Preserving Scriptural Harmony

Only one allusion to the phrase “the faith once delivered to the saints” (Jude 3) survives from the early church, in Book 10 of Origen’s Commentary on John. This article establishes that Origen is offering a close paraphrase of this saying, and suggests that it appears as a slogan, possibly reflecting use by other Christians, in favour of overriding the implications of the spiritual reading of John 2.20–22. It shows how Origen’s interpretative procedures – distinguishing literal and spiritual senses, and invoking the key principle of Scripture’s internal harmony – interact and combine to resist this deployment of Jude 3. Although this requires Origen to admit some kind of “change of good things once given to the saints”, it constitutes an application and further elucidation of his careful exegetical method which, ultimately, “preserves the harmony of the narrative of the Scriptures”.

How to Read This Book: Jewish Lights Publishing and the Pragmatics of Spiritual Reading

ABSTRACTThis paper considers how print culture was mobilized in the early 1990s to transmit spiritual beliefs, experiences, and emotions through an examination of the pragmatics of reading endorsed by Jewish Lights Publishing (founded in 1990). Using interviews, advertisements, internal memos, books, jacket copy, and reviews, this study reconstructs the ecology out of which Jewish Lights Publishing emerged, as well as the goals and assumptions about Judaism, Jews, and books that animated the creation of a new, and specifically spiritual, Jewish press. I argue that what makes Jewish Lights a spiritual press is not only the content and design of the books, but also the instructions the press offers for how to use the books it produces. This paper is not only about the production and circulation of spiritual Jewish books, but the production and circulation of beliefs about what spiritual Jewish books do for an imagined community of readers.

Linguo-stylistic Features of the Letters of St. Ambrose of Optina to Private Individuals

В статье рассмотрены частные письма оптинского старца прп. Амвросия (Гренкова) (1812-1894) к монашествующим и мирянам: их стилистические свойства, выбор лексики, средств художественной выразительности. Особое внимание уделено притчам и афоризмам в речи старца как одной из характерных примет индивидуального стиля. Выразительный и доступный стиль частных посланий прп. Амвросия делает его письма востребованным духовным чтением на протяжении уже двух столетий. The article considers private letters of St. Ambrose (Grenkov) of Optina (1812- 1894) to monks and laity: their stylistic properties, choice of vocabulary, means of artistic expression. Special attention is paid to parables and aphorisms as one of the notable signs of his individual style. The expressive and accessible style of St. Ambrose’s private Epistles has made his letters a sought-after spiritual reading for two centuries.

‘The Sweet Pain of Life’ - Dancing Metaphysical Longing: A Theological Reading of Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake

The performing arts offer opportunities for the creative representation of spiritual and moral values and serve an important function in contemporary culture. Dance, and in particular ballet, has the potential through its somatic dynamics centred around graceful movement and stylised gesture, to offer an alluring spectacle of beauty and value to any audience. What we offer in this article is a philosophical, theological and spiritual reading of Matthew Bourne’s 2018 production of Swan Lake. The dance revolves around the longing of one male swan for another and the obstacles they encounter due to their desire. We argue that this work is important, not because of its homoerotic appeal, but because it offers a portrayal of universal, spiritual longing as an analogue to, and constituent of, sexual erotic yearning. Since this religious and transcendent approach to sexual love is found in Platonic, Biblical and other theological sources, we interpret the dance through these philosophical and religious lenses, but freely admit that it takes a certain purifying of the eye of the soul (as ascetics have suggested throughout the ages) to interpret the dance in this manner.

St. Dimitry of Rostov and his multi-volume work the “Book of the Lives of the Saints”

The article is devoted to the creative activity of the Metropolitan Dimitry of Rostov (Daniel Savich Tuptalo), one of the most famous Slavic writers of the late 17th — early 18th centuries. He entered into the history of Russian literature as an author of a multi-volume work on the Lives of the Saints (1689–1705). This work has been translated from Church Slavonic into many foreign languages and has become an important source for spiritual reading for millions people around the world.

Sirr al-ʿālamayn: un Ġazālī apocrifo o inaspettato?

Sirr al-ʿālamayn wa kašf mā fī’l-dārayn is a work whose attribution to al-Ġazālī has long been debated, and whose authenticity today is almost unanimously denied. In what may be considered as its second part, it contains some passages relating to alchemy and its operations that seem to be worthy of reflection. Such passages, present in a work attributed to Ġazālī, do not necessarily cast further doubts on its attribution; because if on the one hand some passages are to be considered perhaps a bit too ‘audacious’, on the other a non-negligible part of the work is dedicated to Ġazalian themes treated in a way that appears parallel to what is expressed in authentic works. After examining different arguments for and against the attribution to Ġazālī, arguments destined however to leave the question open, we realize that the Sirr being or not being a work by Ġazālī is not the most interesting thing in our research: for a historian of science, and in particular of alchemy, the main contribution of this work is in the role that it plays over time in its diffusion and among its readers: be it authentic or not authentic, this work, as attributed to Ġazālī, probably contributed to creating or consolidating the image of a Ġazālī connoisseur of alchemy and magic, and perhaps also to relating the search for transmutation to the search for God; a not insignificant circumstance, if we consider the progressive affirmation of a ‘spiritual’ reading of alchemy and transmutation.

“Hanging out with Jesus”

This chapter studies FOCUS missionaries’ daily Holy Hour and argues that this particular prayer discipline shapes how Catholic millennials become missionaries who are willing to evangelize college students every single day. Missionaries pray at the intersection of religious experience, religious practice, social context, bodily comportment, and interior processes. Daily Holy Hour involves Adoration, mental prayer, lectio divina, intercessory prayer, and spiritual reading. With each prayer form, millennials enact the mundane work of trying to become twenty-first century Catholic missionaries. These prayer practices—updated, remixed, and reclaimed for a new generation of Catholics—were the way these millennials articulated and embodied their Catholic identity.

The Revelatory Text and the prologue of the Gospel of Luke

The first print of the book of Sandra Schneiders, The Revelatory Text, appeared more than 25 years ago. With the help of the hermeneutic theories of Gadamer and Ricoeur, she proposes a kind of exegesis that integrates scholarly methods and spiritual reading. In this article we investigate how the model of Sandra Schneiders is congruent with the old intuition of the lectio divina. We compare the model of Schneiders with the systematisation of the lectio divina by Guigo II, the Carthusian. As a result, we see in the text of Guigo the pre-understanding of the Carthusian spiritual life at work. And as a result we also recognise Schneiders’ transformative understanding of the subject matter of the text in the phase of the oratio and the comtemplatio. In the model of Guigo, there is also room for critical analysis in the phase of the meditation. We investigate also if the Bible itself gives indications for the kind of exegesis Schneiders proposes. What Schneiders says about pre-understanding is present in the prologue of the Gospel of Luke. Luke considers the story he tells as a history guided by God. What Luke tells about the genesis of his text belongs to the world behind the text. The world of the text is present as a well-ordered world. Luke speaks also about the transformation of the reader. In this, we recognise what Schneiders says about the world before the text and the transformative understanding of the subject matter of the text. We conclude that the model of Schneiders is innovative in relation of common academic exegesis. It is rooted in the tradition of Christian spiritual reading, and it is present in those biblical texts which indicate how to read.

‘But I Still Read The Bible!’

While it might be assumed that post-Christian women have rejected the sacred texts of Christianity, this chapter highlights their continued use of the Bible to resource their spiritual lives, and in doing so raises two questions for gendered religious reading practices. First, post-Christian women’s biblicalism crosses the distinction between sacred and secular literatures, and reading processes sometimes made in religious feminisms. Second, despite the emphasis on ‘women’s experience’, feminist theology has focused on the text to the extent that actual readers and their spiritual reading practices are often overlooked. Yet, qualitatively interviewing post-Christian women reveals the biblical reading and the ‘filtering’ strategies they employ to monitor their use of the Bile. This questions the assumption that women who use literature as a spiritual resource are doing so because they have found the Christian testaments lacking in opportunities to access the divine and have therefore excluded them from their personal collections of spiritual texts. While post-Christian women readers in this study are critical of scripture and question its relevancy, they are still reading the Bible.