Ilia Delio

Clare of Assisi: A Heart Full of Love explores Clare's deep desire to live the gospel life, more precisely, her desire for all of us to reflect on Christ and his crucifixion in order to see our own strengths and weaknesses, and most importantly, our capacity to love. Ilia Delio illustrates how Clare, through her life, her writings, letters, prayer and example, is truly a mystic who helped generations of Catholics clearly see how Christ took on human flesh, not just to suffer and die for us, show more but to help us all in turn reflect back the face of Christ to the world.

Clare was not simply a follower of Francis, she was a formidable, resolute, devout and loving saint whose life centered on this essence of human identity—Christ is in each of us—and who sought to teach us to just be ourselves and to let God dwell within us. In Clare of Assisi: A Heart Full of Love, Ilia Delio shows us just how Clare's simple, but powerful beliefs transformed the way we all think about Christ—even today. show less

We are a species between axial periods. Thus, our religious myths are struggling to find new connections in a global, ecological order. Delio proposes the new myth of relational holism; that is, the search for a new connection to divinity in an age of quantum physics, evolution, and pluralism. The idea of relational holism is one that is rooted in the God-world relationship, beginning with the Book of Genesis, but finds its real meaning in quantum physics and the renewed relationship between show more mind and matter. Our story, therefore, will traverse across the fields of science, scripture, theology, history, culture and psychology. Our guides for a new myth of relational holism are the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, and the Jesuit scientist-theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The complex human can no longer be simplified to one view or another: one must see the whole of our existence or one does not see at all. - from the publisher show less

This short book is dense, and rewards close reading. Delio critiques the medieval cosmology which has formed the basis of theology since Thomas Aquinas and argues for a theology based on "new" cosmology, i.e., the Big Bang theory, evolution and quantum relativity. She is, as this summary suggests, quite daring and her ideas stirred me.

Dense and hard to consume very much at a time, but really good. It's not a book that I particularly enjoyed reading, just because it was so much to take in...but a good deal of the material has become some of my core beliefs! I could make a book just from my highlights. She quotes Teilhard de Chardin so much that at times I wondered if I should have just read his works instead.