Julian of Norwich
Okay, I’ve posted the first of what I hope will be many biography/bibliography pages to my new Mystics page. It is on, naturaly, Julian of Norwich. Follow the link to enjoy.
Return to the One
Return to the One: Plotinus’s Guide to God-Realization
By Brian Hines
Bloomington, IN: Unlimited Publishing, 2004
Review by Carl McColman
Plotinus: You can’t understand Christian mysticism without him. Trouble is, you can’t hardly understand him, either — unless you’re a serious philosophy geek, which, alas, excludes me and 99% of the world’s population. Reading Plotinus, a second century pagan philosopher and the most important of the Neoplatonists, is only marginally more satisfying than reading Finnegans Wake; like Joyce, Plotinus is murky and mysterious; his lone work, The Enneads, is just barely accessible enough to tantalize the first-time reader with a sense that real treasures do, in fact, lie buried deep within his dense and highly technical prose. Even worse, the vast majority of secondary sources — books about Plotinus and his writing — are written by philosophers for students of philosophy, and thus tend to underemphasize the practical, spiritual implications of Plotinian thought. Today’s Christians and modern Pagans tend to be equally ignorant that this genius of mystical philosophy ever existed, let alone that his thought is essential to the understanding of how western spirituality developed over the ensuing 1800 years.
Enter Brian Hines, an independent writer and spiritual seeker who made the effort to study Plotinus as a mystic rather than a philosopher, and subsequently wrote this marvelously accessible introduction to the spirituality of The Enneads. I’m tempted to say this is virtually a “Plotinus for Dummies,” except that I think it’s better than such a formulaic title might suggest. (more…)
Yet another website makeover…
One of the many features I love about having a WordPress website/blog is that it gives me detailed information about which pages people link to (and which links people use to come to the site). I’ve been rather humbled to discover that two old pages (that date back to my earliest website that I created back in the mid-1990s) still have many live links out there in cyberland, links which send several visitors to my site each day. One of those links pointed to a page I had created called “Spiritual Formation Online” in which I reflected on the practices of contemplative prayer, writing and maintaining a rule of life, and working with a spiritual director; the other pointed to the original “Website of Unknowing,” which was a collection of mini-biographies of the five English mystics of the 14th & early 15th centuries.
I retired both of those pages a while back. But word apparently never got out, and all sorts of inbound links meant that many visitors to my site were greeted with an unceremonious “Error 404 – Not Found” page. Not too impressive!
So I’ve decided I need to resurrect both of those pages. (more…)
