The discipline of spirituality can be described as the study of human experience of encounter with the transcendent and our lived response to that encounter. There are commonalities to our experience of transcendence that cross the divides of culture...
The present article provides an urban reading of the Apophthegmata Patrum, in the broader context of the rediscovery and re-evaluation of monastic spirituality by and for the laity. On the one hand, the 21st century is considered to be the age of lon...
Social isolation and inactivity have a profound effect on one’s quality of life. In recent times, the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the social life of many. When it comes to disabled populations, emotional well-being is greatly affected by an...
This paper examines the ways in which the Letters of Ammonas, John Cassian’s Conference IV, and the corpus of Macarius-Symeon appropriate and develop the motif of divine abandonment found in St. Antony and shifts it into a distinctly pneumatolo...
The present paper explores contemporary desert father Matta Al-Miskīn’s views on humankind’s union with God within the Paradise–Fall–Salvation schema against the backdrop of his Alexandrian Patristic forebears. He underst...
Christian monasticism has an ancient land-based foundation. The desert fathers and later reform movements appealed to the land for sustenance, spiritual metaphor, and as a marker of authentic monastic identity. Contemporary Roman Catholic monastics w...
In the early 1990s, David Orr wrote about the epistemological myths of North American culture, and offered ecological literacy as a form of resistance. In the same decade, Parker Palmer confronted dominant epistemologies in religious institutions, an...
This article explores “contestation” as a constitutive and enduring dimension of Christian monasticism. From its origins in the contemptus mundi and fuga mundi of the Desert Fathers to its modern cultural and ecological expressions, monas...