ÊAmongst the apparent enigmas of life, amongst the seemingly most radical and abiding of interior antinomies and conflicts experienced by the human race and by individuals, there is one which everything tends to make us feel and see with an ever-increasing keenness and clearness. More and more we want a strong and interior, a lasting yet voluntary bond of union between our own successive states of mind, and between what is abiding in ourselves and what is permanent within our fellow-men; and more and more we seem to see that mere Reasoning, Logic, Abstraction,Ñall that appears as the necessary instrument and expression of the Universal and Abiding,Ñdoes not move or win the will, either in ourselves or in others; and that what does thus move and win it, is Instinct, Intuition, Feeling, the Concrete and Contingent, all that seems to be of its very nature individual and evanescent. Reasoning appears but capable, at best, of co-ordinating, unifying, explaining the material furnished to it by experience of all kinds; at worst, of explaining it away; at best, of stimulating the purveyance of a fresh supply of such experience; at worst, of stopping such purveyance as much as may be. And yet the Reasoning would appear to be the transferable part in the process, but not to move; and the experience alone to have the moving power, but not to be transmissible. Experience indeed and its resultant feeling are always, in the first instance, coloured and conditioned by every kind of individual many-sided circumstances of time and place, of race and age and sex, of education and temperament, of antecedent and environment. And it is this very particular combination, just this one, so conditioned and combined, coming upon me just at this moment and on this spot, just at this stage of my reach or growth, at this turning of my way, that carries with it this particular power to touch or startle, to stimulate or convince. It is just precisely through the but imperfectly analyzable, indeed but dimly perceived, individual connotation of general terms; it is by the fringe of feeling, woven out of the past doings and impressions, workings and circumstances, physical, mental, moral, of my race and family and of my own individual life; it is by the apparently slight, apparently far away, accompaniment of a perfectly individual music to the spoken or sung text of the common speech of man, that I am, it would seem, really moved and won. And this fringe of feeling, this impression, is, strictly speaking, not merely untransferable, but also unrepeatable; it is unique even for the same mind: it never was before, it never will be again. Heraclitus, if we understand that old Physicist in our own modern, deeply subjective, largely sentimental way, would appear to be exactly right: you cannot twice step into the same stream, since never for two moments do the waters remain identical; you yourself cannot twice step the same man into the same river, for you have meanwhile changed as truly as itself has done, _____ ___: all things and states, outward and inward, appear indeed in flux: only each moment seems to bring, to each individual, for that one moment, his power to move and to convince.

The written word is one of the defining elements of Christian experience. As vigorous in the 1st century as it is in the 21st, Christian literature has had a significant function in history, and teachers and students need to be reminded of this powerful literary legacy. Covering 2,000 years, The Encyclopedia of Christian Literature is the first encyclopedia devoted to Christian writers and books. In addition to an overview of the Christian literature, this two-volume set also includes 40 essays on the principal genres of Christian literature and more than 400 bio-bibliographical essays describing the principal writers and their works. These essays examine the evolution of Christian thought as reflected in the literature of every age. The companion volume also features bibliographies, an index, a timeline of Christian Literature, and a list of the greatest Christian authors. The encyclopedia will appeal not only to scholars and Christian evangelicals, but students and teachers in seminaries and theological schools, as well as to the growing body of Christian readers and bibliophiles.

This introduction to the disciplines through the lives of two great saints is a joyful 'reunion' with our greater Christian heritage. By looking at spiritual disciplines 'biographically, ' we see both the realities and the possibilities of a committed Christian life.

During the first decade of the twentieth century the Roman Catholic Church was shaken to its core by an intellectual reform movement, 'modernism', seeking radical changes in the traditional approaches to biblical studies, philosophy and theology. The repercussions of the church authorities' condemnations and repression of the so-callled modernist heresy persisted for more than half a century. Then, liberated by Pope John XXIII, himself suspected of being a modernist, the Second Vatican Council created the possibility for many modernist ideas to resurface and initiate a renewal of the church in the modern world. The present work contains the integral correspondence of the leader of this modernist movement, Baron Friedrich von Hugel to Maude D. Petre along with her two extant letters to him. The correspondence offers a unique glimpse into the history of the movement and an example of how its leading protagonist promoted the novel ideas of many of the seminal thinkers of the time among his friends and colleagues. Sadly, the letters also depict the often unchristian nature of the authorities' response and the subsequent suffering inflicted on some of the church's most critical but faithful and enlightened members.

"The enigmatic link between the natural and artistic beauty that is to be contemplated but not eaten, on the one hand, and the eucharistic beauty that is both seen (with the eyes of faith) and eaten, on the other, intrigues me and inspires this book. One cannot ask theo-aesthetic questions about the Eucharist without engaging fundamental questions about the relationship between beauty, art (broadly defined), and eating."—from Eating Beauty In a remarkable book that is at once learned, startlingly original, and highly personal, Ann W. Astell explores the ambiguity of the phrase "eating beauty." The phrase evokes the destruction of beauty, the devouring mouth of the grave, the mouth of hell. To eat beauty is to destroy it. Yet in the case of the Eucharist the person of faith who eats the Host is transformed into beauty itself, literally incorporated into Christ. In this sense, Astell explains, the Eucharist was "productive of an entire 'way' of life, a virtuous life-form, an artwork, with Christ himself as the principal artist." The Eucharist established for the people of the Middle Ages distinctive schools of sanctity—Cistercian, Franciscan, Dominican, and Ignatian—whose members were united by the eucharistic sacrament that they received. Reading the lives of the saints not primarily as historical documents but as iconic expressions of original artworks fashioned by the eucharistic Christ, Astell puts the "faceless" Host in a dynamic relationship with these icons. With the advent of each new spirituality, the Christian idea of beauty expanded to include, first, the marred beauty of the saint and, finally, that of the church torn by division—an anti-aesthetic beauty embracing process, suffering, deformity, and disappearance, as well as the radiant lightness of the resurrected body. This astonishing work of intellectual and religious history is illustrated with telling artistic examples ranging from medieval manuscript illuminations to sculptures by Michelangelo and paintings by Salvador Dalí. Astell puts the lives of medieval saints in conversation with modern philosophers as disparate as Simone Weil and G. W. F. Hegel.