Here is a letter that I received from Brendan Bowman:<\/p>\n
I am very happy to have found your site.\u00a0 I have been intending to read a book to learn more about the ideas of Meister Eckhart.\u00a0 I would appreciate it if someone could recommend a basic book that touches the surface of Meister Eckhart’s major sermons\/thoughts\/ideas.\u00a0 Thank you very much for your time and help.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Dear Brendan, if I was to recommend just one book, this would be Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defense, by Edmund Colledge, Bernard McGinn. The book opens with a short but fair, dense and careful introduction to Meister Eckhart, followed by a superb selection of his works. This way you will have both what you ask for, and (more than)\u00a0a glance to Eckhart himself. It is important that you will not limit yourself to second hand knowledge and meet Meister Eckhart himself, by his own works.<\/p>\n
A similar, from some aspects even better, choice, would be Simon Parke’s Conversations with Meister Eckhart<\/a>, a rather small book (about 100 pages) managing to gather from Eckhart’s sermons the most significant sayings, presenting them interlinked in a form of an imagined dialogue with Eckhart.<\/p>\n
However, if you need only a book about <\/em>Meister Eckhart, without any of his works, then get The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing, by Bernard McGinn<\/a>.<\/p>\n
A third (not in quality) recommendation, would be the\u00a0Wandering Joy: Meister Eckhart’s Mystical Philosophy, by Reiner Schurmann<\/a>. This is a masterful analysis of some of the most characteristic sermons of Meister Eckhart. It is a difficult and specialized book, but\u00a0it offers\u00a0a genuine\u00a0philosophical approach\u00a0(along with some of Eckhart’s own\u00a0works, as is the case with the first recommendation above).<\/p>\n