Transfigured World


Book Description

Exploring the intricacy and complexity of Walter Pater’s prose, Transfigured World challenges traditional approaches to Pater and shows precise ways in which the form of his prose expresses its content. Carolyn Williams asserts that Pater’s aestheticism and his historicism should be understood as dialectically interrelated critical strategies, inextricable from each other in practice. Williams discusses the explicit and embedded narratives that play a crucial role in Pater’s aesthetic criticism and examines the figures that compose these narratives, including rhetorical tropes, structures of argument such as genealogy, and historical or fictional personae.




Transfigured World


Book Description




A World Transfigured


Book Description

2023 Catholic Media Association First Place Award, Mysticism In A World Transfigured: The Mystical Journey, Philip Sheldrake demonstrates the importance of the mystical dimension of religious belief and practice. Using the words of the great theologian, Karl Rahner, Sheldrake makes the case that the Christian of the future will be either a mystic or nothing at all. In our contemporary world, this judgment applies equally to other religions as well. After chapters on the meaning of “mysticism” and the connection between mysticism and beliefs, Sheldrake describes important dimensions of mystical writings, illustrated by a range of examples. These are “Love and Desire,” “Knowing and Unknowing,” “Wonder and Beauty,” “Mysticism and Everyday Practice,” and “The Mystic as Radical Prophet.” Finally, the book briefly explores why mysticism fascinates so many people in our modern times.




Transfigured World


Book Description

Today there is a growing eagerness to enter into a deeper knowledge of the Mass, the sacraments and the whole life of the Church. A particularly rewarding insight comes from a penetration of the actual words, gestures and symbols used in worship. "The Church wants us to stop and look and be enriched by the glories she presents for our contemplation," writes Sister Laurentia. "The liturgy is God's art. For his material he uses our familiar earth, air, fire and water. In this manner our world undergoes a revelation, an epiphany-it becomes a transfigured world." More importantly, God shapes and uses these materials in order to transfigure man. Through the sacramental power of the liturgy, God comes down to man, and lifts man up to Him; to a sharing in His divine life. In order to gain an insight into the wonders of God's transfigured world, Sister Laurentia examines the relationship of art to the liturgy, and the structure of the liturgy itself. The result is an inspiring, readable book that will give the reader a deeper understanding of the beauty and meaning of worship.




Transfiguration


Book Description

Transfiguration explores the work of John Ruskin, Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Walter Pater, treating in particular the ways in which they engaged with the Christian content of their subject, and, in Pater's case, how the art of Christianity was contrasted with classical sculpture. Stephen Cheeke examines two related phenomena: idolatry (a false substitution, a sexual betrayal), and the poetics of transfiguration (to elevate or glorify subject matter not thought of as conventionally poetic, to praise). Central to the book is the question of the 'translation' of religion into art and aesthetics, a process which supposedly undergirds the advent of the museum age and makes possible the idea of a 'religion of art' as a phenomenon of late century Aestheticism. Such a phenomenon is prepared for, however, through the engagement with Christian painting and classical sculpture in the work of these four writers. All four thought carefully about the ways in which a particular mimetic impulse of 'making-live' in artworks could be connected to religious experience. This meant exploring the nature of the link between seeing and believing—visualising in order to conceive, to verify, but also in the sense of being acted upon by the visible. All four wrote about the great power of artworks to transfigure the objects of their attention. In each case, there emerges the possibility of a secret sexual knowledge hiding within, or lying on the other side of the sensuous knowledge of aesthesis. All four wondered whether this was inherently hostile to Christianity, or whether it may, finally, be an accommodation within it.




Sourcebook for Sundays, Seasons, and Weekdays 2024


Book Description

Those who prepare the liturgy are entrusted with a very important task—helping our assemblies to encounter the real presence of Christ and to be transformed and strengthened for discipleship. Good celebrations of the liturgy help foster and nourish the faith of our parishioners. Sourcebook for Sundays, Seasons, and Weekdays is a trusted annual publication providing insightful, concise, and detailed suggestions for preparing the Mass each day of the liturgical year. With its focus on celebrating the liturgy well, this resource will guide parish teams in making “the liturgical prayers of the Christian community more alive” (On Sacred Music, 31). It includes: -Preaching points -Additional Scripture insights for the Proper of Saints -Music preparation guidance and song suggestions -Ways to connect the liturgy to the Christian life -Original Mass texts for Sundays, solemnities, and feasts of the Lord -Seasonal worship committee agendas -Ideas for celebrating other rites and customs -An online supplement for preparing the sacramental rites -Seasonal introductions -Daily calendar preparation guides -Dated entries with liturgical titles, lectionary citations, and vestment colors -Scripture insights -Brief biographies of the saints and blesseds -Guidance for choosing among the options provided in the ritual texts




Fortnightly Sermons


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Incarnation


Book Description

Deeply engaged with both the tradition and the contemporary world, the book leads readers to an understanding of deep incarnation, interpreting this central Christian idea to address the needs of the entire created order, and allows Christology to be relevant and meaningful when responding to the challenges of scientific cosmology and of global religious pluralism.




Sacred Stories


Book Description

Sacred Stories brings together the work of leading scholars writing on the history of religion and religiosity in late imperial Russia during the critical decades preceding the 1917 revolutions. Embodying new research and new methodologies, this book reshapes our understanding of the place of religion in modern Russian history. Topics examined include miraculous icons and healing, pilgrim narratives, confessions, women and Orthodox domesticity, marriage and divorce, conversion and tolerance, Jewish folk beliefs, mysticism in Russian art, and philosophical aspects of Orthodox religious thought. Sacred Stories demonstrates that belief, spirituality, and the sacred were powerful and complex cultural expressions central to Russian political, social, economic, and cultural life. Contributors are Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Heather J. Coleman, Gregory L. Freeze, Nadieszda Kizenko, Alexei A. Kurbanovsky, Roy R. Robson, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Gabriella Safran, Vera Shevzov, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Mark Steinberg, Paul Valliere, William G. Wagner, Paul W. Werth, and Christine D. Worobec.




Another Finitude


Book Description

Beginning from the notion of finite life, Another Finitude takes this staple subject from post-Heideggerian philosophy and opposes it to the onto-theological concept of infinity, represented by an eternal absolute. Although critical of Heidegger and his definition of finitude as 'being-towards-death', this book does not revert to the ontological idea of infinity secured in the sacred image of immortality. But it also does not want to give up on infinity altogether; the infinite is transposed, so it can become a necessary moment of the finite life. A theological framework for the new elaboration of the concept of finitude is crucial; but instead of following the Lutheran formula, Agata Bielik-Robson turns to the sources of Judaism. Taking inspiration from the Jewish idea of torat hayim, the principle of finite life, which found the best expression in the biblical sentence: love strong as death; love emerges as the alternative marker of finitude, allowing to us redefine it in an affirmative way. By tracing the avatars of love in the group of 20th-century thinkers, or 'messianic vitalists'–Benjamin, Rosenzweig, Arendt, Derrida, and (deeply revised) Freud–the book attempts to demonstrate the possibility of such affirmation. Love becomes the new 'infinite-in-the-finite'; love in all its forms, from the original libidinal endowment of the human psyche to the last metamorphoses of agape, the Greco-Christian divine love.