Swan Book Research Articles

Swan, Laura. Forgotten Desert Mothers: Sayings, Lives, and Stories of Early Christian Women. (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press. 2001. Pp. v, 218. $13.95 paperback.) Eight Righteous Women, the modern American icon decorating the cover of Forgotten Desert Mothers, speaks to the intensely devotional nature of Swan's work as well as her contemporary style. Laura Swan is the prioress of Saint Placid Priory and a scholar of Catholic theology. As such, she is able to encapsulate for her audience recent scholarly readings of the women's desert movement (Elm, Harvey, McNamara) and her own meditative musings on monastic themes (silence, prayer, asceticism). Of course, the primary material itself is brilliant. For example, the author discusses the provocative vita of Amma Syncletica, who after having renounced all of her inheritance,cut her hair as a sign of consecration and moved with her blind sister to the family tomb outside of Alexandria (p. 42). Similarly, Swan's lively analysis of lesser known desert mothers, such as Matrona of Perge, who led a monastic community of mixed-- class, cross-dressing women (pp. 94-95), is engaging. In the last section of the book Swan grapples with Christian ascetic practice in a twenty-first century American context, particularly the role of self-abnegation, sexuality, and sanctity in modern Catholicism. Finally, in an appendix, Swan provides an English translation of the ordination rituals (cheirotonia) surrounding the consecration of female deacons. Overall, this reader found Forgotten Desert Mothers to be a theologian's version of Kathleen Norris's highly successful Cloister Walk (1997). On account of its accessible interpretation of early Christian women's vitae and its willingness to incorporate ancient asceticism into the twenty-firstcentury world, Swan's book would work very well in an undergraduate survey course on women and Christianity. NOTES AND COMMENTS Association News first vice-president of the American Catholic Historical Association, Bernard McGinn, will also be the chairman of the Committee on Program for the Association's eighty-fourth annual meeting, which will be held in Washington, D.C., on January 8-11, 2004. Members of the Association who wish to propose papers or (preferably) complete sessions should write to Professor McGinn by January 13, 2003,giving an abstract of each paper. All participants in the sessions must be or become members of the Association, except those representing another historical society that is co-sponsoring the session. Anyone who will present a paper in January, 2003, is not eligible to present one in January, 2004. Proposals should be sent to Professor McGinn in care of the School of Divinity, the University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637; e-mail: bmcginn@midway.uchicago.edu. chairman of the committee organizing the spring meeting that will be held at the University of Scranton on March 28-29,2003, Roy Domenico, has issued a call for papers. Proposals for individual papers or, preferably, complete sessions should be sent to Professor Domenico by October 21, 2002, in care of the Department of History, St. Thomas Hall, the University of Scranton, Scranton, Pennsylvania 18510;e-mail: domenicor2@uofs.edu. Conferences, Meetings, Symposia A symposium held in Moscow, March 25-26, 2002, The Society of Jesus and Imperial Russia: Reign of Catherine the Great, was the first scholarly event ever jointly sponsored by the Society of Jesus, represented by the Jesuit Historical Institute in Rome, and an official Russian body, here the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAN). As the director of the Academy's Institute for Universal History, Academician Aleksandr Oganovich Chubar'ian, who initiated the idea for the symposium, put it, such a conference would have been unimaginable ten or fifteen years ago. greeting of the Jesuit Father General, Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, to the symposium emphasized the Jesuits' debt to Russia for protecting the Society after the 1773 suppression, enabling it to spread rapidly after the 1814 restoration. …

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