A visitor coming today to the beautifully situated convent of Maria-Medingen in Bavaria will find a doll of the infant Jesus proudly displayed in a glass shrine. It is in a chapel dedicated to the fourteenth-century nun to whom the doll once belonged, the mystic Margaretha von Ebner. In ...
In the Old Babylonian period we find instead a plethora of other women devoted to religion. Most conspicuous are those who lived as a group in convents, each in her own house. Such a woman was called in Sumerian a lukur, Akkadian nadîtu, for which we shall use the term ‘nun’. ...
aIn the years after China’s invasion of Tibet in 1950, thousands of Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and convents were destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of Tibetans perished. Today the suppression of religion is more subtle and less visible to outsiders. Many of the monasteries have been partly ...