In Monasteries and the Care of Souls in Late Antique Christianity, Paul C. Dilley explores the personal practices and group rituals through which the thoughts of monastic disciples were monitored and trained to purify the mind and help them achieve salvation. Dilley draws widely on the interdisciplinary field of cognitive studies, especially anthropology, in his analysis of key monastic 'cognitive disciplines', such as meditation on scripture, the fear of God, and prayer. In addition, various rituals distinctive to communal monasticism, including (...) entrance procedures, the commemoration of founders, and collective repentance, are given their first extended analysis. Participants engaged in 'heart-work' on their thoughts and emotions, which were understood to reflect the community's spiritual state. This book will be of interest to scholars of early Christianity and the ancient world more generally for its detailed description of communal monastic culture and its innovative methodology. (shrink)

Besides Dracula, Ceauşescu, and Nadia Comăneci, monasteries constitute a permanent Romanian brand, inextricably linked in every foreign visitor's mind to Romanianness. Specific to Moldavia and Bucovina—the Eastern and Northern parts of Romania—these monasteries have attracted visitors for the past 500 years. The person visiting a sacred site is transformed from being merely a tourist into a pilgrim. The painting “The Ladder towards Heaven” at the Pângăraţi Monastery, for example, highlights the importance of the mental and physical involvement of the (...) tourist-pilgrim as an interactive participant in the process of self-discovery. (shrink)

_An illuminating record of dialogues between the Dalai Lama and some of today’s most prominent scientists, philosophers, and contemplatives_ In 2013, during a historic six-day meeting at a Tibetan monastery in southern India, the Dalai Lama gathered with leading scientists, philosophers, and monks for in-depth discussions on the nature of reality, consciousness, and the human mind. This eye-opening book presents a record of those spirited and wide-ranging dialogues, featuring contributions from prominent scholars like Richard Davidson, Matthieu Ricard, Tania Singer, (...) and Arthur Zajonc as they address such questions as: Does nature have a nature? Do you need a brain to be conscious? Can we change our minds and brains through meditation? Throughout, the contributors explore the exciting and sometimes surprising commonalities between Western scientific and Tibetan Buddhist methods of perceiving, investigating, and knowing. Part history, part state-of-the-field, part inspiration for the future, this book rigorously and accessibly explores what these two investigative traditions can teach each other, and what that can tell us about ourselves and the world. (shrink)

April 29-30, 1995 in the premises of the Ternopil Medical Institute. Academician I.Ya.Gorbachevsky held an international scientific conference with such a title. In her work participated: A. Kolodny, - deputy director of the Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, President of the Ukrainian Association of Religious Studies; Employees of the Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine - V.Malakhov, V.Klimov, L.Filipovich, O.Sagan, V.Demian, T.Chaika; Lviv Museum of the History of Religion - (...) G. Skop-Drusyuk, L. Skop, I. Petrov; Ternopil universities and institutions Y.Sudersky, O.Gudim, L. Boytsun, and others. Our fellow countryman, Professor Stepan Yarmus, participated in the conference. (shrink)

The Goose Lake Monastery Debate was an important event in the history of Chinese thought, chiefly because it marked the differences between two of the greatest representatives of the movement of thought known in the West as Neo-Confucianism. In this article, it is my aim to offer a historical reconstruction of the events that took place, to give an exegetical analysis of the problems discussed, and to conclude with an interpretation that places these problems in a wider perspective. I (...) hope to show how this event which occurred in China 800 years ago was not a hair-splitting affair with little consequence for men today, but that it concerned a problem that is both universal and contemporary: the conflict between learning and wisdom. (shrink)

The Goose Lake Monastery Debate was an important event in the history of Chinese thought, chiefly because it marked the differences between two of the greatest representatives of the movement of thought known in the West as Neo-Confucianism. In this article, it is my aim to offer a historical reconstruction of the events that took place, to give an exegetical analysis of the problems discussed, and to conclude with an interpretation that places these problems in a wider perspective. I (...) hope to show how this event which occurred in China 800 years ago was not a hair-splitting affair with little consequence for men today, but that it concerned a problem that is both universal and contemporary: the conflict between learning and wisdom. (shrink)

We present an OWL 2 ontology, called SaintGall, representing the Saint Gall plan, one of the most ancient documents arrived intact to us. The Saint Gall plan describes the ideal model of a Benedictine monastic complex that inspired the design of many European monasteries. The structural, functional, and architectural specification of an ideal Benedectine monastery is modeled by the SaintGall ontology, which allows one to analyse and model the Monastery architectural type. This work started with the purpose of (...) relating Catania’s San Nicolò l’Arena Benedectine Monastery with the abstract notion of Benedectine monastery, in the ambit of an ontological model based on the renovation works carried out by the architect Giancarlo De Carlo and developed by the same authors. The SaintGall ontology opens a research path aiming at comparing different monastic architectures that can be useful in any intervention of refurbishment or design for a monastery. (shrink)

Already in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Minorite and Dominican orders (or Poor Clares and Dominican women) played an important role in town building in terms of religion and social ties, as well as in architecture and urban development. In the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Franciscan Order became important in the same urban environment, contributing with other monasteries to shaping the changing religiosity. This article studies the relationship of Mendicants’ priories – both male and female – to (...) their urban milieux, for which these orders’ monasteries are typical. The area of interest, however, is not the monastic church but the chapter house and the cloister. Despite the presumed rules of enclosure, a lay public can also be envisioned in these spaces, enabling the study of a partial interconnection between the “outer” secular and the “inner” sacred monastic worlds. A combined historical, art historical, archaeological, and anthropological analysis furthers understanding of the conditions under which these interconnections developed. Urban “artistic” and memorial presentations in the monastic context can be traced, along with activities organized in both the cloister (e.g., funerals and processions) and the chapter house, which also served for other types of lay gatherings (e.g., court or guild chapel). (shrink)

One of the least investigated, which now exists in Ukraine is the Old Believers. Despite the fact that their communities have been operating in our territory for more than two centuries, researchers have long devised this topic with their attention. The main reason for this attitude to the study of the Old Believers should be considered political realities of the XX century, and they are known to have not contributed to the objective study of even traditional Ukrainian denominations. Therefore, right (...) now, with the proclamation by the state of equal treatment of all religions and non-interference in their affairs, the time has come to make up for the lost. Let us stop here only on one aspect of the problem - the activities of the Old Believers monasteries. (shrink)

The purpose of the present article is to offer the scholarly community interested in the Byzantine period of Mount Athos new knowledge about some of the estates possessed by the Bulgarian Athonite monastery of Zographou in the vicinity of Hierissos in the early 14th century. The new details we shall comment on derive from an unknown document kept in the archive of Zographou.

In its nearly 1000-year history, the Ukrainian monastery as a specific religious institution, aimed at realizing the idea of ​​a perfect Christian life through self-isolated forms of organization of life, experienced a rather complicated evolution. In Ukraine, this complexity has not always been dictated by the inherent development of monasticism itself or the peculiarities of the forms of organization of monastic life, and to a large extent determined by external non-monastic and extra-church factors.

In 1536 the English Parliament under pressure from Henry VIII and the Lord Chancellor, Thomas Cromwell, gave its consent for the dissolution of the lesser monasteries and abbeys in the king’s realm, and three years later with the sanction of MPs some of the greater religious houses also suffered the same fate. The principal aim of this paper is to assess the importance of this political decision with a view to examining the progress being made in the field of education (...) in England in the middle of the sixteenth century resultant upon this dissolution. The evaluation of the merits and demerits originating from the suppression of the English monasteries is made in terms of both primary and academic education. The answers to these key questions are preceded by a short analysis of the reputation monasteries and abbeys had acquired by that time. Also on a selective basis, some opinions have been presented here to provide an overall picture of the standing of the monks and nuns and their concomitant activities, as perceived through the eyes of English society; the eminent scholars and humanists in particular. Subsequently, before assessing the consequences resulting from the dissolution of the religious houses in England, some consideration is given to the reasoning and rationale which lay behind both Henry VIII and his Lord Chancellor’s political decisions. (shrink)

The Kirillov Monastery at White Lake in the far north of the Muscovite state was home to the greatest library, and perhaps the only secondary school, in all of medieval Russia. This volume reconstructs the educational activities of the spiritual fathers and heretofore unknown teachers of that monastery. Drawing on extensive archival research, published records, and scholarship from a range of fields, Robert Romanchuk demonstrates how different habits of reading and interpretation at the monastery answered to different (...) social priorities. He argues that 'spiritual' and 'worldly' studies were bound to the monastery's two main forms of social organization, semi-hermitic and communal. Further, Romanchuk contextualizes such innovative phenomena as the editing work of the monk Efrosin and the monastery's strikingly sophisticated library catalogue against the development of learning at Kirillov itself in the fifteenth century, moving the discussion of medieval Russian book culture in a new direction. The first micro-historical 'ethnology of reading' in the Early Slavic field, Byzantine Hermeneutics and Pedagogy in the Russian North will prove fascinating to western medievalists, Byzantinists, Slavists, and book historians. (shrink)

This paper argues that the phenomenon of globalisation can be best understood as the secularisation and widespread extension of a particular type of life?conduct that originated in Western monasticism. This concerns not substantive content but modality and form, like the self?sustaining methodical regularisation of the everyday conduct of life in closed and partitioned space aiming at rationalisation and perfection. This type of inner?worldly asceticism was a successful response to the challenge of chaotic ?liminal periods of transition, following a wholesale dissolution (...) of order. However, the solution represents a generalisation of liminality into a permanent condition, explaining both the innovativeness and creativity of modern societies, but also their characteristic tempo of hectic change that disrupts stable human relationships and the coexistence with animals and plants, losing balance and measure. (shrink)

In this autoethnographic essay, I reflect on my brief personal experiences of conducting field research on ways in which way a small group of Tibetan Buddhist monks enact a monastic total institution in Ladakh, India. More specifically, I analyze my experiences in view of the relationship between dual and nondual mind, as discussed by Henry Vyner (2002) in Anthropology of Consciousness, and use this analysis to develop preliminary insights into the ways in which a Tibetan Buddhist monastery is constituted.

Scholarly focus on the political relationship between monasteries and the state has obscured other dynamics in the post-Mao revival and development of dGe-lugs-pa monasticism in China and led to its marginalization in wider discussions about Buddhism in the contemporary world. The present article seeks to broaden our understanding by examining economic reforms at a monastery in A-mdo. Based on fieldwork conducted 2008-2009, it argues that while recent monastic economic developments converge with state policies, monks’ narratives place agency for reforms (...) within the monastic community and present impetus for reform as a moral issue. Consideration of the moral dimension of reforms, drawing on Sayer’s conception of moral economy, allows for a thicker understanding of contemporary monastic development which takes into account dynamics that extend beyond monastic interactions with the political and hegemonic power of the Chinese state. (shrink)

The changing sacred landscape of Late Antiquity has long been seen in terms of a monolithic development ‘from temple to church’. Recent scholarship, however, has discarded this picture in favour of a more complex view, in which freestanding churches (and monasteries) were increasingly built from the fourth century onwards, while at the same time various, mostly practical, ways were found of dealing with the sacred built environment of the past. The Late Antique papyri from Oxyrhynchus contain dozens of references to (...) churches and monasteries, and, occasionally, also temples. The city thus affords an excellent opportunity to study the changing sacred landscape of this period in a local context. In previous scholarship, several lists have been compiled to collect the attestations of churches. The last comprehensive collection of the material dates back two decades, however, while the one list of monasteries is heavily outdated. Moreover, a list of temples in the Late Antique papyri has never been put together. This article, then, presents, in the appendix, a brand-new Checklist of temples, churches and monasteries of Late Antique Oxyrhynchus. It serves as the basis for the detailed analysis of the data that precedes it, which shows that these data are in perfect agreement with the now prevalent general view among Late Antique scholars of how the sacred landscape changed over time. For comparison with the findings from the papyri, we will also briefly discuss the results of recent excavations at the site. (shrink)