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Religion General

The Monk's Cell

Ritual and Knowledge in American Contemplative Christianity

by (author) Paula Pryce

Publisher
Oxford University Press
Initial publish date
Jan 2018
Category
General
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780190680589
    Publish Date
    Jan 2018
    List Price
    $120.00

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Description

The call to contemplative Christianity is not an easy one. Those who answer it set themselves to a sometimes arduous task of self-reformation through rigorous study and practice, learned through the teachings of monks and nuns and the writings of ancient Christian mystics, often in isolation from family and friends. Those who are dedicated can spend hours every day in meditation, prayer, liturgy, and study. Why do they come? Indeed, how do they find their way to the door at all?

Based on nearly four years of research among semi-cloistered Christian monastics and a dispersed network of non-monastic Christian contemplatives around the United States, The Monk's Cell shows how religious practitioners in both settings combined social action and intentional living with intellectual study and intensive contemplative practices in an effort to modify their ways of knowing, sensing, and experiencing the world. Organized by the metaphor of a seeker journeying towards the inner chambers of a monastic chapel, The Monk's Cell uses innovative "intersubjective fieldwork" methods to study these opaque interiorized, often silent communities, in order to show how practices like solitude, chant, contemplation, attention, and a paradoxical capacity to combine ritual with intentional "unknowing" develop and hone a powerful sense of communion with the world.

About the author

Paula Pryce is a writer and anthropologist who grew up in the historical territory of the Sinixt Interior Salish, British Columbia.

Paula Pryce's profile page

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