Veil and Cowl: Writings From the World of Monks and Nuns

by James B. Simpson (Editor)

Overview

This thoughtful, inspiring, often humorous, and intensely spiritual collection brings together for the first time the most searching writings from the world of monks and nuns. They reveal and explore the mystique of lives given totally to God.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781566632515
Publisher:	Dee, Ivan R. Publisher
Publication date:	10/18/1999
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.92(w) x 8.34(h) x 0.71(d)

Editorial Reviews

The dedicated religious life of permanent vows and strictly regulated community life may inspire nostalgia for a vanished spiritual element, but, as Notre Dame president emeritus Theodore Hesburgh, himself avowedly religious, notes in his introduction, ``The substance of the religious life has in many ways been enriched by the changes.'' The religious watershed of Vatican Council II, nearly three decades ago, marked the decline of vocations among Roman Catholics and a concomitant closure for religious men and women of the ``old type.'' In writings edited by Simpson, an Episcopal priest, we hear from Benedictines, Carthusians, Carmelites, Franciscans and members of Anglican/Episcopal communities speaking simply, eloquently, joyfully about their spiritual lives. Among the 40 selections are also appreciations by secular writers Geoffrey Moorhouse, Matthew J. Bruccoli and others, and fiction by Rumer Godden and Brian Moore, all of which attest to fascination with the rich interior life of the veil and cowl. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Episcopal priest Simpson ( Simpson's Contemporary Quotations , Houghton, 1992, among others) has excerpted from previously published sources 40 short sketches of the lives and experiences of monks and nuns in the years before Vatican II. Ten of the pieces are fictional; the rest are true stories, half of which are by monks or nuns themselves. Simpson compiled these portraits in response to the questions, ``Who are they? What is behind such deep devotion?'' His collection succeeds in describing the cloistered religious life and its adherents. Except for a few brief sentences identifying each author, the selections are not accompanied by explanatory text, and some may be inaccessible to readers unfamiliar with Catholic ritual and liturgy. For libraries with holdings in Christian spirituality and Catholicism.-- Wendy Knickerbocker, Rhode Island Coll. Lib., Providence

Library Journal