How does the mind experience the sacred? What biological mechanisms are involved in mystical states and trances? Is there a neurological basis for patterns in comparative religions? Does religion have an evolutionary function? This pathbreaking work by two leading medical researchers explores the neurophysiology of religious experience. Building ......
Contesting Knowledge and Practice in West African Sufi Texts
Examines the works of two Sufi Muslim scholars, Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti (d. 1811) and his son Sidi Muhammad (d. 1826), focusing on their cosmology and metaphysics of the realm of the unseen, in relation to the history of magical discourses within the Hellenistic and Arabo-Islamic worlds.
Contesting Knowledge and Practice in West African Sufi Texts
Sorcery or Science? examines how two Sufi Muslim theologians who rose to prominence in the western Sahara Desert in the late eighteenth century, Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti (d. 1811) and his son and successor, Sidi Muhammad al-Kunti (d. 1826), decisively influenced the development of Sufi Muslim thought in West Africa. Known as the Kunta scholars, ......
The Legacy of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross
The theme of Enkindling Love is God's desire for partnership with us. Excerpts from the seven moradas of Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle are interspersed with brief selections from John of the Cross's mystical trilogy in order to show the seven stages of growth and transformation.
The Spiritual Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Afro-Peruvian Mystic, Ursula De Jesus
The life of the black religious servant Ursula de Jesus (1604-1666) has remained one of the best-kept historical secrets of the New World. This English language translation of the diary she began in 1650 allows us to hear the voice of the former slave turned spiritualist. Born into slavery in Lima, Peru, Ursula entered a convent at the age of ......
The Role of Mysticism in the Theology of Martin Luther
Bengt Hoffman elevates Christian spirituality and spiritual formation as proper subjects for serious theological study. This book reveals Luther's mystical experience of God in a prayerful life to be essential in the development of his theology. It shows how the spiritual life is essential to Luther's understanding of the gospel. Balanced by his ......
The Cloud of Unknowing was the work of an unknown 14th-century English writer with a powerful message of God's unconditional love in the face of despair. Johnston's theological treatment of this and other works by the same writer makes a conscious comparison with Oriental ways of contemplation.
