In 1945, a Coptic document containing sayings attributed to Jesus was discovered deep within an ancient Egyptian cave. This "lost gospel," the Gospel of Thomas, was written at the same time as the canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and is now considered one of the greatest...

These dialogues between Robert Aitken Roshi, one of the first American-born Zen masters, and Brother David Steindl-Rast, the Roman Catholic monk and hermit, took place during a week-long retreat the two old friends undertook in 1991 in a remote part of the island of Hawaii. Their aim was to approach...

Inner Christianity is the first introduction to mystical and esoteric Christianity for the general reader. It speaks from a nonsectarian point of view, unearthing insights from the whole of the Christian tradition, orthodox and heretical, famous and obscure. The esoteric tradition has traditionally...

This collection of folk tales, legends, and narratives about the life of Francis of Assisi and his followers appeared about seventy-five years after the saint’s death, in the early fourteenth century. The writings have remained popular ever since due to their beauty and charm,...

The heart of the Christian faith is a direct encounter with God so profound that it can be referred to as union. It is an experience that cannot be described in words, but it can be glimpsed—in the radiant lives of the men and women called mystics. Here James Harpur presents...

This introduction to the writing and preaching of the greatest medieval European mystic contains selections from his sermons, treatises, and sayings, as well as Table Talk, the records of his informal advice to his spiritual children.

From the time of the desert fathers to our own "post-Christian" age, the literature of monastic wisdom has provided inspiration for those of us who lead ordinary lives in the world. Father Jeremy Driscoll, a poet and theologian who is also a Benedictine monk, brings the genre into the...

In print for more than forty years, New Seeds of Contemplation has served as a guide to the contemplative life for several generations of spiritual seekers. The word contemplation is itself somewhat problematical, according to Thomas Merton: "It can become almost a magic word,...

Here, in one of his most popular of his more than thirty books, Thomas Merton provides further meditations on the spiritual life in sixteen thoughtful essays, beginning with his classic treatise "Love Can Be Kept Only by Being Given Away." This sequel to Seeds of Contemplation...

Thousands have fallen in love with the anonymously authored book The Way of a Pilgrim—the account of an ordinary man's encounter with the Eastern Orthodox Christian practice of the Jesus Prayer, which consists of the constant repetition of the short phrase, "Lord Jesus Christ,...

This pocket-sized treasury of wisdom from the influential Christian contemplative, political activist, social visionary, and literary figure is abridged from the larger collection Seeds by Robert Inchausti (Shambhala, 2002).

The Practice of the Presence of God is among the most enduringly popular of all Christian devotional works. It is a collection of conversations with a simple seventeenth-century French Carmelite monk who, through the simplest of everyday activities, was able to achieve a profound intimacy...

How did we come to revere this thirteenth-century Italian merchant's son as a saint? This penetrating meditation provides what may be the best answer yet, by gently but sure-handedly cutting through every pious legend to discover what is timeless and universally true about Saint Francis.

Visionary, mystic, poet, musician, naturalist, healer, theologian-the Rhineland nun Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) was a Renaissance woman long before there was a Renaissance. This is the first book in English to offer a representative selection of writings from all of her amazing range of work....

Thomas Merton is often considered the most prominent Christian contemplative of the twentieth century, but he was also a political activist, social visionary, and literary figure whose writings combine the candor of Thoreau and the moral vision of Gandhi. Here is a remarkably accessible introduction...