Our community is convinced that a lifetime commitment to spiritual reading, study, and on-going formation goes hand-in-hand with a rich, expansive, creative contemplative life.
We arrange our schedule to provide time each day for the kind of in-depth reading of Scripture, Carmelite sources, theology, spirituality, and philosophy that will infuse and inspire our prayer, liturgies, daily living together, and our relationships with the broader community.
Our community has cherished a tradition of learning and study from the beginnings of our Carmel in 1790, when our foundresses brought over 1,300 books on the boat from the Low Countries to America.
Since the Second Vatican Council a program of continuing education has been an integral part of our lives. A breadth of education has influenced not only the renewal of our Carmelite life, but our prophetic responsibilities as contemplative women at this time in history.
Encouraged by the seminal documents of Vatican II, our study has extended to world religions, literature, and science with its incredible discoveries, as well as to other disciplines and many contemporary issues like women’s and gender studies, the environment, poverty, racism, human trafficking, war and violence.
