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Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Jerusalem, this essay explores a contextual form of Christian-Jewish dialogue evidenced in Catholic monasteries and convents in Israel. It proposes that this phenomenon draws from the precedents set by two forms of interreligious dialogue—by the patterns of Christian-Jewish dialogue developed in the twentieth century in Europe and North America, and by monastic interreligious dialogue—and adapts and develops these precedents to fit the religious and cultural context of contemporary Israel. Informed by the past fifty years of Christian-Jewish dialogue in the years since Vatican II, these practices result in a highly contextual form of Christian-Jewish dialogue, which reflects the unique position of Catholic religious who are living in the Jewish milieu of Israel in a Jjost-Nostra aetate world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Christian monasticism has an ancient land-based foundation. The desert fathers and later reform movements appealed to the land for sustenance, spiritual metaphor, and as a marker of authentic monastic identity. Contemporary Roman Catholic monastics with this history in mind, have actively engaged environmental discourse in ways that draw from their respective monastic lineages, a process sociologist Stephen Ellingson calls 'bridging'. Though this study is of limited scope, this bridging between monastic lineages and environmental discourse could cautiously be identified with the broader phenomenon of the 'greening' of Christianity. Looking to the future, while the footprint of North American monastic communities is quite small, and their numbers are slowly declining, a variety of conservation-minded management schemes implemented since the 1990s by some communities suggests that the impact will remain for many decades to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from long-term ethnographic research with a global network of contemplative Christians, this paper discusses an emerging teaching role for North American monasteries as the numbers of avowed religious decline. Since the Trappist community of St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, first developed the Christian meditation technique called Centering Prayer in the 1970s, monks and nuns have increasingly become teachers, models, and stabilizers of non-monastic practitioners who attempt to transform their ways of being and thinking towards monastic-inspired sensibilities. Their guidance includes the use of face-to-face, literary, and virtual means to teach methods of contemplative intersubjectivity and a commitment to lives based on service, hospitality, and humility, as well as on study and formalized rites. The paper focuses on non-monastics' strong attraction to monastic teachings on ambiguity as a source of creativity and wonder in uncertain times, as practiced through a combination of cataphatic and apophatic ritual, including Centering Prayer. The number of monastic postulants continues to falter, yet a much larger, "non-gathered" community of non-monastic oblates and neo-monastic contemplatives has grown increasingly reliant on monastics to help provide alternatives. The rising interdependence of monastics and non-monastics may become the basis of a transformation of Christian monasticism and a new concept of religious community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of calls to 're-enchant' the world in the face of our ecological crisis, where do Christians stand on the question of land being sacred? I put this question to monks living at four monastic communities in the American West. For monks living on the land, the world is sacramental of God's presence. However, this sacramental character was not universally recognized as being sacred, or divine. The monastic presence on the land can give places a sacred character through their work and prayer. Far fewer monks admitted that land was intrinsically sacred. However, during what one monk called "charged moments" the sacredness of God was seen as manifesting through the land. Thus, while there is no consensus among monks as to the sacredness of land, there is a deep reverence for place and landscape at the heart of monastic spirituality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]