Luther’s Mysticism, Pietism, and Contemplative Spirituality

To ask, “Why church?” certainly stirs multilayered theological, missional, ecclesial, and pastoral reflection. The question also has spiritual ramifications. To explore some of them, we will trace a thread of the Lutheran spiritual tradition from Martin Luther’s own “faith mysticism” through particular aspects of German pietism. That overview will provide a foundation for engaging the contemporary contemplative movement, in order to discern how its concepts and practices might provide insight for the practice of spirituality. Our conviction is that deepening the interior journey through a living, active faith leads not to withdrawal but to an awareness—even a vulnerability—that welcomes a healthy struggle with the realities of our world

Superspace Type II 4D Supergravity from Type II Superstring

We derive the equations of motion of type II 4D supergravity in superspace. This is achieved by coupling the Type II Berkovits' hybrid superstring to an N=2 curved background and requiring that the sigma-model has N=(2,2) superconformal invariance at one loop. We show that there are no anomalies in the fermionic OPE's and the complete set of compensator's equations is derived from the energy-momentum tensor. The equations of motion describe a hypertensorial and vectorial multiplet coupled to a U(1)\times U(1) N=2 Poincar\`e Supergravity.Comment: 13 pages, revtex4. Based on work presented at 4th International Winter Conference on Mathematical Methods in Physics (WC 2004), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 9-13 Aug 200