Spirituality

Vita Nuova (1292-94) is regarded as Dante's most profound creation. The thirty-one poems in this, the first of his major writings, are linked by a lyrical prose narrative celebrating and debating the subject of love. Composed upon Dante's meeting with Beatrice and the "Lord of Love," it is a love story set to the task of confirming the "new life" this meeting inspired. With a critical introduction and explanatory notes, this is a new translation of a supreme work which has been read variously as biography, religious allegory, and a meditation on poetry itself.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize
Finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection

The extraordinary new poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United States

Even the men in black armor, the ones
Jangling handcuffs and keys, what else

Are they so buffered against, if not love's blade
Sizing up the heart's familiar meat?

We watch and grieve. We sleep, stir, eat.
Love: the heart sliced open, gutted, clean.

Love: naked almost in the everlasting street,
Skirt lifted by a different kind of breeze.

--from "Unrest in Baton Rouge"

In Wade in the Water, Tracy K. Smith boldly ties America's contemporary moment both to our nation's fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. These are poems of sliding scale: some capture a flicker of song or memory; some collage an array of documents and voices; and some push past the known world into the haunted, the holy. Smith's signature voice--inquisitive, lyrical, and wry--turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother, and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men, and violence. Here, private utterance becomes part of a larger choral arrangement as the collection widens to include erasures of The Declaration of Independence and the correspondence between slave owners, a found poem comprised of evidence of corporate pollution and accounts of near-death experiences, a sequence of letters written by African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and the survivors' reports of recent immigrants and refugees. Wade in the Water is a potent and luminous book by one of America's essential poets.

In honor of the bicentennial of Henry David Thoreau's birth, this edition of Walden features an introduction and annotations by renowned environmentalist Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben gives us Thoreau's Walden as the gospel of the present moment, as a neccessary book because it is useful right now.
--Robert Richardson, author of Henry Thoreau, A Life of the Mind and Emerson: The Mind on Fire

"We need to understand that when Thoreau sat in the dooryard of his cabin 'from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, ' he was offering counsel and example exactly suited for our perilous moment in time."
--Bill McKibben, from the introduction

First published in 1854, Henry David Thoreau's groundbreaking book has influenced generations of readers and continues to inspire and inform anyone with an open mind, a love of nature, and a longing for simplicity and contemplation. Bill McKibben provides a newly revised introduction and helpful annotations that place Thoreau firmly in his role as cultural and spiritual seer. This beautiful edition of Walden, published in honor of the bicentennial of Thoreau's birth, is more accessible and relevant than ever in an age of technological change and ecological crisis.

In his poem, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," William Blake hypothesized that If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." Of course, Blake's "doors of perception" are both hard to clean and even harder to keep clean. For John Ruskin, the famous 19th century art and social critic, seeing demanded a scientist's respect for fact, but also a love for what was being seen. These poems ask us to attend, with devotion and care, to a world which will always remain a mystery, but a mystery in which love calls us to the things of this world where we may become most fully human.

This spiritual classic has a history as fascinating as the book itself. The original text was first discovered in 1516 in a monastic library in Germany, and it has remained in circulation ever since. Written in the spiritual tradition of Thomas a Kempis's "Imitation of Christ and Brother Lawrence's "Practicing the Presence of God, it is for many people a treasured devotional work.

This edition of the book is titled "The Dharma of Jesus to emphasize its power as an enlightenment text and its relevance to modern spirituality. It speaks of a spirituality beyond denomination and even beyond religious tradition. It has the same simple authority as the Hindu Upanishads or the sermons of the Buddha while remaining a distinctively Christian work. One cannot read this book with an open mind and come away unchallenged -- or unchanged. It speaks of the most liberating spiritual ideas ever given to humanity, yet its language is beguilingly simple.

Martin Luther said of it: "Next to the Bible and St. Augustine, no book has ever come into my hands from which I have learnt, or would wish to learn, more of what God, and Christ, and man, and all things are." Tony D'Souza's stirring translation, together with an informative introduction, now makes this enigmatic and utterly unique devotional text available to a new generation of readers.

This volume provides an introduction to the work of Meister Eckhart and a guide to the spiritual life.

What started as an impossible dream-to build a café that employs women recovering from prostitution and addiction-is helping to fuel an astonishing movement to bring freedom and fair wages to women producers worldwide where tea and trafficking are linked by oppression and the opiate wars.

Becca Stevens started the Thistle Stop Café to empower women survivors. But when she discovered a connection between café workers and tea laborers overseas, she embarked on a global mission called "Shared Trade" to increase the value of women survivors and producers across the globe.

As she recounts the victories and unexpected challenges of building the café, Becca also sweeps the reader into the world of tea, where timeless rituals transport to an era of beauty and the challenging truths about tea's darker, more violent history. She offers moving reflections of the meaning of tea in our lives, plus recipes for tea blends that readers can make themselves.

In this journey of triumph for impoverished tea laborers, hope for café workers, and insight into the history of tea, Becca sets out to defy the odds and prove that love is the most powerful force for transformation on earth.

Saint Augustine formulated the classic Christian understanding of desire, that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. Gilbert Meilaender maintains that this frustrated desire lies at the heart of our existence. In The Way That Leads There he takes Augustine as a conversation partner for exploring subjects that human beings have wrestled with for centuries -- desire, duty, politics, sex, and grief. Meilaender's carefully reasoned, insightful work rescues Augustine from many of our misperceptions and interacts meaningfully with both C. S. Lewis and Catholic moral theology, generating insights on difficult topics. The picture of life that emerges in these pages is one of incompleteness, of our inability to perfect and unify our moral lives. Yet this inability is not a cause for despair; it is rather a call to look, with Augustine, to God as the source and object of our greatest desire.

Among those affected by the renewal of Vatican II, none experienced the changes more than women religious. Habits were replaced by secular dress; separation behind the cloister gave way to service in the world. But the deepest changes were less visible-a new way of thinking and imagining the meaning of religious life. For communities that had seen little change in a hundred years, the impact was beyond imagining. "It did not feel like 'renewal' then," writes Joan Chittister. "It felt like disaster, like loss, like liberation, like life gone wild. And it felt like all of them all at once." This book is both a study of the way change happens and an example of it. It is an inspiring story, addressed to the wider church, about how to redefine the essentials of faith in a time when old ways and formulas no longer serve.

Resilience enables us not only to survive adversity, but to be transformed by it. This book offers simple and proven strategies to develop resilience that will be of enormous benefit to anyone who is yearning to feel more peaceful and prepared. Coast Guard veteran, interfaith chaplain, and pastor Tracy Mehr-Muska shares the stories of her own struggles with self-esteem, sexual assault, and miscarriage that inspired her to research resilience and to enthusiastically reach this conclusion: resilience is not something that is inborn, but instead is a set of characteristics we can cultivate. Mehr-Muska brings these characteristics to life using inspirational secular and multifaith stories, as well as compelling scientific evidence. She ties each chapter together with an uplifting story of a personal friend that bravely and gracefully overcame obstacles and embodies each of these essential characteristics. Weathering the Storm also poses insightful questions for reflection and offers concrete strategies for implementation that can be used individually or in group contexts such as faith communities, families, and therapeutic relationships. Just as we practice fire drills before a fire happens, this book will help us be better equipped for the eventual storms of life so we can live with greater peace and preparedness. ""Weathering the Storm pulsates with hope without hint of smoothing over rough seas of human trauma and tragedy. With raw personal transparency and innovative attention to the resilience of her closest mates, former Coast Guard officer and current university chaplain Tracy Mehr-Muska coaxes us into believing in our capacity to endure. She reminds us again why we are alive. There is no simpler way to say it: your life will be richer for having read this brave and beautiful book."" --Robert C. Dykstra, Princeton Theological Seminary ""Mehr-Muska offers wise and accessible counsel to all of us who could use more resilience. Drawing from the life experience of a group of women she met in the Coast Guard, as well as her own years working in hospice and as a college chaplain, Mehr-Muska shows that resilience is not a magical attribute that only some have, but a set of skills that can be learned. A pleasure to read, this book is a deeply sensitive and insightful guide on how to meet life's challenges with clarity and courage."" --Victoria Pitts-Taylor, Wesleyan University ""Some people get stuck in a spiritual or political or personal traffic jam and start whining. Others start planning alternative routes. Still others make good use of the down time. Tracy's book helps you become a back roads, thoughtful, spirit-full, anywhere, any time kind of person."" --Donna Schaper, Judson Memorial Church Tracy W. Mehr-Muska, DMin, serves as a university chaplain at Wesleyan University. She is an ordained Presbyterian pastor, board-certified interfaith chaplain, Coast Guard veteran, wife, and mother. Her passion for learning about and teaching resilience has been inspired by the strong and spirited people she has served and worked alongside while in the military and while ministering in a trauma hospital, prison, psychiatric hospital, university, and hospice.

Clyde S. Kilby is rare among the best expositors of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and their circle of friends in that he became personally acquainted not only with Lewis and Tolkien, but also Lewis's brother Major Warren Lewis, Owen Barfield, Lord David Cecil, and others of the Inklings. He particularly captured the soul of C.S. Lewis in his lectures, articles and books, which guided his vision in creating and curating the prestigious Wade Collection at Wheaton College, Illinois. This delightful book makes available Dr. Kilby's wide-ranging and inspiring take on Lewis, Tolkien and the affinities they shared with their circle, the Inklings, in their enchantment with profound thought vibrant with imaginative wonder which took them beyond "the walls of the world". (Colin Duriez Inklings scholar, author of The Oxford Inklings)

"If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for."--Thomas Merton

Some of today's most popular spiritual writers--including Rev. James Martin, S.J.; Bishop Robert Barron; Robert Ellsberg; Rev. Daniel P. Horan, O.F.M.; and Kaya Oakes--explore the meaning of life and what we live for using Thomas Merton's life and writings as a guide.

In his address before the US Congress, Pope Francis praised Merton as one of four exemplary Americans. This was no surprise to the thousands who already know and appreciate the twentieth-century monk, but there were many listening that day who still have no idea who Merton is.

What I Am Living For offers readers new to Merton, as well as longtime enthusiasts, an opportunity to see how the influential twentieth-century monk and writer continues to encourage the awakening of faith in the twenty-first century.

The book is in two parts. Each contributor to part one focuses on an aspect of the spiritual life that is of vital importance today and on which Merton made a profound impact. These include:

Martin--Finding who God intends you to be

Ellsberg--The spiritual need for solitude and stability

Oakes--The importance of coming to terms with our sexuality, whether married, single, or celibate

Horan--The importance of dialogue with God, culture, society, and people of other faiths

Part two features shorter, often more personal reflections on the future of faith, the life and teachings of Merton, and what he still says to anyone who seeks a relationship with God.

Contributors include such well-known writers as Barron; Sue Monk Kidd; Pico Iyer; Paula Huston; Ilia Delio, O.F.M.; Paul Quenon, O.C.S.O.; and Sylvia Boorstein.