Christ's Redemptive Nuptials: The Incomparabe Marriage Of The Lamb is an inspiring narrative portraying the incomparable marriage of Christ and the church presented in storyline form. This narrative begins in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve in presenting graphic mental images of their serene enjoyment in this scenic wonderland. Afterward, it painfully describes the deceptive incursion of Satan, and the resultant temptation of Eve and the imprudent disobedience of Adam. However, it also shows how God's great compassion leads fallen mankind to Christ, and the resultant redemption in His divine works. It also portrays how the Holy Spirit enables believers to become the church. Afterward, this narrative shifts to an enactment of one particular church as ite members await the Rapture. Then, it enacts all of the End Time events. Finally, it enacts the delightful atmosphere of heaven. Grace to all and to God be the glory!

Heirs of Fame: Milton and Writers of the English Renaissance brings together a dozen essays by recognized scholars of the English Renaissance. Because each essay juxtaposes Milton with another major writer from the period, the volume should contribute to current efforts to place Milton in his historical period and culture. The contextualizing influences considered by the various contributors include politics, biography, Christian exegetical traditions, social and even academic contexts.

Ut pictura meditatio: The Meditative Image in Northern Art, 1500 -1700 examines the form, function, and meaning of pictorial images produced and/or circulated in the Low Countries, Germany, and northern France as templates for the meditative life and its spiritual exercises. Our epigraph - ut pictura meditatio (as is a picture, so is meditation) - connotes the ways in which pictures facilitated meditative prayer and, conversely, the extent to which such prayer was experienced visually. Our essayists are prominent scholars in the fields of art history, history, literary studies, philosophy, and religious studies, all of whom study the ways in which visual images served to structure the interior religious life of laity and clergy in the early modern period. The volume asks how and why images were used not only to initiate, sustain, and structure kinds and degrees of meditative and contemplative devotion, but also to figure the soul's cognitive operations, its negotiation between states of being, between interior and exterior sense, between corporeal and spiritual sight. Implicit in this questioning are further explorations of the nature and scope of the interplay among mental, visual, and verbal images, and the subject positions such images allowed the votary to represent and inhabit. These questions touch upon issues of identity, subjectivity, and figuration that should be of interest to historians of art, literature, religion, and society.

Thomas Merton gave numerous conferences during his decade (1955-1965) as novice master at the Cistercian Abbey of Gethsemani. In A Monastic Introduction to Sacred Scripture, Patrick F. O'Connell presents one of these, a wide-ranging introduction to biblical studies. Drawing on church tradition, teaching of recent papal documents, and scholarly resources of the time, Merton reveals the central importance of the Scriptures for the spiritual growth of his listeners. For Merton, at the heart of any meaningful reading of the Scriptures, not only for monks but for all Christians, is the invitation to respond not just intellectually but with the whole self, to recognize the gospel as 'good news', as a saving, liberating, consoling, challenging word, reflecting his fundamental belief that 'the Holy Spirit enlightens us, in our reading, to see how our own lives are part of these great mysteries - how we are one with Jesus in them'. O'Connell's extensive introduction situates this reflection in the context of Merton's evolving engagement with the Bible from his own days as a student monk through the mature reflections from his final years on the biblical renewal in the wake of the Second Vatican Council..