From Publishers Weekly
"If the book has a plot, it is this one," begins Weaver in this fascinating snapshot of the history of the Carmelite monastery in Indianapolis. "The community that began in 1932 as a group living in a sacred space apart from the world has changed over time into a community that sees the world itself as a sacred space." This branch of Carmelites was founded by Teresa of Avila in the mid-16th century to be small, unendowed and enclosed (literally, cloistered). Weaver's book shows how the nuns in Indianapolis have tried to balance these ideals with the challenges of living in the modern world (e.g., making a living through their typesetting business, or handling the volume of traffic on their popular Web site, www.praythenews.com). The book is imaginatively organized, with each chapter corresponding to some architectural phase of the monastery's construction; the chapter on contemplative prayer, for example, is centered around the building of the new chapel in 1961. Based on written history, in-depth interviews with the monastery's residents and a profound sense of place, Weaver's book raises important questions about change and religious community.Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Book Description
This book is both a history of the Carmelite monastery of Indianapolis and an introduction to the Carmelites, a contemplative order of Roman Catholicism, founded in the 13th century and reborn as a reform movement for women religious by Teresa of Avila in the 16th century. Carmelite nuns live an ascetic, cloistered life, but the view that one must "leave the world" to find sacred space has evolved to embrace the notion that the world itself is sacred space.


About the Author
Mary Jo Weaver is Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University. She has published books on the modernist controversy at the turn of the 19th century, on the women's movement within the Catholic Church toward the end of the 20th century, and, most recently, two books on divisions within American Catholicism at the turn of the millennium, Being Right and What's Left (both Indiana University Press). She teaches courses on mysticism with special attention to Teresa of Avila and has been a friend of the Indianapolis Carmelites for more than 20 years.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Imagine a medieval castle with a Web site. The Carmelite monastery of Indianapolis has strong towers, heavy oak doors and hand-wrought iron fittings, and hallways marked off by heavy chains where light comes in through mauve-colored windows. It also has a bank of computers linked together in a LAN and a Web site, words that were not in the vocabulary of Saint Teresa of Avila, the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic and founding genius of Carmelite spirituality. Sisters who entered the monastery in Indianapolis (built in 1932) moved into a house and a life not unlike the one that Teresa inhabited. They "left the world" in order to live a religious life in a sacred space. Today those same sisters perceive the universe itself as a sacred space, and they are surprisingly aware of and prayerfully present to the world." This project, which began as an architectural history soon developed into a celebration of Carmelite spirituality as it grew from the experience and reforming instincts of Teresa of Avila. Paradoxically, just as the Indianapolis sisters completed a thirty-year building project designed to produce the ideal monastery, the Catholic Church participated in the second Vatican council, an event that, among other things, opened new theologies of prayer and spirituality. The sisters in Indianapolis, following the example of their undaunted founder, began to explore comtemplative life in new ways and to find a dynamic concept of cloister. Their openness to new ideas is a reflection of Teresa's own struggles to come to terms with a new form of prayer in a particularly dangerous time and place. Living inside a medieval system has produced a group of women remarkably at home in new understandings of prayer, cloister, and community.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly