The story of novelist and poet Deborah Larsen's young womanhood, The Tulip and the Pope is both an exquisitely crafted spiritual memoir and a beautifully nuanced view of life in the convent.In midsummer of 1960, nineteen-year-old Deborah shares a cab to a convent. She and the teenage girls with her, passionate to become nuns, heedless of all they are leaving behind, smoke their last cigarettes before entering their new lives. In the same artful prose that distinguished her novel The White, Larsen's memoir lets us into the hushed life of the convent. She captures the exquisite peace she found there, as well as the extreme constriction of the rules and her gradual awareness of all that she is missing. Eventually the physical world—the lush tulip she remembers seeing as a girl, the snow she tunneled in, and even the mystery of sex—begins to seem to her an alternative theater for a deep understanding and love of God.

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A twentieth anniversary edition of the classic, featuring new material by the author. Anna Pavord's internationally bestselling sensation, The Tulip, is the story of a flower that has driven men mad. Greed, desire, anguish, and devotion have all played their part in the development of the tulip into a worldwide phenomenon. Today, the United States alone imports three thousand million tulip bulbs each year. No other flower has ever carried so much consequence; it charts political upheavals, illuminates social behavior, mirrors economic booms and busts, plots the ebb and flow of religious persecution. Why did the tulip dominate so many lives through so many centuries in so many countries? Anna Pavord, a self-confessed tulipomaniac, spent six years looking for answers, roaming through Asia, India, and the Ottoman Empire to tell how a humble wildflower of the Asian steppes made its way to Turkey and from there took the whole of Western Europe by storm. Sumptuously illustrated from a wide range of sources, this irresistible volume has become a bible, a unique source book, a universal gift book, and a joy to all who possess it. This beautifully redesigned edition features a new Preface by the author, a completely revised listing of the best varieties of this incomparable flower to choose for your garden, and a reorganized listing of tulip species, to reflect the latest thinking by taxonomists.

In this book, Dustin Griffin explores the lifelong conversation between two great eighteenth-century English writers, Swift and Pope.

For many American Catholics in the twentieth-century the face of the Church was a woman's face. After the Second World War, as increasing numbers of baby boomers flooded Catholic classrooms, the Church actively recruited tens of thousands of young women as teaching sisters. In Into Silence and Servitude Brian Titley delves into the experiences of young women who entered Catholic religious sisterhoods at this time. The Church favoured nuns as teachers because their wageless labour made education more affordable in what was the world's largest private school system. Focusing on the Church's recruitment methods Titley examines the idea of a religious vocation, the school settings in which nuns were recruited, and the tactics of persuasion directed at both suitable girls and their parents. The author describes how young women entered religious life and how they negotiated the sequence of convent "formation stages," each with unique challenges respecting decorum, autonomy, personal relations, work, and study. Although expulsions and withdrawals punctuated each formation stage, the number of nuns nationwide continued to grow until it reached a pinnacle in 1965, the same year that Catholic schools achieved their highest enrolment. Based on extensive archival research, memoirs, oral history, and rare Church publications, Into Silence and Servitude presents a compelling narrative that opens a window on little-known aspects of America’s convent system.

In 1962 a group of Catholic leaders traveled to Rome, charged by Pope John XXIII with the task of making the gospel of Christ relevant in a modern world. The Second Vatican Council transformed the lives of Catholics through sweeping reforms -- yet its effect on the daily lives of practicing Catholics has never been fully understood. In this illuminating study, religious historian Colleen McDannell presents new insight into Vatican II by shifting the framework of its analysis: from men to women, from urban to suburban, from theory to practice. Using the story of her Catholic mother's life as a narrative thread, McDannell presents in The Spirit of Vatican II a refreshingly positive portrayal of the state of modern Catholicism -- and a testament to the lasting effects of its liberalization.

Since the first scandals broke in the mid-1980s, the sexual misconducts of priests have cost the Catholic Church in America more than $4 billion in compensation settlements and incalculable damage to its reputation. Although their crimes have attracted far less attention, predatory nuns have also caused harm. The depredations of these nuns took place in convent novitiates, orphanages, boarding schools for Native Americans, and in Catholic schools, both elementary and secondary. Their victims, male and female, ranged in age from six-year-olds to young adults. This book focuses on the criminal behavior of North American nuns and the responses from church leadership. Mothers superior were outspoken in their refusal to accept responsibility for the crimes committed under their watch, and their inclination was to close ranks and protect the predators, endangering many children and young people in the process. The complainants, on the other hand, were considered nuisances to be pushed aside with the least amount of exposure and expense possible. Straightforward and informative, this text begins by exploring the nuns' vow of chastity and its relationship with human sexuality, followed by dozens of case studies detailing the sexual abuse that nuns committed in various settings.