Brother Aelred loved singing and looking after the pigs. But it was his secret weapon that stopped invading Vikings from getting the monastery's treasure.
Robert de la Borde comes to England in the 1980's from the Caribbean after hearing that his brother, Jean Marc, has died. In Bristol, his brother's journals prompt Robert to visit Ashton Park Monastery, which Jean Marc entered in the 1960's as Brother Aelred.There, with the help of his brother's monastic friend Benedict, Robert pieces together Jean Marc's life; his exuberance, his mental suffering, and his struggle to balance his sexual impulses with his love of God, as set out in the work of Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship, against the austerity of Catholic sexual morality. In his understanding, Robert also learns what connects Jean Marc to Jordan, the African slave-boy captive at Ashton Park during the eighteenth century.As Robert is forced to question his inherited prejudices and to confront another ghost of Jean Marc's childhood - the events concerning Ted Salter - what unfolds is a story about the triumph of compassion over brutality. Moving from present to past, from cruelty to sympathy, Aelred's Sin is a powerful novel of erotic love, spiritual awakening and above all, reconciliation.
The ideal way to try Collins Big Cat, to plug gaps and to refresh your reading resources at unbeatable prices. Starter sets contain a complete list of titles from each band with a big discount on the normal price. The Emerald Starter Set contains: In the Rue Bel Tesoro 978-0-00-733631-9 Caliban s Cave 978-0-00-733630-2 My Olympic Story 978-0-00-733636-4 Code Making, Code Breaking 978-0-00-733644-9 Matti s Miracle 978-0-00-723124-9 On Safari 978-0-00-723125-6 Brother Aelred's Feet 978-0-00-723093-8 The Games Player of Zob 978-0-00-723094-5 Pirate! 978-0-00-723095-2 Olaudah Equiano: From Slavery to Freedom 978-0-00-723096-9 The Masai: Tribe of Warriors 978-0-00-723097-6 What Are You Looking At? 978-0-00-723091-4 Great Expectations 978-0-00-746542-2 Treasure Box 978-0-00-746538-5 Discovering Tutankhamun's Tomb 978-0-00-746544-6 Your Brain 978-0-00-746545-3 Kaleidoscope 978-0-00-722870-6 Maui Tames the Sun 978-0-00-722871-3 The Princess and the Pea 978-0-00-722866-9 Archie the Big Good Wolf 978-0-00-723421-9"
The first half of the book features the word's finest players at work, tacking all manner of ANT contracts -some commendable, others truly awful. You will have the chance to plan your play in these contracts yourself, before seeing what fate befell the original declare. The second half contains humorous short stories featuring many of David Birds well-loved character: the bridge-crazy monks of St. Titus Monastery, the nuns of St. Hilda's Convent, the Rabbi and his entourage. There is further action from Cholmeley School, from the missionaries whose main task in life is to convert the Bozwambi tribe to the Acol bidding system and even some tales of Sir Guy of Gisburne.
This book places the life of Aelred of Rievaulx, third abbot of the English Cistercian abbey of Rievaulx, within the hundred-year period from the Norman Conquest of England in October 1066 through Aelred's death in January 1167. While exploring what is known of Aelred's life from his own works and especially from the principal work of Walter Daniel, author of The Life of Aelred of Rievaulx, Burton considers the influence of both English and church history on Aelred's personality and purpose as Christian, abbot, and writer. He emphasizes the place of the crucified Christ at the center of Aelred's life while calling spiritual friendship-not only personal but cosmological-the "hermeneutic key" to his teaching.
Aelred of Rievaulx, the saintly abbot, tells here of saintly forebears and wondrous events in the North of England. An exile and son of exiles, Aelred was well aware of the conflicts and contradictions of human life in exile from the true homeland. He became the great cistercian teacher of the Incarnation, the spiritual guide of fallen humans to the God who had become a man. He wrote of and for flawed and foolish men and women on their journey to the heavenly Jerusalem; his pilgrims are cloistered and uncloistered, men and women: kings and queens, monks and nuns, saints on horseback and workers in purple and lepers and robbers and priests. Through his eyes, we see the saint who evangelized Scotland (The Life of Ninian, written probably 1155-1160), and the saints of the church of Aelred's family home (The Book of the Saints of the Church of Hexham and Their Miracles, ?1154-1155), and we learn of A Certain Wonderful Miracle (1158-1165). Book jacket.
As distinct from the many recent collections and studies of medieval literature and culture that have focused on gender and sexuality as their major themes, this collection considers and serves to re-think and re-situate religion and sexuality together. Including 'traditional' works such as Chaucer and the Pearl-poet, as well as less well known and studied texts - such as alchemical texts and the Wohunge group - the contributors here focus on the meeting point of these two often-examined concepts. They seek an understanding of where sex and religion distinguish themselves from one another, and where they do not. This volume locates the Divine and the Erotic within the continuum of experience and devotion that characterize the paradox of the medieval world. Not merely original in their approaches, these authors seek a new vision of how these two inter-connected themes - sexuality and the Divine - meet, connect, distinguish themselves, and merge within medieval life, language, and literature.
For the medieval Cistercian abbot Aelred of Rievaulx, human beings are capable of happiness because human nature is good-but the self-defeating choices of humans have led to their misery. A loving God leads humans to happiness by nudging their free wills toward choosing the good and then, if they respond positively, giving them the power to realize that good. The power, or virtue, which perfects the human intellect is humility, which is not meekness but self-knowledge, gained through introspection and meditation on and through nature and Scripture. The will is perfected through love, without which no human act is good. Love for oneself, for others, and for God are complementary, not competing acts of the will. A special way of loving is firiendship, on which Aelred's teaching is perhaps the most complete and most sophisticated in the history of Christian thought. Perfection is, for Aelred, attainable in this life, since he sees perfection as a process, not a static condition. That condition will be attained in the total fulfillment of the afterlife.
"The universe is a product of God's infinite love, according to the expansive thinking of Aelred of Rievaulx, a Cistercian abbot of the Middle Ages. Aelred sees human existence, order, and action as reflections of God's love. But Aelred knows that, although they have been created for happiness, humans are neither perfect nor happy. At the same time, however, he is sure that the flood of God's love can overwhelm people who do not reject this divine gift. Because Aelred knows that humans exist only in relationship, he searches out the social order necessary for happiness. So he explores the nature of the church as a community and the support that each social group or calling gives to the whole of existence." "This study examines how Aelred sees God informing the cosmos, and the humans who inhabit it, according to the divine order and principle of love. It follows Aelred's analysis of the disordering sources of human unhappiness, which happens when humans reject God's love, and then investigates Aelred's understanding of God's re-ordering of the human condition through the gifts and graces flowing from his greatest gift: his son, Jesus."--BOOK JACKET.
14th century Yorkshire: the time of Chaucer. Peregrine, strong and beloved abbot of St Alcuin's monastery, suffers a stroke. Now incapacitated, he begins an arduous recovery with the help of his brothers in the infirmary. Brother Tom, the young monk closest to him, is horrified by the suffering Peregrine's illness has inflicted. He keeps his distance, out of his depth. How will he find the courage to make this demanding journey of vulnerability with his friend? How will they communicate, now Peregrine can no longer speak? How will Tom respond to the terrible, secret promise his abbot asks him to make? In this journey to the depths of humanity, the two men discover together the treasures of darkness and the intimate mystery of compassion. Engaging and beautifully written, warm and haunting, The Long Fall concludes the first trilogy in The Hawk and the Dove series.
