The Shattering Of Loneliness

Author : Erik Varden
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1472953274
Total Pages : 118 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Shattering of Loneliness written by Erik Varden and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The experience of loneliness is as universal as hunger or thirst. Because it affects us more intimately, we are less inclined to speak of it. But who has not known its gnawing ache? The fear of loneliness causes anguish. It prompts reckless deeds. To this, every age has borne witness. No voice is more insidious than the one that whispers in our ear: 'You are irredeemably alone, no light will pierce your darkness.' The fundamental statement of Christianity is to convict that voice of lying. The Christian condition unfolds within the certainty that ultimate reality, the source of all that is, is a personal reality of communion, no metaphysical abstraction. Men and women, made 'in the image and likeness' of God, bear the mark of that original communion stamped on their being. When our souls and bodies cry out for Another, it is not a sign of sickness, but of health. A labour of potential joy is announced. We are reminded of what we have it in us to become. That our labour may be fruitful, Scripture repeatedly exhorts us to 'remember'. The remembrance enjoined is partly introspective and existential, partly historical, for the God who took flesh to redeem our loneliness leaves traces in history. This book examines six facets of Christian remembrance, complementing biblical exegesis with readings from literature, ancient and modern. It aims to be an essay in theology. At the same time, it proposes a grounded reflection on what it means to be a human being.

Author : Erik Varden
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1472979451
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Entering the Twofold Mystery written by Erik Varden and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-01-20 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Erik Varden published The Shattering of Loneliness in 2018. Now, with the world in the throes of uncertainty and turbulence, he helps us interpret the signs of the times, convinced that the perennial experience of monks and nuns has much to teach us. The principles of monasticism have become attractive to many, awakened as we are to the importance of integrity, the pursuit of peace, asceticism as a path to freedom, hospitality and contemplative seeing. After a deeply personal introduction, Varden invites us to consider what makes a monk. He then takes us on a pilgrimage through the Church's year, drawing on Scripture, tradition and literary and religious figures of our time. Varden lets the reader discover the generous breadth and depth of a monk's outlook on life. In so doing he provides inspiration, enjoyment and enlightenment in equal measure.

Author : Paul Verhaeghe
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429915926
Total Pages : 204 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Love in a Time of Loneliness written by Paul Verhaeghe and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first essay, "The Impossible Couple", is both a humorous and razor-sharp analysis of the contemporary relationship between man and woman. In the second essay, "Fleeing Fathers", the author demonstrates that today the Freudian Oedipus complex has disappeared, with a resulting shattering of classic gender roles. Post-modern morals are strange compared to previous morality, because they convey an obligation to enjoy. Things become even stranger when one finds that the expected enjoyment fails to come and, instead of that, we are faced with boredom, anxiety, and anger. The author reconsiders the opposition between Eros and Thanatos as an opposition between two forms of sexual pleasure. The fact that this opposition is ever present in heterosexual love demonstrates that gender differentiation goes beyond temporal cultural forms. Accessibly written and provocatively argued, Love in a Time of Loneliness is a polemic whose very informality belies its serious intent. In these three fascinating essays, The author leaves the ordinary paths of thinking and sets out to discover what drives us in sex and love.

Author : Thomas Dumm
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 067403113X
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Loneliness as a Way of Life written by Thomas Dumm and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “What does it mean to be lonely?” Thomas Dumm asks. His inquiry, documented in this book, takes us beyond social circumstances and into the deeper forces that shape our very existence as modern individuals. The modern individual, Dumm suggests, is fundamentally a lonely self. Through reflections on philosophy, political theory, literature, and tragic drama, he proceeds to illuminate a hidden dimension of the human condition. His book shows how loneliness shapes the contemporary division between public and private, our inability to live with each other honestly and in comity, the estranged forms that our intimate relationships assume, and the weakness of our common bonds. A reading of the relationship between Cordelia and her father in Shakespeare’s King Lear points to the most basic dynamic of modern loneliness—how it is a response to the problem of the “missing mother.” Dumm goes on to explore the most important dimensions of lonely experience—Being, Having, Loving, and Grieving. As the book unfolds, he juxtaposes new interpretations of iconic cultural texts—Moby-Dick, Death of a Salesman, the film Paris, Texas, Emerson’s “Experience,” to name a few—with his own experiences of loneliness, as a son, as a father, and as a grieving husband and widower. Written with deceptive simplicity, Loneliness as a Way of Life is something rare—an intellectual study that is passionately personal. It challenges us, not to overcome our loneliness, but to learn how to re-inhabit it in a better way. To fail to do so, this book reveals, will only intensify the power that it holds over us.

Author : Mary David
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1472971337
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Joy of God written by Mary David and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sister Mary David Totah was a nun of the Benedictine contemplative community of St Cecilia's Abbey on the Isle of Wight. American by birth, she was educated at Loyola University, the University of Virginia and Christ Church, Oxford. After a distinguished teaching career, she entered religious life in 1985. For 22 years until her early death from cancer she guided the young nuns of her abbey with enthusiasm, wisdom and wit. The spirituality to be found in the pages of this book demonstrates to the reader why her influence should have been so great and so deep. Her notes to the novices deal with issues of relevance to a world beyond the cloister: What is the meaning of suffering? How do we cope with living with people who annoy us? How do we relate to a God we cannot see? How do we make the big decisions of life? Sister Mary David's teaching was both profound and intensely practical, suffused with faith in God's joy in our work, leisure, community and family life but above all in our view and understanding of ourselves. This book, with an introduction by Abbot Erik Varden OCSO (author of The Shattering of Loneliness) shows us how to realize the Joy that is God.

Author : Luigi Gioia
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1472950992
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Touched by God written by Luigi Gioia and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Luigi Gioia's book Say it to God: In Search of Prayer was chosen as the 2018 Archbishop of Canterbury's Lent Book and welcomed by many as an honest, accessible guide to freshen their practice of prayer in the midst of busy modern life. In Touched by God, Gioia moves on to explore the art of contemplation. He points out that contemplation is not a more advanced way of praying but a silent and loving attentiveness to God which has nothing in common with disembodied, ahistorical and impersonal forms of spirituality. Contemplation begins when we are touched by God through Scripture and become aware of his presence in us. Gioia shows how this happens concretely in the lives of the characters of the Gospel of John, his chosen guide to learn how to welcome God in our lives and interact with him. Gioia's way to contemplation takes the reader not only through Scripture but also through plays and novels where God is never mentioned or is seen as absent, distant or even as an enemy. By engaging with both religious and non-religious authors the reader can discover that contemplation is not some kind of spiritual wonderland but coexists with doubts, thrives in the middle of struggles, is discovered even in suffering, dissolves guilt and leads to authentic self-knowledge and compassion for every human being.

Author : Mary Laura Philpott
Publisher : Atria Books
ISBN 13 : 1982102810
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book I Miss You When I Blink written by Mary Laura Philpott and published by Atria Books. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER A charmingly relatable and wise memoir-in-essays by acclaimed writer and bookseller Mary Laura Philpott, “the modern day reincarnation of…Nora Ephron, Erma Bombeck, Jean Kerr, and Laurie Colwin—all rolled into one” (The Washington Post), about what happened after she checked off all the boxes on a successful life’s to-do list and realized she might need to reinvent the list—and herself. Mary Laura Philpott thought she’d cracked the code: Always be right, and you’ll always be happy. But once she’d completed her life’s to-do list (job, spouse, house, babies—check!), she found that instead of feeling content and successful, she felt anxious. Lost. Stuck in a daily grind of overflowing calendars, grueling small talk, and sprawling traffic. She’d done everything “right” but still felt all wrong. What’s the worse failure, she wondered: smiling and staying the course, or blowing it all up and running away? And are those the only options? Taking on the conflicting pressures of modern adulthood, Philpott provides a “frank and funny look at what happens when, in the midst of a tidy life, there occur impossible-to-ignore tugs toward creativity, meaning, and the possibility of something more” (Southern Living). She offers up her own stories to show that identity crises don’t happen just once or only at midlife and reassures us that small, recurring personal re-inventions are both normal and necessary. Most of all, in this “warm embrace of a life lived imperfectly” (Esquire), Philpott shows that when you stop feeling satisfied with your life, you don’t have to burn it all down. You can call upon your many selves to figure out who you are, who you’re not, and where you belong. Who among us isn’t trying to do that? “Be forewarned that you’ll laugh out loud and cry, probably in the same essay. Philpott has a wonderful way of finding humor, even in darker moments. This is a book you’ll want to buy for yourself and every other woman you know” (Real Simple).

Author : Michal Ben-Naftali
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781948830072
Total Pages : 138 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Teacher written by Michal Ben-Naftali and published by . This book was released on 2020-01-21 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on true events, the story of a Holocaust survivor who spent her life trying to disappear.

Author : Adrienne von Speyr
Publisher : Ignatius Press
ISBN 13 : 0898700442
Total Pages : 186 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Christlicher Stand written by Adrienne von Speyr and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The more popular, practical counterpart to Hans Urs von Balthasar's own book of the same title, this book plumbs the depths of what it means to be a Christian.

Author : Elisabeth-Paule Labat
Publisher : Liturgical Press
ISBN 13 : 0879076801
Total Pages : 160 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Song That I Am written by Elisabeth-Paule Labat and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2014-04-02 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Song That I Am: On the Mystery of Music is a short but full-to-the-brim essay on the decisive role that great music (whether Bach, Tavener, or Gregorian chant) ought to play in the spiritual life. With admirable restraint Élisabeth-Paule Labat shares her interior experience of music and thus continually opens up fresh vistas through worlds of sound and spirit. With her uncanny gift of language, Labat precisely describes soundings and yearnings of the soul that many of us glimpse fleetingly. Because "only the lover sings" (St. Augustine), her final illumination is that the experience of profound music ought to transform us into the beauty that we hear.