"Portrays the lives and experiences of twelve mystical activists, exploring their worldview and spirituality and their relationship to social transformation"--

"Portrays the lives and experiences of twelve mystical activists, exploring their worldview and spirituality and their relationship to social transformation"--

In September of 1976 a group of some fifty scholars and practising mystics gathered at the University of Calgary. The chief objective of the Conference was to ponder and assess the nature of mysticism in its Eastern, Western and North American Indian forms. The method the Conference followed was somewhat unusual in that it aimed at a dialogue between the practising mystics and the scholars. What this book presents to the reader is not the outcome of the dialogue, but the personal statements and papers from which the dialogue began. Of course there is a degree to which the dialogue is already present, in that the papers of the scholars were written with the statements of the mystics in hand. Among some of the philosophers present, a set of more formal comments on each others presentations was recorded and these have been included.

Mysticism presents a challenge to anyone who is interested in fundamental questions about the nature of reality, knowledge, and how we should live. In this book the author examines questions posed by mysticism. He clarifies the nature of the claims advanced by Western and Asian mystics, and explores the beliefs and values of classical mystical ways of life for their interconnections and reasonableness. Jones discusses whether all mystical experiences and all mystical claims of knowledge are similar, and examines the relation of concepts and experiences in mystics' claims. Also presented are standards for evaluating competing mystical claims, and mystics' problems with language. Whether mystics' arguments are rational is investigated along with the relation of moral and non-moral values and the role of beliefs and values in enlightened mystics' ways of life. Mysticism's relation to the enterprises of science, theology, psychology and ethics is also examined.

God is Love. To believe in this God of unconditional Love is a lived experience in each person and in each generation everywhere on the globe and all different cultures and historical periods. In the beginning of the nineteenth century we notice in the south of the Netherlands a strong movement to renew and to actualise the Catholic faith in the concrete circumstances of poverty and political neglect. In this way the Congregation of the Sisters of Charity Daughters of Mary and Joseph was founded on 7 July 1820 in ’s Hertogenbosch. Similar to several other congregations in the same period St Vincent de Paul was their principal source of inspiration, determined their charism and remained at the centre of their spirituality. Religious life is essentially a lived experience of faith in which concrete persons touched by the incomprehensible Love of God dedicate their life in total surrender to this Love. As a result, they obey to the divine calling to be wholly transformed in love and to become docile instruments of God’s overwhelming Charity towards all vulnerable persons - young and old – their brothers and sisters who are stripped of their human dignity, humiliated and enslaved in many subtle ways. In this Vincentian congregation this divine vocation of Charity was originally implemented as a specific service to the education of blind and deaf children but widened to the care of other forgotten groups like victims of trafficking in women and discrimination or subordination of women.

A comprehensive exploration of the philosophical issues raised by mysticism. This work is a comprehensive study of the philosophical issues raised by mysticism. Mystics claim to experience reality in a way not available in normal life, a claim which makes this phenomenon interesting from a philosophical perspective. Richard H. Jones’s inquiry focuses on the skeleton of beliefs and values of mysticism: knowledge claims made about the nature of reality and of human beings; value claims about what is significant and what is ethical; and mystical goals and ways of life. Jones engages language, epistemology, metaphysics, science, and the philosophy of mind. Methodological issues in the study of mysticism are also addressed. Examples of mystical experience are drawn chiefly from Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, but also from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Daoism. “This is a significant extension of the seminal work by Walter Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy. That work has stimulated much literature, all of which Jones manages to review here. He critically extends Stace’s universal core and embeds it in a sophisticated discussion of the extent, range, and metaphysical implications of mysticism.” — Ralph W. Hood, Jr., coauthor of The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach

Mystics presents a collection of previously unpublished essays by prominent scholars that consider both the idea of mystics and mysticism. The contributors offer detailed discussions of a variety of mystics from history, and on mysticism in the twenty-first century.

In this volume Professor Firth has brought together and commented upon a number of his papers on anthropological subjects published over the last thirty years. All these essays relate in different ways to his continuing interest in the study of social process, especially in the significance within a social context of individual choice and decision. Although some specialist studies are included, e.g. the group of papers dealing with the Polynesian island of Tikopia, the main themes of the book are broad ones and there are important general essays on such topics as social change; social structure and organization; modern society in relation to scientific and technological progress; and the study of values, mysticism, and religion by anthropologists. There is also a hitherto unpublished chapter on anthropology as a developing science.