This companion to the Spiritual Exercises, in an anniversary edition does justice to women’s experience across contexts and social locations. While acknowledging obstacles that the Exercises hold for women in various contexts, the authors provide fresh interpretations of every aspect of this spiritual classic. They bring together feminist consciousness, a broad knowledge of psychology and theology, and the compassionate insight of experienced spiritual guides. The situation of women making and giving the Spiritual Exercises has changed radically in the past two decades since the publication of the previous edition, which highlights the variety women’s experience of the Spiritual Exercises from different cultural contexts. It also draws from new and younger women's voices, thus extending the reach of the original text to another generation over wider geographic and cultural spread. The revised book opens up new ways in which the Exercises may offer liberating possibilities for women world-wide.

Revised & Updated and Includes a New Preface from the Author Embark on the spiritual ADVENTURE of a lifetime. There's no better guide than St. Ignatius of Loyola for people who want to enliven their faith, discover their purpose, and make better decisions in their life. In this revised edition of The Ignatian Adventure, Kevin O'Brien, SJ, offers a unique way of experiencing the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius in daily life. With O'Brien as our navigator, we adventure through 32 weeks of prayer and meditations that draw us into a deeper encounter with God. What sets this book apart from other Ignatian retreats is how O'Brien incorporates the timeless counsel of wisdom figures throughout the ages and personal stories about living the Exercises in everyday life. O'Brien makes it easy to see how these teachings intersect with the real world. The Ignatian Adventure is an ideal resource for spiritual directors. Its user-friendly style also makes it the perfect book for anyone seeking a better understanding of Ignatian spirituality and a richer prayer life.

An engaging and practical resource appropriate for both guides and seekers that brings women's perspectives to the Spiritual Exercises.

If Carl Gustav Jung and Ignatius of Loyola could face each other over a gap of four centuries, what would they have to say to one another? Kenneth Becker demonstrates, in this engaging study, that these two intellectual and spiritual giants bring great insight to each other's work.

* Includes passages from Scripture and opportunities to reflect and pray * Ideal for use during Advent or Lent

We all make decisions constantly--some with careful reflection, some without much thought. But what if we understood these decisions, minor as well as major, as matters of faithful Christian living? In this helpful and encouraging book, Elizabeth Liebert introduces the practice of discernment and guides readers through the process of faithful decision making. Following the way of discernment means becoming increasingly able to notice where God is at work in the world and in one's own life--and becoming increasingly generous with one's own life in response. After briefly exploring the Christian tradition of discernment, Liebert then turns to practical steps and exercises that will help readers as they seek God's call in the midst of their decisions, allowing readers to internalize some of these practices and incorporate them into their daily lives.

This book explores the co-dependency of monotheism and idolatry by examining the thought of several prominent twentieth-century Jewish philosophers—Cohen, Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas. While all of these thinkers were keenly aware of the pitfalls of scriptural theism, to differing degrees they each succumbed to the temptation to personify transcendence, even as they tried either to circumvent or to restrain it by apophatically purging kataphatic descriptions of the deity. Derrida and Wyschogrod, by contrast, carried the project of denegation one step further, embarking on a path that culminated in the aporetic suspension of belief and the consequent removal of all images from God, a move that seriously compromises the viability of devotional piety. The inquiry into apophasis, transcendence, and immanence in these Jewish thinkers is symptomatic of a larger question. Recent attempts to harness the apophatic tradition to construct a viable postmodern negative theology, a religion without religion, are not radical enough. Not only are these philosophies of transcendence guilty of a turn to theology that defies the phenomenological presupposition of an immanent phenomenality, but they fall short on their own terms, inasmuch as they persist in employing metaphorical language that personalizes transcendence and thereby runs the risk of undermining the irreducible alterity and invisibility attributed to the transcendent other. The logic of apophasis, if permitted to run its course fully, would exceed the need to posit some form of transcendence that is not ultimately a facet of immanence. Apophatic theologies, accordingly, must be supplanted by a more far-reaching apophasis that surpasses the theolatrous impulse lying coiled at the crux of theism, an apophasis of apophasis, based on accepting an absolute nothingness—to be distinguished from the nothingness of an absolute—that does not signify the unknowable One but rather the manifold that is the pleromatic abyss at being’s core. Hence, the much-celebrated metaphor of the gift must give way to the more neutral and less theologically charged notion of an unconditional givenness in which the distinction between giver and given collapses. To think givenness in its most elemental, phenomenological sense is to allow the apparent to appear as given without presuming a causal agency that would turn that given into a gift.

The book follows the structure of the Spiritual Exercises, commenting on major themes in what Ignatius calls the First Week, the Second Week, the Third Week, and the Fourth Week, ending with the Contemplation for Attaining Love. It engages the audience by introducing fresh reflections on the Principle and Foundation (to be read in the context of late medieval marriage vows), and by using, at length, several episodes in the Gospel stories (e.g. the nativity of Christ, the call to service of Peter’s mother-in-law, the particular approaches of the evangelists to Christ’s passion and death, and the place of Ch. 21 in John’s theology of love) to show how contemporary biblical interpretation enriches possibilities for prayer. Resources for prayer are drawn from Christian painting, sculpture, music, literature (e.g., Pascal and Kierkegaard) and poetry. The author explores links between the Exercises and the traditional practice of lectio divina. In doing this, he illustrates the scope of teaching on lectio divina coming from the Second Vatican Council and shows how translators and commentators have missed the Council’s use of the technical term lectio divina.