Tag: Monastic

Free Download Julie Hotchin, "Women and Monastic Reform in the Medieval West, c. 1000 – 1500: Debating Identities, Creating Communities "
English | ISBN: 1837650497 | 2023 | 296 pages | EPUB | 18 MB
New approaches to understanding religious women’s involvement in monastic reform, demonstrating how women’s experiences were more ambiguous and multi-layered than previously assumed.

Free Download Kenneth C. Carveley, "The Monastic Footprint in Post-Reformation Movements "
English | ISBN: 1032111445 | 2022 | 312 pages | EPUB, PDF | 6 MB + 18 MB
This book examines the influence of the monastic tradition beyond the Reformation. Where the built monastic environment had been dissolved, desire for the spiritual benefits of monastic living still echoed within theological and spiritual writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a virtual exegetical template. The volume considers how the writings of monastic authors were appropriated in post-Reformation movements by those seeking a more fervent spiritual life, and how the concept of an internal cloister of monastic/ascetic spirituality influenced several Anglican writers during the Restoration. There is a careful examination of the monastic influence upon the Wesleys and the foundation and rise of Methodism. Drawing on a range of primary sources, the book will be of particular interest to scholars of monastic and Methodist history, and to those engaged in researching ecclesiology and in ecumenical dialogues.

Free Download John Cassian, "How to Focus: A Monastic Guide for an Age of Distraction "
English | ISBN: 0691208085 | 2024 | 288 pages | EPUB, PDF | 667 KB + 1160 KB
How you can learn to focus like a monk without living like one

Free Download How to Focus: A Monastic Guide for an Age of Distraction (Audiobook)
English | ASIN: B0CQD8KVTP | 2024 | 2 hours and 13 minutes | MP3@64 kbps | 62 MB
Author: John Cassian, Jamie Kreiner
Narrator: Mike Cooper
Distraction isn’t a new problem. We’re also not the first to complain about how hard it is to concentrate. Early Christian monks beat us to it. They had given up everything to focus on God, yet they still struggled to keep the demons of distraction at bay. But rather than surrender to the meandering of their minds, they developed powerful strategies to improve their attention and engagement. How to Focus is an inviting collection of their strikingly relatable insights and advice-frank, funny, sympathetic, and psychologically sophisticated. This wisdom is drawn from John Cassian’s Collationes, one of the most influential manuals for monks from late antiquity.

Free Download Monastic Life in Anglo-Saxon England, C.600-900 By Sarah Foot
2006 | 398 Pages | ISBN: 0521859468 | PDF | 22 MB
A major new history of English monasticism between the sixth and tenth centuries.

Free Download Talking Back: A Monastic Handbook for Combating Demons By Evagrius Ponticus
2009 | 200 Pages | ISBN: 0879073292 | EPUB | 1 MB
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 bookTalking Back (Antirrhaªtikos)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 ofAthanasius and AsceticismandDemons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity,and he edits theJournal of Early Christian Studies.

Free Download Come and See: The Monastic Way for Today By Brendan Freeman
2010 | 228 Pages | ISBN: 0879070226 | EPUB | 1 MB
Come and Seeis look inside the mind of a monk. The Vision of monastic life proposed here is not new; it is a Vision going back to the Desert Fathers of the fourth century. And yet, it is new because it is rooted in a place in the soul that never grows old. Come and see where I live, Jesus said to the disciples who were following him. He could just as well have said, come and see where you live; where your real life is being lived. Monastic spirituality is not some esoteric or Gnostic way of perceiving reality or understanding life. It is a treasure hidden in the field of your own heart; it is a universal spirituality that is the common inheritance of every human being; it is a search for God. From the atheist to the saint there is in the heart of all creatures a desire for ultimate meaning, a desire for God. In this sense everyone has the heart of a monk.As you read this book you will meet some of the great themes of monastic life: silence, solitude, community life, prayer. You will also be helped to find your most authentic self, the self Thomas Merton spoke of when he said at the center of our being is a point of nothingness, a point of pure truth. Nothingness, emptiness, absence are important aspects of our spiritual journey.There is a subtheme running through ancient monasticism that conceives of the monastery as a hospital ‘a place for healing the soul, the spirit, the heart. The place of the heart is highlighted in these conferences and homilies as an ancient theme so relevant to the modern person.

Free Download Words For The Journey: A Monastic Vocabulary By Edith Scholl; David N. Bell
2009 | 208 Pages | ISBN: 0879070218 | EPUB | 1 MB
In matters of religion and spirituality the simplest phrases can be the most misleading. Or, if not misleading, misunderstood. There is no doubt that this is true of the Cistercian tradition. As Sister Edith Scholl writes in the introduction to this volume: When I started reading and studying the writings of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Cistercians years ago, I was struck by their rich vocabulary of Latin words ‘words rich with resonances from Scripture, the liturgy, and patristic and earlier monastic authors, words for which no exact equivalents exist in English. It seemed to me that these words could be a key to a deeper understanding of their message. . . . This study of some of the most important of them could serve as a companion to the translations being published in the Cistercian Fathers Series, enabling nonspecialists to read those translations with greater understanding and appreciation. In fact, it might prove a fruitful source for approaching the whole monastic ethos.""Sister Edith Scholl has come to our rescue. . . . She has provided us with a book, and a very sensible book it is. The words she offers us are truly words for the journey, though like any journey, they are not without risk. Offering our human will to God is an extraordinarily risky business, but we may rest assured that our prayers will be answered."-From the Foreword by David N. Bell

Free Download The Life of the Vows: Initiation into the Monastic Tradition By Thomas Merton; Patrick F. O’Connell
2012 | 686 Pages | ISBN: 0879070307 | EPUB | 1 MB
As novice master of the Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, Thomas Merton presented weekly conferences to familiarize his charges with the meaning and purpose of the vows they aspired to undertake. In this setting, he offered a thorough exposition of the theological, canonical, and above all spiritual dimensions of the vows.Merton set the vows firmly in the context of the anthropological, moral, soteriological, and ecclesial dimensions of human, Christian, and monastic life. He addressed such classical themes of Christian morality as the nature of the human person and his acts; the importance of justice in relation to the Passion of Christ, to friendship and to love; and self-surrender as the key to grace, prayer and the vowed life. Merton’s words on these topics clearly spring from a committed heart and often flow with the soaring intensity of style that we have come to expect in his more enthusiastic prose.The texts of these conferences represent the longest and most systematically organized of any of numerous series of conferences that Merton presented during the decade of his mastership. They may be the most directly pastoral work Merton ever wrote.