“Practicing to be a contemplative," says Zen priest Sensei Zenju, "you’re learning to be embodied and to be boundless at the same time.”
mysticism
In the private journals of contemplative thinker Thomas Merton, Sophronia Scott found guidance for how to live in these fraught times.
A contemplative Catholic nun touches the world through prayer.
For Valarie Kaur, love is sweet labor
A memoir of an activist whose life is grounded in Sikh mysticism
I love pop psychology pieces that try to make sense of those Christmas-tree-colored splotches that appear on brain scans.
While women have historically been bound by family obligations, household chores, or desperate poverty, there have been monasteries throughout history that allowed some to focus on their vocation without those typical pressures.
At first I found the "little flower" insufferable. Then I read her unedited writing.
The Woman, the Hour, and the Garden, by Addison Hodges Hart
Hart’s vision is at once allegorical, moral, and eschatological. Christ, married to the church, draws us into deeper life with God.
Flesh Made Word, by Emily A. Holmes
Emily Holmes endeavors, with the help of French feminist theories, to understand several of the medieval mystics who are most alien to 21st-century religious sensibilities.
I was the only woman in a seminary course on negative theology. One day, a young man raised his hand and asked, “What about an ordinary housewife? How could a person like that live this life of prayer?”
