Continuous prayer in Catherine of Siena

Catherine of Siena offers considerable wisdom regarding continuous prayer. However, this wisdom in not well known because it is scattered among her texts, including over 373 letters, and is expressed in images and metaphors, the product of oral communication by a 14th-century woman with no formal education. Through a literary analysis of original texts, I will show the interconnection among the meanings of her symbolic communications, offering a narrative about continuous prayer. I will explore the meaning of inner cell and time spent in this cell for knowledge of self and God. I will show how this dual knowledge results in transformation of the deepest motivation at the core of the person. Living consciously and for God’s kingdom out of this transformed core of the self constitutes continuous prayer

The dialogue of the seraphic virgin, Catherine of Siena : dictated by her, while in a state of ecstasy, to her secretaries, and completed in the year of our Lord 1370; together with an account of her death by an eye-witness /

Translation of Libro della divina dottrina.Mode of access: Internet

Opening the Sacred Body or the Profaned Host in The Merchant of Venice

This text was conceived and begun in the Orient, the Middle East (American University of Beirut) and was completed in the Occident (University of Central Florida). Between the beginning of an end, the birth of a death, the end of a beginning and the death of a birth, in that painful intersection, this text aims at tracing the phenomena and events of opening and cutting that leave their imprints upon the textual landscape of The Merchant of Venice. It will not be a question here of repeating or returning to the paradigm of the circumcision, but of highlighting that Shylock\u27s attempt to open the body, to make an incision into the Christian body of Antonio represents and reproduces a willingness to attack and to profane the Eucharist. © 2013 © 2013 Taylor & Francis