Books with category Religious Life
Displaying 2 books

Unveiled: The Hidden Lives of Nuns

2005

by Cheryl L. Reed

Unveiled: The Hidden Lives of Nuns offers a candid and fascinating exploration into the lives of nuns, drawing on interviews with more than three hundred nuns from a variety of orders. This book reflects a diversity of beliefs and provides a revealing look at life behind the convent walls.

Cheryl L. Reed, an award-winning investigative journalist, lived and prayed with these nuns, witnessing their vows and ceremonies. She delves into their daily lives, worship services, friendships, and their attitudes toward the modern world and its consumerism.

Through this journey, readers will gain insight into love, sex, faith, joy, loss, and regret, as well as the nuns' views on motherhood, relationships, and feminism. This book is an eye-opening exploration of the interior lives of women dedicated to their spiritual paths.

The Calling

On a hilltop north of Seattle, overlooking the glorious vista of Puget Sound and the white-capped Olympics, stands Rosary Heights, the motherhouse of the Sisters of Saint Dominic of the Holy Cross. The story begins here, with a catastrophic storm that shifts the ground beneath the motherhouse and threatens to send it crashing into the waters below. In a single act of nature, a moment of truth, the order is forced to rethink its place in the world and its purpose.

With Rosary Heights as the backdrop, Catherine Whitney takes a personal journey inside the order that ran the school she attended as a child, the order that, for a short time, she contemplated entering herself. Her quest is to come to terms with what it means to be called to the religious life. What is the secret these women hold that makes them--no matter how diverse--perform common rituals, celebrate the same Mass, and serve the same God?

In The Calling, we meet several valiant women who struggle with the practicalities of the world around them as well as the complicating issues of the life of a nun. Each woman's story is compelling. Together, they form a dramatic human chronicle that is fascinating and revealing--a chronicle of a community that has existed for centuries but is still evolving and whose anxieties and joys are utterly relevant to all of us, regardless of our beliefs.

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