In the last decade of his life, while living as a hermit-monk in dialogue with the world, Thomas Merton created a body of visual art that has remained largely unknown and little studied in the nearly forty years since his death. With this book, Merton's art at last moves out of the shadows to be...

The early Christian monks of Egypt, Syria, and Palestine were the spiritual heroes of their age—fleeing the security of civilization for the desert, where they sought God in lives of prayer, contemplation, and radical simplicity. This book is a portable collection of their teachings, and those...

Chanting the psalms, or psalmody, is an ancient practice of vital importance in the Christian spiritual tradition. Today many think of it as a discipline that belongs only in monasteries—but psalmody is a spiritual treasure that is available to anyone who prays. You don’t need to be...

From John Chrysostom in the fourth century to Teresa of Avila in the sixteenth to William Butler Yeats in the twentieth, this wide-ranging collection is a treasury of writings on prayer from throughout the history of Christianity. Lorraine Kisly has arranged the material according to the great general...

This anonymous fourteenth-century text is the glory of English mysticism, and one of the most practical and useful guides to finding union with God ever written. Carmen Acevedo Butcher’s new translation is the first to bring the text into a modern English idiom—while remaining strictly...

God.

It’s such a small arrangement of letters to cause so much trouble. In the culture wars that rage around us today, few of the people who use that word as a weapon have any sense of its source, its nuances, or the ultimate elusiveness of its definition. The same can...

The spiritual exploits of Anthony the Great—the prototype of the Christian "Desert Father"—have been immortalized in stories and art since the fourth century. Here is the stunning account of a modern seeker's quest to get beneath the legends that surround Anthony and to determine...

The spiritual exploits of Saint Anthony the Great—the prototype of the Christian "Desert Father"—have been immortalized in stories and art since the fourth century. Here is the stunning account of a modern seeker's quest to get beneath the legends that surround Anthony and...

When Thomas Merton entered a Trappist monastery in December 1941, he turned his back on secular life—including a very promising literary career. He sent his journals, a novel-in-progess, and copies of all his poems to his mentor, Columbia professor Mark Van Doren, for safe...

“We always have a choice to live the moment as a cause of resentment or as a cause for joy.”—Henri Nouwen (1932–1996)

The insights of Henri Nouwen have shown millions of people how to choose joy in any moment—even moments full of pain and brokenness.  Few...

Jakob Boehme (1575–1624) was one of those remarkable teachers, like Meister Eckhart, who pushed language to its limits to describe an experience that happens above and beyond rational thought. He was a Bohemian shoemaker who, in response to the overwhelming visionary experiences he began to...

A landmark work of scholarship and literary translation, The Gnostic Bible presents the most significant and beautiful sacred texts of gnostic mysticism. The gnostics were religious thinkers who believed that salvation is found through mystical knowledge and personal religious experience....

Gnosticism was a wide-ranging religious movement of the first millennium CE—with earlier antecedents and later flourishings—whose adherents sought salvation through knowledge and personal religious experience. Gnostic writings offer striking perspectives on both early Christian and non-Christian...

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Gnosticism was a wide-ranging religious movement of the first millennium C.E. whose adherents sought salvation through knowledge and...

"You can't 'get' to heaven," says Mother Macrina, "you must become heaven," and the way that happens is through prayer, repentance, and love. The wise and lively Mother Macrina—a fictional character born from the imagination of author Irma Zaleski—is a modern-day...