Search results for ""author rachel mann""

Priest, poet and broadcaster Rachel Mann believes the world is charged with a divine spark. She explains how in our encounters with what she terms ‘the spectres of God’, one can become at peace with limitation, precariousness, lack of certainty, and one’s fragility and fractures - and at the same time find in divine fragility the hope of the world. Drawing on her own experiences, in three short chapters (on the body, on love, and on time) Mann explores how God invites us, repeatedly, to live in a rich three-dimensional mystery that subverts the depressing flat-earth of modern life.

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A Poetry Book Society Recommendation Spring 2024. In her second collection, Mann wrestles with the questions and possibilities raised when trans identity, faith and the limits of myth and language intersect and are tested. Eleanor Among the Saints is a study in the queer joy found in counter-factuals and fantasy, shaped through the prism of the disputed story of Eleanor Rykener, a medieval trans woman, seamstress and sex worker.

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In the Bleak Midwinter explores the power of Advent and the joy of Christmas through the poetry of Christina Rossetti. Best known for her poems-turned-carols In the Bleak Midwinter and Love Came Down at Christmas, Rossetti’s rich and wondrous faith provides an inspiring seasonal companion. For each day from Advent Sunday to the Epiphany, Rachel Mann selects a poem and reflects on it, drawing on Rossetti’s many other writings including her devotional journals and commentary on biblical narratives. At a time when commercial pressures are at their most intense, this volume aims to lead readers to an encounter with God’s time and space, to find our true identity beyond all that would limit and diminish our humanity.

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‘About the months leading up to Evie’s death, indeed, about the aftermath, I made a solemn vow to keep silent, and I like to think I take promises seriously. Despite what happened to Evie, I still think of those months I spent in the company of her and Richard, Ivo, Charlie and Piers as fondly as I remember anything. That we swore an oath to silence is not, necessarily, a sign of guilt. You should remember that we are the kind of people who take oaths seriously and we had more things binding us together than mere promises.’ ~ Littlemore College is in a picturesque village just outside Oxford. Its calm surroundings have seen generations of aspirant priests pray and train. As far as the outside world is concerned, human passions are restrained by devotion to a higher calling. But this is the 1990s and women are training for the priesthood for the very first time. Passions are running high and at Littlemore College’s enclosed and febrile heart, a small group of brilliant young ordinands, the favoured students of the charismatic and controversial Medievalist, Professor Albertus Loewe, are asking themselves some very dangerous questions. When Catherine Bolton arrives with her freshly-minted doctorate on Chaucer and the Church, Dr Loewe and his secretive group of students represent an irresistible challenge to her and her new friend Evie Kirkland. But just as Evie is not quite the friend she seems to be, so too the medieval passions of Dr Loewe’s group are more far reaching and intense than she could ever have imagined.

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A Kingdom of Love is a lyrical interrogation of the place of the sacred and profane in a demythologised world from poet and Anglican parish priest, Rachel Mann.

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** Suitable for online learning and study ** A brilliant new Lent Course for 2019, based on the hugely popular film The Greatest Showman. The 2018 Golden Globe-nominated movie starring Hugh Jackman, about the founder and stars of the Barnum & Bailey Circus is ideal for Lenten study of Christian themes of hope, redemption and new life. The five-week course offers discussion points, biblical reflections and prayers based on short excerpts from the film. The themes are: (1) ‘A Million Dreams’, exploring what liberation and hope might look like for an ‘outsider’ in the world; (2) ‘Come Alive’, exploring how the family of faith can bring hope and purpose; (3) ‘Rewrite the stars’, asks what forms of resistance can be placed in the way of salvation; (4) ‘Never Enough’, questions the temptations of false fulfilment that can lead us to betrayal; (5) ‘The Greatest Show’, shows how redemption is found when we discover ‘the circus is our home’.

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‘About the months leading up to Evie’s death, indeed, about the aftermath, I made a solemn vow to keep silent, and I like to think I take promises seriously. Despite what happened to Evie, I still think of those months I spent in the company of her and Richard, Ivo, Charlie and Piers as fondly as I remember anything. That we swore an oath to silence is not, necessarily, a sign of guilt. You should remember that we are the kind of people who take oaths seriously and we had more things binding us together than mere promises.’ ~ Littlemore College is in a picturesque village just outside Oxford. Its calm surroundings have seen generations of aspirant priests pray and train. As far as the outside world is concerned, human passions are restrained by devotion to a higher calling. But this is the 1990s and women are training for the priesthood for the very first time. Passions are running high and at Littlemore College’s enclosed and febrile heart, a small group of brilliant young ordinands, the favoured students of the charismatic and controversial Medievalist, Professor Albertus Loewe, are asking themselves some very dangerous questions. When Catherine Bolton arrives with her freshly-minted doctorate on Chaucer and the Church, Dr Loewe and his secretive group of students represent an irresistible challenge to her and her new friend Evie Kirkland. But just as Evie is not quite the friend she seems to be, so too the medieval passions of Dr Loewe’s group are more far reaching and intense than she could ever have imagined.

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Since C.H. Sisson's ground-breaking Selected Poems (Carcanet, 1984), Christina Rossetti's readership has burgeoned. Almost a century ago Ford Madox Ford claimed her as 'the most valuable poet that the Victorian age produced', and - as Valentine Cunningham recently declared - she now sits at top table with Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins and Barrett Browning. Feminist and queer scholars have since laid claim to Rossetti; but her Anglo-Catholic faith was never incidental to the power of even her most secular poems and is at the heart of her imaginative work. As an Anglican priest and poet, Rachel Mann in her selection appreciates Rossetti's ambition while attending, too, to recent scholarship that focuses on the religious, feminist and fantastical elements in her work.

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