Spiritual communion as a response to hunger for Christ

The health restrictions required by the COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible for many people to receive communion, creating profound spiritual hunger for many who are accustomed to receiving communion regularly. One option is the practice of spiritual communion, which may include a prayer of intent in times when a Christian is unable to receive the sacrament. This article explores theological foundations for this practice and its roots in Christian tradition, and the use of this devotional practice by congregations during the pandemic.

The Canticle of the Creatures as Hypotext behind Dante’s Pater Noster

The article analyses Dante’s explanatory paraphrase and exegesis of the Lord’s Prayer, which opens the eleventh canto (v. 1–24) of Purgatory. The author reminds us that the prayer is the only one fully recited in the entire Comedy and this devotional practice is in line with the Franciscan prescription to recite it in the sixth hour of the Divine Office when Christ died on the cross. The prayer is reported by the poet on the first terrace of Purgatory, where the proud and vainglorious must learn the virtue of humility, and therefore it symbolizes the perfect reciprocity between man and Godhead. Dante collates and amplifies the two complementary Latin versions of the Lord’s Prayer from Matthew 6: 9–13 and Luke 11: 2–4. The two synoptic texts are supplemented by the Gospel of John, from which Dante takes the concept of celestial bread (manna) – the flesh and the blood of Christ – which nourishes, liberates and sanctifies Christians. Apart from the Bible, Dante also draws upon the Augustinian and Tomistic traditions. However, the main hypotext behind the prayer, which is neither cited nor acknowledged in any explicit form in the Comedy, is the Franciscan Laudes creaturarum (“Canticle of the Creatures”), also known as the Canticle of the Brother Sun. Written in vernacular by St. Francis himself, who is also the author of the Expositio in Pater noster, the Canticle was still recited and sung together with the Lord’s Prayer in the Franciscan communities in Dante’s time. Moreover, following the parallel readings popular nowadays in Dante studies, the author argues that Purgatorio 11 may be elucidated in the context of Paradiso 11, which is the Franciscan canto par excellence, and taken together they both offset cantos 10, 11, 12 of Inferno, which are based on the sin of pride (superbia). The denunciation of pride in and around canto 11 of Inferno alludes to humility – the remedy of such pride in Purgatory 11, which in turn prepares the reader for the encounter with St. Francis – the paragon of humility – in Paradiso 11. The author concludes that the Dantean paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer is no less than an elaborate exegesis and homage to Christ and His teachings, something which is encompassed in a nutshell in the Sermon on the Mount.

Iconoclasm

Iconoclasm is the modern name used to describe the debate about the legitimacy of portraits of Christ, Mary, and the saints in Orthodox devotional practice that began in the 720s and was resolved with the “triumph of Orthodoxy” in 843. It had an impact on Byzantine culture in two fundamental ways. First, it sealed the importance of visual communication at the heart of Orthodox devotional practice and theology. Second, by establishing that images of saints (icons) allowed the believer to channel prayers to the saint portrayed, the pro-image doctrine that emerged in the ninth century ensured that all believers—not just priests—had equal access to the divine.

The Visual Culture of Revelation: Visions and the Images that Reveal Them

It is often thought that since remote, rare, and ephemeral events such as apparitions are not available to the direct observation of scholars, the question of their nature as events must be set aside in scholarly inquiry. This results in a focus on meaning that can ignore the qualities of the event as reported and as apprehended by devotional imagery that emerges over time to provide access to the event and its relevance for devotional practice. It also encourages concepts of revelation that are not able to consider the event as a visual form of experience and regard revelation itself as something that must be either true or false. This essay proceeds otherwise, arguing that revelation is not a single, closed event, but an ongoing visual process in which sketchy schemata interact with fixed imagery to interpret the event in an ongoing history of iconography and visual interpretation. The essay focuses on the visuality of devotion to Our Lady of Fátima as a case study in how seeing works and imagery functions to make revelation a visual process whose devotional life is ongoing.

“A Monster of iniquity in my self”: Queer Sacramental Temporality in Thomas Shepard and Michael Wigglesworth

This article contends, through a reading of Thomas Shepard and Michael Wigglesworth, that puritan devotional practice contains a queer temporality that emphasizes the recurrent experience and recording of personal sinfulness. This queer temporality, articulated in puritan devotional literature in sacramental terms, poses an important challenge to the secularization account Charles Taylor offers in which puritan religious emphasis on righteous conduct leads to ultimately secular projects of social and individual reform.

“Gathering the Dispersed of Israel”: The Evolution of a Kabbalistic Prayer Addendum for Tiqqun Qeri

This article traces the evolution of a kabbalistic prayer supplication that was designed to purify male Jews from pollution caused by improper seminal emission. In doing so, it focuses on the metaphysical rationale behind it, its function, and its metamorphosis from a highly technical practice into a mainstream devotional practice. It addresses how notions of sexual pollution (qeri) were contextualized in Lurianic Kabbalah and how they were later embedded in kabbalistic manuals and prayer books. Furthermore, the article examines Jewish-Christian and inner- Jewish debates that emerged in connection with the effects of spilling semen in vain. Special attention is paid to possible social factors that may have impacted the increased anxiety about male bodily fluids and “misguided” desires. In addition to the available research on the theological and general historical background of the prohibition of wasting seed, the following analysis offers a microhistory of this short yet highly influential text.

Bureaucrats Bewildered

Using Kazakhstan as a case study, this chapter shows how the atheist officials charged with policing religion in the Soviet Union quickly lost track of the religious policies they were tasked with enforcing. Meanwhile, bureaucrats at local levels were often oblivious or even indifferent to those policies. Beyond the bureaucratic confusion and malaise, there was also significant confusion among officials over the very nature of Islam in the Soviet Union. What was the point of “registering” mosques, for example, if Kazakh Muslims, with their legacy of nomadism, did not need mosques? What was the point of monitoring mullas and other Islamic leaders when each Muslim is, according to tradition, ritually autonomous and self-sufficient? By showing the grey areas where enforcement met devotional practice, this chapter argues that Soviet Muslims were given a broad space for religious activity not only thanks to Stalin’s policies, but also through bureaucratic incompetence, indifference, and bewilderment.

Tending the ‘Contested’ Castle Garden: Sowing Seeds of Feminist Thought

Medieval women are typically portrayed as secluded, passive agents within castle studies. Although the garden is regarded as associated with women there has been little exploration of this space within medieval archaeology. In this paper, a new methodological framework is used to demonstrate how female agency can be explored in the context of the lived experience of the medieval garden. In particular, this study adopts a novel approach by focusing on relict plants at some medieval castles in Britain and Ireland. Questions are asked about the curation of these plants and the associated social practices of elite women, including their expressions of material piety, during the later medieval period. This provides a way of questioning the ‘sacrality’ of medieval gardening which noblewomen arguably used as a devotional practice and as a means to further their own bodily agency through sympathetic medicine.

Spirituality and Devotion

The spirituality and devotional practice of Jonathan Edwards, glimpsed in his personal writings and in the first-hand observations of Samuel Hopkins, is illuminated as well in the full range of his writings, including decades of sermons, notes on Scripture, and theological reflection in the ‘Miscellanies’. Pre-eminently biblical in focus, his piety was both intensely personal and integral to his intellectual work and public ministry. Even sensing the divine while meditating in nature, his mind was always fixed on God’s Word and the work of Christ in redemption. Rooted in the Augustinian–Reformed–Puritan tradition, he balanced ecstasy and order in his ‘sense of the heart’ core idea, embraced the new hymnody along with Psalm singing, and engaged Enlightenment empirical methodology in his understanding of religious experience. For Edwards, behaviour and piety were united in a spirituality of beauty and benevolence.

The Meaning of Imagined Pilgrimage

There is growing interest among historians of late medieval and early modern Europe in the concept of resistance for understanding women and power. Researchers are beginning to look beyond religious women’s overt and well-documented forms of opposition to reform efforts that increasingly restricted their physical enclosure; they contend that these women also resisted through more subtle cultural means, such as the devotional practice of imagined pilgrimage. Yet recent studies — including one by this author — have argued unconvincingly that late medieval Dominican nuns in southwest Germany who took mental journeys to Jerusalem or Rome thereby resisted their enclosure. This article uses an approach created by the anthropologist Sherry Ortner to check and correct this resistance model. It shows that the interpretation of what imagined pilgrimage meant to and for these late medieval women is most likely an effect of scholars’ present biases, both intellectual and sociocultural.