Ancient Paths Faith
The Christian contemplative tradition, East and West, read from the source: the desert fathers, the mystics, the practices and the places.
Brother Lawrence: Did He Find God in the Kitchen?
Brother Lawrence: did he find God in the kitchen? Ask almost anyone and they will tell you he was a cook who prayed among the pots and pans. We went looking for those words in his ...
The History of Lent: How Long Did It Really Last?
Ask almost anyone how long Lent lasts and the answer is forty days. But in the fourth century a pilgrim in Jerusalem named Egeria wrote that there the fast lasted eight weeks, and ...
The Imitation of Christ: Who Really Wrote It?
The Imitation of Christ was copied by hand for years with no author's name. One copy, finished in 1441 and now in the Royal Library in Brussels, ends with a signature: by the hands...
Julian of Norwich: Why She Wrote 'All Shall Be Well'
Julian of Norwich wrote that all shall be well, in England, in the century of the Black Death. In her own book the sentence is not a comfort she started with: it is the answer to a...
Saint Catherine's at Sinai: Why It Was Never Destroyed
Saint Catherine's monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai has never been destroyed: monks have prayed behind the same walls for about fourteen and a half centuries, while empires rose...
Saint Anthony: Why Thousands Followed Him to the Desert
In the fourth century, thousands of Egyptians left the green valley of the Nile to live in rock and sand, and the man they followed was Anthony. Everything we know of his life come...