Free and open to the public. This event will be held online through Zoom (registration required) and live-streamed to YouTube. This event is part of a summer webinar series on Monastic Wisdom.
The Song of Songs is the Bible’s treasure-house of love poetry, a cycle of songs sung between a man, a woman, and their friends, lush with the imagery of nature and of intense human longing. In it the name of God nowhere to be seen; believers have always, however, cherished it as a figurative representation of the ideal love between God and humanity; indeed, one of history’s most forceful movements for Christian celibacy – the Cistercian renewal of the twelfth-century – was famous for tending to treat the Song of Songs as the very heart of the Bible. This challenges us with the following very basic question: what does it mean to speak of God in romantic terms?
Speaker: Father Joseph Van House, Our Lady of Dallas Cistercian Abbey
Wisdom from the Heart of the Cistercian Tradition
Join us once per month, June through September, for four Sunday evening sessions featuring monks from Our Lady of Dallas Cistercian Abbey who will lead us through a series of reflections examining the contours of the monastic intellectual tradition. At the foundations of the Cistercian order is the reform movement of St. Bernard of Clairvaux. In faithfulness to their founder, these webinars invite participants to see how the monastic approach to Scripture, theology, and the common life might reform our own understanding and endeavors in the labors of daily Christianity.
This series is co-presented with Our Lady of Dallas Cistercian Abbey, and co-sponsored by the Harvard Catholic Forum, the Nova Forum, the Saint Benedict Institute, and Studies in Catholic Faith and Culture at the University of Dallas.