“I trust no one will call me a mystic—a name, in its strict theological sense, too high, and in its popular sense (I hope) too vague, to describe me; but it ...

AUSTIN, Texas (RNS) — Sandy Davis Kirk woke at 5 a.m. on July 4 to a roaring sound outside her window. “I heard people shrieking from the waters,” said Davis Kirk, whose backyard is bordered by the ...

Mysticism is a dirty word for some Christians. “They think of it as the bizarre,” said Bernard McGinn, a retired religion professor at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School. “But that is an ...

(RNS) — In his new book, ‘Desmond Tutu: A Spiritual Biography of South Africa’s Confessor,’ Michael Battle delves into the ways Tutu’s religious formation shaped a vision that helped topple apartheid ...

An Anthropocentric-Christocentric Mystagogy. A Study of the Method and basic Horizon of Thought and Experience in the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. (University of Münster Offset, ...

What are we to make of the variety of spiritual experiences? Michael Hughes was 22 years old when he had a mystical experience at a Maryland Catholic church. “It was almost as if I had wandered into ...

Once or twice a month, Bernard McGinn receives an email from someone wanting to talk about their “special” experience. Many pose questions like, “How do I know if I’ve really had a mystical encounter ...

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Conventional ascetic, mystical theology is based on an affective, purgative, illumined, unitive rising of the soul to God, following paths set forth by Ss. Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Francis ...

Desmond Tutu lived astride one of Christianity’s great failures—and one of its great successes. At the pinnacle of White disdain for South Africa’s original residents, the country’s government ...