Desert Encounters

What does the hermit life mean to a Benedictine monk used to living in community? This article makes the case that the hidden riches of living as an anchorite in the desert can deepen one’s commitment to living with others, as well as expand one’s interreligious horizons. Such are my reflections from a recent sabbatical stay in the high-desert region of south-central Colorado

The Monastic Ideal and the Glorified/Spiritual Resurrection Body: An Exercise in Speculative Theology

An imaginative exploration of the possible attributes of the glorified, spiritual, postresurrection human body in the Christian tradition (see 1 Cor 15:35-50), by integrating Scripture, gender studies, monastic spirituality, and patristic theological sources

Hospitality in the Benedictine Monastic Tradition

A reflection on the importance of Benedictine hospitality in Scripture, the Rule of Benedict, interreligious dialogue, and in our uprooted and immigrant world of today

Monks as Model Men: Gender Anomalies or Heroic Ideal?

The movie The Mask You Live In portrays gender socialization for men in the United States today as dominated by a trajectory emphasizing ruthless competition, a never-ending search for prestige in material wealth, and a largely self-serving quest to overcome and control women. The movie graphically depicts all the accompanying psychological dysfunction, legal difficulties, and emotional distress experienced by boys and young men desperately trying to conform to such a scripted model of masculinity. Anthropological research invites alternate ways of thinking about the relationship between sex and gender. This is especially true among those who claim a close relationship with the supernatural or transcendent. Can the methodology of cultural anthropology provisionally expand the consideration of gender variants to provide other ways of modeling masculinity without discarding the underlying gender binary altogether? Catholic Christian monastics —men and women who commit to communal devotional and service roles in the light of transcendent aims and ends—demonstrate the potential for providing healthier alternative masculinity scripts. More specifically, can monks successfully model and communicate such an alternative masculinity for men in a higher educational institutional setting

Religious Faith as Cultural Heritage at the Refuge for World Truths

Faith undergirds the Refuge for World Truths, a multireligious heritage-scape that emerged out of an old Spanish land grant adjacent to the Wild West mining and ranching town of Crestone, Colorado. Established by an entrepreneurial husband-and-wife team in the late twentieth century, the Refuge’s spiritual centers were founded upon different faith commitments. Christian, [Sufi] Muslim, and Baha’i centers adhere to a monotheistic faith and claim divine revelation as the source of their presence in the Refuge. New Age, polytheistic, and nontheistic groups base their faith claim on the personal mystical revelations of “Glenn,” a local peripatetic and self-described prophet who hailed the arrival of the original couple. Two stints of ethnographic research point to the spiritual centers’ public ritual performances as both invitations to pilgrims to intensify this faith and as functional cogs in the integration and continuity of the heritage-scape’s ritual economy. Finally, the faith expressions underlying the Refuge for World Truths allow this unique locality to champion interreligious dialogue as a method for addressing diversity and negotiating potential onsite conflict on the path to peaceful mutuality