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Throughout this century the Letter of James has been viewed consistently as a disjointed set of instructions. Father Hartin deviates radically from this approach. He shows that the "call for perfection" provides a unifying meaning for the letter. Examining the concept of perfection against the background of the Greco-Roman world, the Old Testament, and the Septuagint, the author shows that perfection provides a key to define the spirituality of the Letter of James. It offers an understanding of God and of the way one is called "to be in the world." Hartin adopts a fresh approach toward understanding the categories of wisdom, eschatology, and apocalyptic as they illuminate the letter's advice.
Written as a concise handbook, this Practical Guide presents a novel paradigm for addressing the enduring questions of our existence, while providing a roadmap to the rational pursuit of spirituality in contemporary life. Approaching our spiritual development as one would any experimental science, Bahram Elahi, MD, describes the nature of the human soul, or self, through a series of original diagrams and functional analogies to medicine, psychology, and physics. In so doing, he introduces a new medicine of the soul that not only establishes how to nourish and develop the soul through the practice of correct divine and ethical principles, but also how to diagnose and treat its various ailments. Explaining the purpose of our presence on earth as the completion of the first stage in our spiritual development, he summarizes this fundamental work in three main points: examining and mending one’s faith, sufficiently developing one’s sound reason, and cultivating one’s humanity. Ultimately, this timely Practical Guide offers readers of all backgrounds an accessible roadmap to our spiritual journey that is adapted to life in modern society.
An examination of the spirituality of imperfection ; draws on the wisdom stories of the ages from the Hebrew, Greek, Buddhist and Christian traditions to provide a wellspring of hope and inspiration to anyone who thirsts for spiritual growth and guidance.
"Steps to Spiritual Perfection gathers eight studies into a single work that can serve as a companion volume to Ad Monachos in the Ancient Christian Writers series (Paulist Press). The book treats the following major themes of fourth-century Egyptian monasticism - spiritual progress, exegesis, purity of heart, and monastic prayer - and thereby bridges the distance between ourselves and this treasure from another time."--BOOK JACKET.
This title, by John Saward, explores foolishness and fools in Catholic and Orthodox spirituality.
Walter Hilton's The Scale of Perfection maintains a secure place among the major religious treatises composed in fourteenth-century England. This guide to the contemplative life, written in two books of more than 40,000 words each, is notable for its careful explorations of its religious themes and also as a monument of Middle English prose. Its popularity is attested by the fact that some forty-two manuscripts containing one or both of the books survive, with a relatively large number of manuscipts with Book I alone, which suggests it may have been the more popular of the two. Hilton (born c. 1343) was a member of the religious order known as the Augustinian Canons. There is reason to believe that be was trained in canon law and studied at the University of Cambridge. He was the author of a number of works in English and Latin, all much shorter than The Scale. He died at the Augustinian Priory of Thurgarton in Nottinghamshire in 1396. On the basis of the content of certain of his works it can be safely inferred that he was actively involved in some of the religious controversies current in England in the 1380s and 1390s, and his principal concern, evident in The Scale , is to defend orthodox belief, especially in the conduct of the contemplative life.
Since the publication in English of his masterwork, The Sources of Christian Ethics, Servais Pinckaers has become the preferred guide for English-speaking students of Catholic moral theology. This late Belgian Dominican has made themes such as Beatitude, happiness, virtue, and freedom for excellence standard features of classroom instruction in ethics, moral theology, and catechesis. Father Pinckaers's new directions in moral theology came none too soon to Anglo-American moral thought, which otherwise would have become submerged completely under the waves of one kind of relativism or another. Instead of enabling cheap escapes from moral truth, Father Pinckaers directs his students to the Sermon on the Mount. There they discover that those who suffer persecution for justice's sake are called blessed or happy. This suffering may even lead to death. The present volume completes Sources. It gives us a theological account of Christian martyrdom. Authentic martyrs testify to the highest meaning that God inscribes into the moral life. In a word, nothing should deter the Christian from choosing God. No one completes a Christian life without becoming, at least, a martyr for charity. -- from back cover.
Excerpt from The Practice of Christian and Religious Perfection, Vol. 2 of 3 Though this work is composed principally for religious, yet it is very useful to all Christians; and this second part, in particular, is so disposed, as to be of very great advantage to all secular persons who desire to give themselves entirely to God's service. For their first duty is to subdue their hearts by mortifying their passions, by subjecting their senses, (especially their tongue, ) and by humbling themselves before God, in order that those virtues and good works which they have planted in their souls, may spring up and bring forth such fruit as should be expected. It is for this reason that I treat first of mortification, then of modesty and silence, and afterwards of humility; which are the virtues a Christian ought chiefly practise in the beginning of his conversion. And because the Holy Ghost would have those that enter into God's service, remain in fear, and prepare themselves for temptation, I therefore speak in the fourth treatise, of the profit and advantage of temptations, and point out the means of overcoming them. In the fifth and sixth treatises, I show the obstacles that occur in the paths of virtue, and of how great advantage it is to walk always in these paths with joy and liberty. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.