CMI Materials: 2009-2010

Each of the forty chapters includes a selected writing from Kathleen Norris's work along with one or more scripture selections from the Bible.


Contents:
How to use this book -- Hints on keeping a journal -- Who is Kathleen Norris? -- Journey 1-40 -- Journey's end.

Kathleen Norris’s masterpiece: a personal and moving memoir that resurrects the ancient term acedia, or soul-weariness, and brilliantly explores its relevancy to the modern individual and culture.

Numerous laypersons have experienced that the guidelines of Saint Benedicts Rule offer inspiring and realistic ways toward a blessed life, aiming at the growth and flourishing of persons and communities in which they live and work. In this book, Wil Derkse is searching for those basic attitudes and virtues that characterize Benedictine spirituality, making them available for those living and working outside a monastery.

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Gregory of Narek (c. 945-1003), a monk and a priest, is best known for his poetic works, and one of the few commentators on the Song of Songs, which was so great a focus among western monastic writers of the patristic and medieval periods. Living during a period of cultural and religious renaissance which preceded the Turkish and Mongol invasions of Armenia, and in a period of conflict between the non-Chalcedonian Christians of his native land and their Byzantine neighbors, Grigor worked from the Armenian text of the Song, which is slightly longer than the Septuagint or Hebrew versions and contains passages which vary from them. In his commentary Grigor traces themes and draws on other scriptural books to remind readers that every human person is endowed with an innate love for God which, in his words, ‘cannot be sapped.’

Following a moving prologue on the nature of faith, Called to Question is broken into six parts that explore key themes: the inward life, immersion in life, resistance, feminist spirituality, ecology, dailiness. Within each theme is a wide array of topics that embody Sr. Joan's life's work as a sociologist, theologian, Benedictine nun, rights activist, and spiritual guide to countless people throughout the world. Each chapter is an engaging dialogue between Sister Joan and many different wisdom sources about such topics as God's existence and call, experience, struggle, justice, the role of women and men in society and church, living through doubt, and celebrating life.

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Pope Benedict’s Church Fathers presents these important figures of early Christianity in all their evangelical vitality, spiritual profundity, and uncompromising love of God. Benedict tells the true story of Christianity’s against-all-odds triumph in the face of fierce Roman hostility and persecution. He does this by exploring the lives and the ideas of the early Christian writers, pastors, and martyrs, men so important to the spread of Christianity that history remembers them as “the Fathers of the Church".

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A foremost interpreter of Catholic thought and life offers a probing look at Pope Benedict's biblical theology and provides a clear and concise introduction to his life and work.

A collection of essays on the role of the Catholic faith in the modern world. Confronting controversial issues head-on, this volume will inspire Christians everywhere while also offering non-Christians a renewed understanding of what a Christian lifestyle means for political and personal life today as it explores our relationship with God, the responsibility of community and the transformation of culture.

Link to an interview with Cardinal George in which he discusses his book

For centuries male celibates have described, expressed, and celebrated their love of God in the language of sex, most prolifically and characteristically in a thousand years' commentarial tradition on the Song of Songs. After analysing the tradition, its logic and its imagery, Turner provides translations of commentaries by Gregory the Great, Alcuin of York, Hugh of Saint Victor, William of Saint-Thierry, Alan of Lille, Thomas of Perseigne, Thomas Gallus, Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, Nicholas of Lyra, Denys the Carthusian, and John of the Cross.

"Perhaps no book was more central to medieval spirituality and mysticism," writes Bernard McGinn, "or more problematic to contemporary readers, than the Song of Songs. . . Lingering Victorian attitudes towards the opposition between sex and religion find the Song's frank erotic language embarrassing and even distasteful." But in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the Song of Songs was a favorite book of Cistercian monks. Bernard of Clairvaux, Gilbert of Hoyland, and John of Ford, as well as William of Saint Thierry, read it as a dialogue between Christ the Bridegroom and the human soul, the Bride. William of Saint Thierry began composing his commentary soon after entering the Cistercian abbey of Signy in 1135. Having left behind a busy life as a Benedictine abbot and author of theological treatises, he turned to writing meditations on Scripture as the means of listening to the voice of the Beloved. It is therefore ironic that he broke off his commentary on the Song, never to return to it, to alert the Church in France to the teaching of Peter Abelard and then to compose two treatises correcting what he deeply believed were Abelard's theological errors."

In God’s Mechanics, Brother Guy tells the stories of those who identify with the scientific mindset—so-called “techies”—while practicing religion. A full fledged techie himself, Brother Guy shows how he not only believes in God but gives religion an honored place alongside science in his life. This book offers an engaging look at how—and why—scientists and those with technological leanings can hold profound, “unprovable” religious beliefs while working in highly empirical fields. Through his own experience and interviews with other scientists and engineers who profess faith, Brother Guy explores how religious beliefs and practices make sense to those who are deeply rooted in the world of technology.

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Beauty consuming itself like incense burnt before God in solitude: these stories of penitent women from the fourth- century egyptian desert fascinated Christians in antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages.

For more than 100 years, the Vatican has supported an astronomical observatory. This should come as no surprise since from even before the Gregorian Reform of the Calendar in 1582, indeed dating back to the invention of the University (where studying astronomy was a requirement for anyone wanting a doctorate in philosophy or theology!) the Church has not only supported astronomical research, it has seen the study of the Heavens as a way of getting to know the Creator. The books was published in honor of the International Year of Astronomy and is filled with beautiful images from the Vatican's telescopes and wisdom from the Popes.

Placed in the monastery of Helfa, in Upper Saxony, at the age of five, Gertrud began having visions and writing at twenty-five.

Book 1, written by a nun of Helfta, reveals the personality and virtues of Gertrud. Avoiding hagiographical commonplaces, the writer reveals both the strengths and the shortcomings of her very human and very committed heroine.
Book 2 contains Gertrud's own account of her spiritual experiences.

Placed in the monastery of Helfta, in Upper Saxony, at the age of five, Gertrud began having visions and writing at twenty-five. The first two Books of The Herald were written by her own hand; Book Three, compiled twenty years later by another member of the community, 'expounds something of the favors lavished on or revealed to her'. It provides insights into the life and spirituality of this 'most literate of all medieval women visionaries.'

The Abbot General of the Trappist Order (Cistercians of the Strict Observance) reflects on the martyrdom in 1996 of seven of his monks, kidnapped from the Algerian monastery of Our Lady of Atlas and executed by a radical faction of the Groupe Islamique Armé. Choosing, despite known danger, to remain in the adopted homeland he loved, one of the martyred monks had earlier written: I am also aware of the caricature of Islam which a certain Islamism encourages. It is too easy to salve one's conscience by identifying this religious way with the fundamentalist ideologies of its extremists. For me, Algeria and Islam are something different--they are a body and a soul. I have proclaimed this often enough, I believe, in the sure knowledge of what I have received from it, finding there so often that true strand of the Gospel learned at my mother's knee, my very first Church, in Algeria itself, and already inspired with respect for Muslim believers.

A monk-scholar in the great tradition of learned Benedictinism and the most prolific medievalist of the past half-century, Jean Leclercq established 'monastic theology' as a respected field of study after centuries of scholastic eclipse. Dedicated to scholarship and to monastic renewal, he was as beloved in struggling Third World monasteries as he was respected in academic corridors. His keen intellect, his prodigeous memory, and his irrepressible personality are perhaps best summed up in one word with which he closed his letters: Joy!

Bestselling Catholic author Dr. Scott Hahn wants us to see that "The Mass--and I mean every single Mass--is heaven on earth." Literally. Beautifully written in clear, direct language, this book by will help readers see the Mass with new eyes, pray the liturgy with a renewed heart, and enter into the Mass more fully, enthusiastically, intelligently, and powerfully than ever before.

The life and mystical experiences of an intelligent and artistic thirteenth-century flemish nun are described in this contemporary biography, drawn from a lost autobiography. Her own Seven Manieren van Minne is incorporated into the text and given in translation from two redactions: the Latin of her biographer and her own vernacular.

Eyewitness accounts of the lives and teachings of the fourth-century Desert Fathers from the Historia monachorum in Aegypto.

Beautiful and famous color paintings, sculptures and artwork of the Blessed Virgin Mary from all over the world pictures are accompanied by the profound writings and homilies of Pope Benedict XVI on the person of Mary, and her unique role in human history and in the plan of God for salvation history.

Monks and nuns have preserved courtesies, devotions, and contemplative disciplines which the rest of the christian world has lost. In this introduction to the world of the cloister, Fr Cummings explains the origins, and the continuing value, of monastic practices.

This classic study placed the saint squarely among the outstanding theologians of the Middle Ages, and stripped away the sentimentality in which popular piety had wrapped him. Gilson demonstrates in Bernard's works his blend of monastic tradition and the new learning of the early twelfth century.

The Navarre Bible contains the text from the Revised Standard Version bible translation, with additional commentaries and explanations. This extensive project was initiated by St. Josemaria Escriva and was compiled by the University of Navarre faculty. Sources of the commentaries include: various Church documents, the writings of the Early Church Fathers and Doctors of the Church , as well as the writings from modern spiritual writers.

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The Navarre Bible contains the text from the Revised Standard Version bible translation, with additional commentaries and explanations. This extensive project was initiated by St. Josemaria Escriva and was compiled by the University of Navarre faculty. Sources of the commentaries include: various Church documents, the writings of the Early Church Fathers and Doctors of the Church , as well as the writings from modern spiritual writers.

Transforming evagrian hesychia, with its insistence on absolute solitude, Symeon lived as the spiritual father of a bustling monastery in the very heart of Constantinople. Yet his works became, two centuries after his death, perhaps the most important inspiration for Athonite heyschasm.

This book unravels mysteries, corrects misunderstandings, and offers thoughtful, straightforward responses to common objections about the Catholic faith.



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In this book, Pope Benedict XVI explores the legacy of St. Paul. He follows the course of the Apostle's life, including his missionary journeys and his relationship with the other apostles of Jesus such as St. Peter and St. James, and Paul's martyrdom in Rome. These and other important issues are addressed in this masterful, inspirational, and highly-readable presentation of St. Paul and his writings by one of today's great spiritual teachers, Pope Benedict XVI.

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The most scholarly of the remarkable nuns of Helfta composed these meditations, rituals, prayers, instructions on how to pray, chants, hymns, and litanies in the late thirteenth century. Her mastery of poetic prose attests to the level of women's education in the highly cultured abbey she entered as a child of five and never, so far as we know, left even once.

Professor emerita of mathematics at Benedictine University, Dr. Kittel collected forty focused, intensive-extensive oral histories of members of the community of the Sisters of the Precious Blood who lived through the renewal of religious life in response to Vatican II. Weaving these first person testimonies into an integrated living history she describes in depth, often in the Sisters’ own words, their experience in regard to prayer, ministry, community life, the vows. With their help she analyzes the community’s remarkable journey from a fervent pre-conciliar convent life of sacralized routine, uniform prayer and observance, generous collective works, minimal individuality in life and ministry to the vibrant life of a renewed religious congregation.

Scott Hahn celebrates the touchstones of the Catholic life, guiding readers to a deeper faith through the Church’s rites, customs, and traditional prayers. Signs of Life is a clear and comprehensive guide to the Biblical doctrines and historical traditions that underlie Catholic beliefs and practices. Devoting single chapters to each topic, the author takes the reader on a journey that illuminates the roots and significance of all things Catholic, including: the Sign of the Cross, the Mass, the Sacraments, praying with the saints, guardian angels, sacred images and relics, the celebration of Easter, Christmas, and other holidays, daily prayers, and much more.

The son of burgundian nobility, Bernard admitted after years of struggle that humility remained for him the most elusive of the virtues. Yet the uncompromising vehemence of his love for God made him strive for what monastic tradition taught is indispensable to anyone hoping to share God's perfect love.

From the semitic-aramaic spirituality of the early Church to the hellenized theological vision of later centuries, the syrian tradition offers modern Christians an intensity, insights, and an immediacy rare in the West.

In clear and often delightful prose, Casey brings out the personal techniques and practicalities involved in transforming prayer from an "activity" to a way of life. The freshness of his language reinforces the basic premise of this book that spiritual communion with God must be lived, not merely studied or repeated ritualistically.

From his remote Northumbrian monastery, Bede (673-735) exerted an enormous and enduring influence on the study of Scripture, history, mathematics, and Latin literature. This overview of his life and writings, first published in 1990, has now been revised in the light of the most recent scholarship. In it noted scholar Sister Benedicta Ward introduces Bede and analyzes his works and the traditions and events which gave form to his thought.

The literacy and education of medieval nuns has been a subject of dispute and study in recent years. In his third Index of medieval libraries, David Bell presents a comprehensive list of all manuscripts and printed books which have been traced with certainty or high probability to english nunneries. A systematic listing of the books available to english nuns, and in the process an indication of the wealth, the intellectual level, and the spirituality of english nuns from the Conquest to the Reformation.