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Ulterior Lives: The Outsider Politics of Monasticism

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Obedience as a virtue
Did the 'vow of obedience' appear with the first monastic Rule of Life? What of the wild, autonomous spirit of obedience among the hermits?
 • 
The Passio Project
 and 
David Benjamin Blower
Gains and losses in the first Rule of Life
Some things get lost in the first monastic Rule of Life; but the associated gains are pretty compelling.
 • 
The Passio Project
 and 
David Benjamin Blower
Organising the monastic community
The first monastic 'rule of life' appeared not that long after the original desert hermits. What do these first steps of formalisation show us?
 • 
The Passio Project
 and 
David Benjamin Blower
The troubled days of St Jerome
Or, the reassuring complexity of the 'Patron Saint of Difficult Personalities'
 • 
The Passio Project
 and 
David Benjamin Blower
Turning free competition into a joke
The undercurrent of hermits 'competing' to be the lowest and the least parodies the Roman world of power, prestige and privilege.
 • 
The Passio Project
 and 
David Benjamin Blower
On the absence of children
On the face of it, the most long-running anarchist commune in Western history had no investment in what it was building: the end was wired in.
 • 
The Passio Project
 and 
David Benjamin Blower
Exorcising the male gaze
The hermits sought to overcome the sexual predations of patriarchy, but they left some difficult questions behind them
 • 
The Passio Project
 and 
David Benjamin Blower
To be in solitude, together
The hermits show us the easily missed connection between personal spiritualities and the political economies they lean toward
 • 
The Passio Project
 and 
David Benjamin Blower

Notes on Poverty, Death & Nothingness: St Paul of the Cross

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Not your friendly Instagram mystic
Christian mystics have a curious magnetism in these troubled times. Can we understand them on their own terms?
 • 
The Passio Project
 and 
David Benjamin Blower
The other side of the fence
Your enemy is God's gift to you: Part 2 — meeting others outside our own social experience
 • 
The Passio Project
 and 
David Benjamin Blower
Your enemy is God's gift to you
There is a possibility, however slim, that our arguments can lead us to miraculous change.
 • 
The Passio Project
 and 
David Benjamin Blower
Is poverty the problem — or wealth?
For many centuries, voluntary poverty was the mark of revolutionary movements of all kinds, not just religious orders
 • 
The Passio Project
 and 
David Benjamin Blower
Breaking the cycle of power
The eccentric St Paul of the Cross, who took peculiar delight in his own “nothingness,” opens a loophole in our embattled political imagination.
 • 
The Passio Project
 and 
David Benjamin Blower
In praise of nothingness
St Paul of the Cross seems to find a childlike freedom in having nothing to prove.
 • 
The Passio Project
 and 
David Benjamin Blower
The opposite of positive thinking
For St Paul of the Cross, authentic joy comes from experience and compassion — not internalised storytelling
 • 
The Passio Project
 and 
David Benjamin Blower
Let's talk about mystical death
What the diaries of a mystic tell us about 'letting go'
 • 
The Passio Project
 and 
David Benjamin Blower
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