They gossip, crack jokes, fall asleep in church, suffer through depression and doubt like the rest of us. The Boston Globe From the iconic author of Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith , a spiritual journey that brings joy to the meanings of love, grace and faith. It was refounded in the late 10th century by King Athelstan as a Benedictine house dedicated to St Peter and St Paul. What emerges, finally, is an affecting portrait--one of the most vibrant since Merton's--of the misunderstood, often invisible world of monastics, as seen by a restless, generous intelligence.

Nevertheless, it’s always interesting and her out-of-the-box look gives the religious life a freshness and relevance that is often lacking. Part record of her time among the Benedictines, part meditation on various aspects of monastic life, The Cloister Walk demonstrates, from the rare perspective of someone who is both an insider and outsider, how immersion in the cloistered world– its liturgy, its ritual, its sense of community– can impart meaning to everyday events and deepen our secular lives. Whereas prudish denial may have been a darker part of the cloister’s past, it doesn’t show itself here and the way that the nuns and monks approach their unique life leaves even the most skeptical eye-rolling readers with a sense of deep respect .

Dust Jackets are not guaranteed and when still present, they will have various degrees of tear and damage.

It’s still early in the year but there’s more evidence almost every day that the housing market is already in better shape than at the start of 2023. In 2000, Norris and her husband traded their farmhouse on the Great Plains for a condo in Honolulu, Hawaii, so that Norris could help care for her aging parents after her husband’s own failing health no longer permitted him to travel. It’s about getting to know a text so deeply that you could recite lines by heart, and likely have interpreted it and re-interpreted it so many times that its almost as if a different person read it each time. Collected from a diverse range of sources, including Parabola and The New Yorker, these essays offer some insight and grace, but the organizing principle of community is a bit diffuse.And so, living in a community as dedicated to words as monks and nuns do, do the religious communities she interacts with. Each chapter is structured around a reading, a line, or a life of a saint she encounters while attending worship with the monks. Are there any of your own childhood experiences in established religion that have interfered with your spiritual development? And in the essays of The Cloister Walk, Norris is concerned with the question of how we read and interpret the language of scripture, of liturgy, knowing that our grasp on its meaning will always be imperfect. I think a lot of people would show up for that, if only we could all be still and quiet enough, for long enough, to listen.

In "The Cloister Walk," persisting in [Norris's] wonderfully idiosyncratic ways, she gives us the result of an 'immersion into a liturgical world'. Of course, the Christian tradition also carries a “positive” theology, rooted in the acceptance of scripture as divine revelation.Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). Kathleen Norris well understands our temptation to smooth over the thornier elements of Christian faith, to frame them in terms we can easily affirm, terms that play nicely with our post-Enlightenment understanding of reality. Ultimately, faith—and hope for that matter—are rooted in the real presence of God in this world, a presence known to us primarily through channels of the heart. e. attire) and several, almost academic like articles on lesser known saints, revered because they were willing to be murdered to keep their virginity. If you like to read technical manuals and books with finely structured outlines, you will probably not like this book.

Norris's magnificent spiritual memoir of acedia (a complex cousin of depression) gets an uneven audio treatment. Do you think the Catholic church should continue to require its priests, nuns, and monks to make this vow? Kathleen Norris explicates and demystifies words in the Christian vocabulary that both attract and trouble her. With her lucid, luminous prose, hardheaded logic, and far-reaching metaphors, Norris has brought us the cloister at its most alive.

No missing or damaged pages, no creases or tears, no underlining or highlighting of text, and no writing in the margins. A beautiful new edition of one of the most beloved books of the Bible, with insight and illumination from Kathleen Norris.