Skip to main content

Best of the Web: Christian Mysticism of the Future

For a while now, I've been wanting to do a "best of" series where I post links to what I consider to be some of the best web posts/articles that you can find on the internet.

Lately, I've been very busy writing articles, and so my posts here on my blog have taken a bit of a back seat to the rest of my writing. But since I've found time tonight to sit down and actually do something here, I thought it would be a good time to start this "best of" series.

My first pick comes from Carl McColman's delightful mystical Christian blog Anamchara: The Website of Unknowing. The post is entitled "Christian Mysticism of the Future" and its my favorite of all of Carl's posts. (And he's written quite a lot.)

By the way, after you've read this, be sure to check out the rest of his site. His last few blog posts alone are wonderful reading.

Christian Mysticism of the Future

One of my gripes with Phyllis Tickle’s book The Great Emergence is that she provides little or no insight into where she thinks the church is headed during this period of emergence. I think everyone kind of gets it that post-modernity is a hinge time, where we’re after something that no longer works (modernity) and we don’t really know yet what it is we’re before. (as an aside, I figure it’s either going to be a new renaissance that will make the 15th century look like a dress rehearsal, or else it could involve environmental devastation and resultant trauma on a scale never before imagined. And it all really boils down to how effectively we can curb our appetites!).

Okay, well, I can hardly whine about Tickle’s lack of forecasting, if I don’t do a bit of my own. So I’m working on a chapter in my book that will explore my conjectures about the future of Christian mysticism. This is utterly un-scientific: I am only basing my thoughts on what I have seen and read and intuited. So feel free to disagree — but if you do, please post a comment as to why. I’d be curious to hear what other contemplatives sense about where the Holy Spirit is leading us.

But for now, here are the seven characteristics that I (currently) believe will shape the future of Christian mysticism:

  1. Christian mysticism in the future will be increasingly Trinitarian. I believe the success of William Paul Young’s The Shack is at least partially due to its lovely presentation of the trinitarian nature of God. Obviously, the Blessed Trinity has always been central to Christian theology, but I believe its importance will only increase, as a healthy alternative to monism and dualism — both of which have dogged Christian spirituality for too long.
To read the full article, go here.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Feel free to leave us some feedback on the article or any topics you would like us to cover in the future! Much Appreciated!

Popular posts from this blog

Marvin Eder’s Mass-Building Methods

  The Many and Varied Mass-Building Methods of Power Bodybuilding’s G.O.A.T. Eder as he appeared in my article "Full Body Workouts" for IronMan  magazine.      In many ways, the essay you are now reading is the one that has had the “longest time coming.”  I have no clue why it has taken me this long to write an article specifically on Marvin Eder, especially considering the fact that I have long considered him the greatest bodybuilder cum strength athlete of all friggin’ time .  In fact, over 20 years ago, I wrote this in the pages of IronMan magazine: In my opinion, the greatest all-around bodybuilder, powerlifter and strength athlete ever to walk the planet, Eder had 19-inch arms at a bodyweight of 198. He could bench 510, squat 550 for 10 reps and do a barbell press with 365. He was reported to have achieved the amazing feat of cranking out 1,000 dips in only 17 minutes. Imagine doing a dip a second for 17 minutes. As Gene Mozee once put ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Mass & Power Resurrection!

Build Massive Muscles and Monstrous Strength with Heavy, Old-School Dumbbell Training      I don’t know when it happened, or how it happened, but when it comes to strength and power training, we think of barbells and little else.  I’m guilty of this myself.  I’ve written before about using the “ two barbell workout .”  It’s a sound theory, don’t get me wrong.  Basically, if you start your workout session, any workout session, with 2 big, compound barbell lifts—say, front squats and power cleans—you can then do whatever else you want for the rest of the workout and you will get great results.  Or, heck, you can just do 2 compound barbell lifts and nothing else at each workout.  But there was a time not that long ago, when the largest, most massive, muscular, and strongest lifters on the planet—the so-called “Bronze era” of the late 19th century, early 20th century—when strongmen did most of their training with dumbbells and not b...
6 comments
Read more

Tailoring Your Workout Program - Part Two

Tips and Advice for Tailoring Your Training Routine Part 2: Selecting a Program      In post-modern philosophy, there is a term that is important to understand.  I’m not a post-modernist myself—I am, if anything, an integralist , one who integrates different philosophies, East and West, into a singular whole—but I feel this concept is important.  It’s called “the myth of the given.”  The “myth” is when we take our given perception of things to be how they actually are.  We do this more often than we think.  It’s easy to understand this concept when it comes to simple objects, but less so when it comes to ideas.  We may not like how something tastes—raw oysters,for example—so we think oysters are simply bad.  Others, however, may love raw oysters—I could eat them by the bucket.  In this instance, it’s easy to see the myth of the given at work.  Even though you may find oysters personally unsettling, and it befuddles yo...
4 comments
Read more