Brides of Christ is a study of professed nuns and life in the convents of colonial Mexico.

The early Christian writer Tertullian first applied the epithet "bride of Christ" to the uppity virgins of Carthage as a means of enforcing female obedience. Henceforth, the virgin as Christ's spouse was expected to manifest matronly modesty and due submission, hobbling virginity's ancient capacity to destabilize gender roles. In the early Middle Ages, the focus on virginity and the attendant anxiety over its possible loss reinforced the emphasis on claustration in female religious communities, while also profoundly disparaging the nonvirginal members of a given community. With the rising importance of intentionality in determining a person's spiritual profile in the high Middle Ages, the title of bride could be applied and appropriated to laywomen who were nonvirgins as well. Such instances of democratization coincided with the rise of bridal mysticism and a progressive somatization of female spirituality. These factors helped cultivate an increasingly literal and eroticized discourse: women began to undergo mystical enactments of their union with Christ, including ecstatic consummations and vivid phantom pregnancies. Female mystics also became increasingly intimate with their confessors and other clerical confidants, who were sometimes represented as stand-ins for the celestial bridegroom. The dramatic merging of the spiritual and physical in female expressions of religiosity made church authorities fearful, an anxiety that would coalesce around the figure of the witch and her carnal induction into the Sabbath.

This volume argues that ancient Greek girls and early Christian virgins and their families made use of rhetorically similar traditions of marriage to an otherworldly bridegroom in order to handle the problem of a girl’s denied or disrupted transition into adulthood. In both ancient Greece and early Christian Rome, the standard female transition into adulthood was marked by marriage, sex, and childbirth. When problems arose just before or during this transition, the transitional girl’s status within society became insecure. Walker presents a case for how and why the dead Greek virgin girl, depicted in Archaic through Hellenistic sources, in both texts and inscriptions, as a bride of Hades, and the life-long female Christian virgin or celibate ascetic, dubbed the bride of Christ around the third century CE, provide a fruitful point of comparison as particular examples of strategies used to neutralize the tension of disrupted female transition into adulthood. Bride of Hades to Bride of Christ offers a fascinating comparative study that will be of interest to anyone working on virginity and womanhood in the ancient world.

How can we experience the glory of the Lord? Who is the Bride of Christ? Get answers to these questions as the author explores how the Bride of Christ is no ordinary pew sitting Christian. The church has fallen and it is time to arise, get cleansed, sanctified, and restored to the King of Glory. This book will show you clearly what must be done to restore the Bride so that she will be ready to meet the Bridegroom as well as bring restoration to the tabernacle. If we do what David did, we will consecrate ourselves to experience God's glory, worship the King like kings, be transformed into His likeness and change the world around us. Every church leader, as well as the entire Body of Christ, will be impacted by this message. Get your copy today!

From the grandeur of Creation to the glorious union of the Savior and his bride, God's love sweeps through eternity in the greatest of all love stories. A book of power, beauty, and grandeur. Rarely has a piece of Christian literature combined the simplicity of the storytelling art with the profound depths of the Christian faith.

The Church in God's Program is a biblical study covering the entire scope of the church - its beginning, government, ministries, and the new covenant.