Around the year 1215, female mystics and their sacramental devotion were among orthodoxy’s most sophisticated weapons in the fight against heresy. Holy women’s claims to be in direct communication ...with God placed them in positions of unprecedented influence. Yet by the end of the Middle Ages female mystics were frequently mistrusted, derided, and in danger of their lives. The witch hunts were just around the corner. While studies of sanctity and heresy tend to be undertaken separately, Proving Woman brings these two avenues of inquiry together by associating the downward trajectory of holy women with medieval society’s progressive reliance on the inquisitional procedure. Inquisition was soon used for resolving most questions of proof. It was employed for distinguishing saints and heretics; it underwrote the new emphasis on confession in both sacramental and judicial spheres; and it heralded the reintroduction of torture as a mechanism for extracting proof through confession.
The set of Jewish mystical teachings known as Kabbalah are often imagined as timeless texts, teachings that have been passed down through the millennia. Yet, as this groundbreaking new study shows, ...Kabbalah flourished in a specific time and place, emerging in response to the social prejudices that Jews faced.
Hartley Lachter, a scholar of religion studies, transports us to medieval Spain, a place where anti-Semitic propaganda was on the rise and Jewish political power was on the wane.Kabbalistic Revolutionproposes that, given this context, Kabbalah must be understood as a radically empowering political discourse. While the era's Christian preachers claimed that Jews were blind to the true meaning of scripture and had been abandoned by God, the Kabbalists countered with a doctrine that granted Jews a uniquely privileged relationship with God. Lachter demonstrates how Kabbalah envisioned this increasingly marginalized group at the center of the universe, their mystical practices serving to maintain the harmony of the divine world.
For students of Jewish mysticism,Kabbalistic Revolutionprovides a new approach to the development of medieval Kabbalah. Yet the book's central questions should appeal to anyone with an interest in the relationships between religious discourses, political struggles, and ethnic pride.
Emotional states and their representations are gaining increasing attention in the historical study of mysticism. Building on the notion that mystical texts ca.n be utilized to form a relation with ...the divine, in the current article I explore the intersection of emotional expressions, auditory elements, and devotional traditions as central praxes in Ottoman society. While focusing on a late offshoot of the Sabbatean movement, the Ma'aminim of Salonica, a contextualized analysis of previously unexplored sources demonstrates that during the first half of the nineteenth century the Sabbateans reshaped their communal practices according to contemporary cultural conventions in the Ottoman sphere. This study suggests that viewing mystical texts as generators of affect and sensorial ritual draws the focus from the spiritual world of a mystic-author to the experiences of community members, and it proves that neighboring soundscapes and appropriation of popular culture may serve as fundamental components in the historicization of religious phenomena.
A fascinating look at the life of Jesus Christ from a 'mystical' viewpoint, written by 'Yogi Ramacharaka', one of the many pseudonyms of author, occultist and New Thought movementist William Walker ...Atkinson.
The most recent mystical theology scholarship - a discipline that has found new energy and influence. This is examined through the lens of Wittgenstein's philosophy.
This distinctive comparison of Islamic and Christian mysticism focuses on the mystic journey in the two faith traditions - the journey which every believer must make and which leads to the Divine. ...The author clears away misconceptions and highlights similarities and differences in the thought and lives of six key mystics.
Apart from this one spark, neo-Kantianism is the pure cult of a mysticism without an object. 1) finite set of numbers 2) set of all natural numbers5 3) " " rational6 " 4) " " algebraic7 " { ad 2), 3) ...+ 4) are equivalent8 5) " all real9 " not countable 6) set of real numbers between real numbers however little differentiated (4 and 6 together !!) not countable, equivalent to the set of all real numbers.10 7) set of all injective11 functions f (x), 0≤ x ≤1, not equivalent to that of the continuum.
