This e-book introduces scholars to Christian mysticism and sleek severe responses to it. Christianity has a wealthy culture of mystical theology that first emerged within the writings of the early church fathers, and flourished in the course of the center a long time. at the present time Christian mysticism is more and more known as an enormous Christian historical past suitable to modern-day non secular seekers. The booklet units out to supply scholars and different readers with entry to the most theoretical techniques to Christian mysticism - together with these propounded through William James, Steven Katz, Bernard McGinn, Michael Sells, Denys Turner and Caroline Walker-Bynum. It additionally explores postmodern re-readings of Christian mysticism via authors reminiscent of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-François Lyotard. The booklet first introduces scholars to the most issues that underpin Christian mysticism. It then displays on how smooth critics have understood every one of them, demonstrating that stark delineation among different theoretical methods ultimately collapses lower than the load of the complicated interplay among adventure and data that lies on the center of Christian mysticism. In doing so, the publication provides a planned problem to a strictly perennialist examining of Christian mysticism. somebody even remotely acquainted with Christian mysticism will recognize that renewed curiosity in Christian mystical writers has created an important array of scholarship with which scholars of mysticism have to familiarise themselves. This ebook outlines a number of the smooth theoretical techniques in a fashion simply available to a reader with very little past wisdom of this zone, and provides a philosophical/theological advent to Christian mystical writers past the patristic interval vital for the Latin Western Tradition.