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Oct. 27th, 2008 05:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tree_and_leafSome of you, I recall, said you were interested in reading Meister Eckhart - which impulse I would obviously support, because Eckhart is wonderful. He's not, however, necessarily the easiest of writers to approach, not so much because he's dry and academic - he isn't, he's wonderfully vivid and has a sense of humour - but he is a very dense writer, and also he can be misunderstood if you don't have a certain amount of familiarity with mediaeval philosophical thought.†
I've just been reading Cyprian Smith's The Way of Paradox, which answers some of these problems, and which I got an awful lot out of. It's not a work of academic theology, being directly addressed to people who are seeking to deepen their spiritual life, but it is clearly written by someone with a scholarly mind who has reflected deeply both on Eckhart in his original context and what that might mean to us today.
† For similar reasons, come to think about it, I'm rather battling with John Polkinghorne's Science and Christian Belief, because while it seems very interesting and thought provoking, I'm having difficulty with the physics bits.
I've just been reading Cyprian Smith's The Way of Paradox, which answers some of these problems, and which I got an awful lot out of. It's not a work of academic theology, being directly addressed to people who are seeking to deepen their spiritual life, but it is clearly written by someone with a scholarly mind who has reflected deeply both on Eckhart in his original context and what that might mean to us today.
† For similar reasons, come to think about it, I'm rather battling with John Polkinghorne's Science and Christian Belief, because while it seems very interesting and thought provoking, I'm having difficulty with the physics bits.