “bold theories of the human mind” actually directed real political communities. For the Puritans, the theory of equality was the source of real political duties that correspond to the truth about the way we are. That meant, Tocqueville explains, that the Puritans had “a more elevated and complete view” of social duties than did their time’s “European legislators.” They took care of the poor, maintained the highways, kept careful records and registries, secured law and order, and, most of all, provided education for everyone—through high school when possible. The justification of universal education was that everyone should be able to read the Bible to know the truth about God and his duties to Him for himself. Nobody Soc (2009) 46:445–451 DOI 10.1007/s12115-009-9239-0

"Na Maria, pretz e fina valors": A New Argument for Female Authorship

“NA MARIA, PRETZ E FINA VALORS”: A NEW ARGUMENT FOR FEMALE AUTHORSHIP1 ALISON GANZE THE manuscript attribution of “Na Maria, pretz e fina valors” to Bietris de Roman has caused no small amount of controversy among critics, for even those who accept the attribution often struggle to account for what appears to be the sole Occitan canso, or courtly love lyric, written by one woman for another. The speaker in the poem praises “Lady Maria” for her beauty, nobility, and many other virtues; begs her to grant the speaker “so don plus ai d’aver gioi esperansa” (13), declares Maria to be the source of all her happiness and that “per vos vauc mantas ves sospiran ” (16); and implores that she not love any “entendidor truan” (20). The poem’s use of the love language characteristic of the canso has elicited a range of interpretations, from arguments that the poem is an expression of same-sex desire to outright denials of female authorship altogether.2 Yet few have considered whether the poem might be participating in conventions that readily accommodate the language of desire within the exchange of political and social fidelity. While no reading of “Na Maria” can offer conclusive evidence of the sex of its author, the 1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Medieval Association of the Pacific Conference at the University of California-Los Angeles in March 2007, in a session honoring Dhira Mahoney; I am delighted to honor Dhira as mentor with this article on patronage between women. I would also like to thank the members of the Potter College Faculty Writing Group at Western Kentucky University for their helpful comments and suggestions. 2 Though one might be tempted to resolve the problem by concluding that “Na Maria” is in fact a song in praise of the Virgin Mary, there is little in the poem that substantiates a spiritual reading. For example, the terms “pretz” and “valor” used to describe the addressee generally refer to courtly worth in particular, and as Paterson points out, “valor” can also mean “estate” or “property” (“Fin’amor” 35). Moreover, it is difficult to imagine to what the “entendidor truan” might refer in the context of a Marian lyric. 23 one I submit here offers another means by which to reconcile female authorship with a female object of courtly devotion. Many readers who accept the manuscript attribution conclude that the poem must represent one of the few, if not the only, extant examples of a medieval lesbian love song. Indeed, in the biographical notes that accompany her edition of trobairitz poetry, Meg Bogin comments wryly that “Scholars have resorted to the most ingenious arguments to avoid concluding that [Bietris] is a woman writing a love poem to another woman” (176). John Boswell cites “Na Maria” as one of the “few poems exemplifying this [gay artistic] tradition” that survive into the thirteenth century (265), and Pierre Bec surmises that, if “Na Maria” is in fact written by a woman, then “ce serait sans doute le seul poème ‘lesbien’ de toute la lyrique Occitane” (198). The “if/then” nature of this argument is significant: for such readers, a lesbian author – or at least speaker – is the natural and logical conclusion, since a sexual relationship is taken for granted. Even those who acknowledge that we need not necessarily conflate the identities of poet and speaker still insist upon the poem’s queer nature. Bec sees “Na Maria” as a “contre-text,” a text that speaks against a culture’s dominant ideology “en conformité avec un code littéraire donné mais aussi en rupture avec lui” (8). For Tilda Sankovitch, as well, the poem strains against normative boundaries, regardless of the actual likelihood of Bietris’ lesbianism: Whether the poem is or is not an articulation of lesbian desire is less important than the ludic strategy that takes place here: a woman poet uses all the terms a troubadour might address to a woman, but instead of addressing them to a man, she speaks them to a woman. It is precisely the unsettling derailing of the reversal, the surprising twist imposed on the expected scheme, that brings out the ludic...

How to speak with intellectual and theological decency on the resurrection of Christ?: A comparison of Swinburne and Wright

AbstractIn recent scholarship the spiritual reading of the New Testament resurrection stories has come under pressure from new studies of the relevant data. In this article, two of the most conspicuous of these studies are compared and evaluated. First, Richard Swinburne's monograph opens our eyes to the fact that, in interpreting the resurrection stories, much more is at stake than is usually recognised in so-called ‘undogmatic’ exegesis. However, the rather crude way in which Swinburne deals with these stories, suggesting that they represent Jesus' resurrection as a bare fact not qualitatively different from other historical facts, neglects their peculiarity and displays insufficient hermeneutical sensitivity for their unique theological meaning. Second, Tom Wright's monumental volume is sometimes criticised for a similar single-minded focus on historical questions and a concomitant lack of attention to the eschatological character of Jesus' resurrection. As a result, George Hunsinger has argued, it becomes unclear why the resurrection reports embody life-transforming good news now. Close scrutiny of Wright's book, however, does not vindicate this criticism. Wright neither isolates the question of the resurrection's historicity from its theological meanings nor overlooks the fact that a plausible historical case for the resurrection does not in itself elicit faith. Still, he rightly argues that what people believe about what actually has happened often plays a vital role in their personal transformation. Moreover, the eschatological nature of the resurrection does not rule out the fact that it can be seen and discussed with integrity as a historical issue.

Milton and the spiritual reader: reading and religion in seventeenth-century England

Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter One: Thou art sufficient to judge aright: Spiritual Reading in Areopagitica Chapter Two: Spiritual Reading in Milton's Eikonoklastes Chapter Three: Godly Reading in Milton's De Doctrina Christiana Chapter Four: There plant eyes: Spiritual Interpretation and Reading in Paradise Lost Chapter Five: The Reader Within: Spiritual Interpretation in Paradise Regained Chapter Six: Baxter, Fox, Winstanley and Miltonic Spiritual Reading Notes Bibliography Index

Book Review: Eat this Book: A conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

Book Review: Eat this Book: A conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

Backpacking with the Saints: The Risk Taking Character of Wilderness Reading

The lives of the saints are full of stories about the life-changing experience of reading classic texts in provocative, wilderness places. The author of this essay points to his own practice of taking classics of Christian spirituality on wilderness backpacking trips as a metaphor of the risks involved in spiritual reading generally. Drawing on Augustine’s understanding of the dynamic relationship between the reading of a text and the place in which one reads it, he examines the reading process in light of the “two-books” tradition (reading scripture and nature together), offering three vignettes from his own experience of wilderness reading.

Bringing Reformed Liturgy to Print at the New Monastery at Marienthal

AbstractThe reformed liturgical texts created at the Council of Basel (1431–1449) were not printed at Mainz, the birthplace of the new technology, but across the river Rhine at a new monastery of the Brothers of the Common Life at Marienthal. Documentation of the establishment of that monastery is sketchy but includes the involvement of Archbishop Adolph II of Nassau (1462–1475) and vicar general of the Mainz diocese, Gabriel Biel (1410–1495), who would become a Brother at Marienthal. The 21 editions (1474–1484) that were issued by the monastery were almost all newly written books by local clerics: the reformed liturgical texts for the new German Bursfeld Congregation of Benedictines and diocesan breviaries; spiritual reading in the vernacular so typical of the books of the Brothers, including the first German translation by Biel of Jean Gerson's Opus tripartitum, a confessional by Johannes Lupi, and a life of St. Martin of Tours by Sulpitius Severus. Who cast the six types, who did the printing, and who paid for the printing shop remain subjects of conjecture?

Tradition at the heart of renewal: the coptic orthodox church and monasticism in modern Egypt

The Egyptian desert is not only the home of monasticism but of monastic revival which is at the heart of the reform and renewal of the Coptic Orthodox Church. This monastic revival is not the work of one person but of a series of spiritual gifted individuals, in particular Patriarch Cyril VI (1902–1971), Matta el-Meskeen (1919–2006) and the current Patriarch Shenouda III (elected in 1971), who have demonstrated leadership and vision in shaping Coptic Christianity in the modern era. The monastic renewal has also been made possible by the growth in monastic vocations, both male and female, which have made this structural renaissance possible in the Coptic Church. Members of the episcopate in the Coptic tradition are chosen from the ranks of the monks, thus the spiritual character of monastic renewal has become the face of the Church. Today the monasteries are intimately integrated into parish life and the ascetic and spiritual reading of the Desert Fathers have found a new home in the wider Coptic Christian community.