Teresa of Avila and Jonathan Edwards on Prayer and Spirituality

Contemplative prayer has been a major source of contention in evangelical spirituality. Contemplative prayer is frequently mentioned as one apparent spiritual activity that is foreign to the scripture and Christian worldview and more resembling the New Age Movement and pantheistic Eastern religion by people who are skeptical of the mystical Christian tradition. This article will examine Teresa of Avila’s thought on mystical prayer, which is sometimes misinterpreted as a notion incompatible with evangelical theology of prayer. Hence, Teresa’s ideas of mystical prayer will be examined and compared with Jonathan Edwards’ concepts of prayer, which is considered to reflect evangelical theology of prayer. The comparison suggests that the contemplative, mystical prayer of Teresa is compatible with evangelical theology of prayer in its progress and purpose. Teresa and Edwards both understood prayer as an experience and progress that leads to the complete union with God, mediated by Christ and his words in scripture. This spiritual union with God will transform the devoted one with tremendous passion and strength to love and help others in their struggle and suffering. This study of Teresa’s thought of mystical prayer is expected to reinvigorate evangelical theology and praxis of prayer by learning from the rich spirituality of the Christian mystical tradition.

Hagiography as a Platform for Internal Catholic Debate in Early Modern Europe: Francisco de Ribera's La Vida de la Madre Teresa de Iesus (1590) and the Defense of a Contemplative Way Inside the Jesuit Order

By the end of the sixteenth century, the Society of Jesus was redefining its ever-growing organization. Starting with the generals Mercurian and Acquaviva, the order attempted to leave behind the open spaces devoted to retired forms of prayer so as to put the full weight of the institution on its practical ministries. However, such an advance against contemplative prayer did not lack challenges. The present work aims to rescue a hardly studied critical prose in the midst of those changes: the case of the Spanish Jesuit Francisco de Ribera. This article suggests that Salamanca's professor used his words to defend contemplative prayer. For this purpose, he utilized a device of great scope in the Catholic universe during the Counter-Reformation: the hagiographic narrative. It is proposed here that the vita appears as a mechanism of dispute not only outside but also inside Roman Catholicism. In this sense, the hagiography was a platform of debate within the order. Far from being a purely repetitive text, Ribera's biography of the Castilian visionary and reformer Teresa of Ávila shows the exaltation of a form of prayer that he gladly projected to the group of all believers and especially to the Society of Jesus.

Modlitwa Jezusowa jako dziedzictwo duchowe Polaków i Ukraińców

The article is an attempt to look at Jesus’ prayer as a common spiritual heritage of all Christians, including the Polish and the Ukrainian, and at the same time a synthesis of the current thoughts on this prayer tradition, which is one of the oldest forms of Christian contemplative prayer. It originates from the Holy Scriptures and meditations of the Word of God, it was practiced and developed by the Desert Fathers, Fathers of the Church, monks, clergy and laity, above all in the Churches of the Christian East. Today, the most widespread is in the Orthodox and Greek Catholic Church, but for many years has been experiencing a kind of revival in the Catholic Church. The article presents the teaching of the Church, its saints and contemporary spiritual masters on this subject.

Adam of Dryburgh

This chapter explores the life and theology of Adam of Dryburgh. Overtaken by love for the contemplative life, Adam became a preacher, an abbot, and a prolific theologian. The fact that Adam was in the first place a preacher is reflected in his idiosyncratic and very characteristic prose writing, which is very ‘oral’ in style—designed not to be read but to be listened to. Most of all, we see Adam in his early work as a convinced Augustinian. It was probably while serving as administrator of Dryburgh in the early 1180s that Adam composed what is generally considered to be his masterpiece, his De triplici genere contemplationis, a guide to contemplative prayer. His influence seems to have become greater, not less, as time went on: the great majority of surviving manuscripts of his work date from the fifteenth century. Adam is the only medieval theologian of international stature who lived and worked almost entirely in Scotland.