Via Zoom, this event is presented by the Lumen Christi Institute.

A webinar lecture with Fr. Joseph Van House of Our Lady of Dallas Cistercian Abbey

Free and open to the public. This event will be held online through Zoom (registration required) and live-streamed to YouTube. This event is part of a summer webinar series on Monastic Wisdom. 

The Song of Songs is the Bible’s treasure-house of love poetry, a cycle of songs sung between a man, a woman, and their friends, lush with the imagery of nature and of intense human longing. In it the name of God nowhere to be seen; believers have always, however, cherished it as a figurative representation of the ideal love between God and humanity; indeed, one of history’s most forceful movements for Christian celibacy – the Cistercian renewal of the twelfth-century – was famous for tending to treat the Song of Songs as the very heart of the Bible. This challenges us with the following very basic question: what does it mean to speak of God in romantic terms?