https://therepository.org/ancient-paths/The Christian contemplative tradition, East and West, read from the source: the desert fathers, the mystics, the practices and the places.enhttps://therepository.org/ancient-paths/ep06-brother-lawrence-did-he-find-god-in-the-kitchen/https://therepository.org/ancient-paths/ep06-brother-lawrence-did-he-find-god-in-the-kitchen/Mon, 02 Nov 2026 13:00:02 +0000Brother 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 book. They are not there. We read his conversations and letters in two English translations, from 1895 and 1906, side by side, and followed his most famous sentence to the three places where it is printed.https://therepository.org/ancient-paths/ep05-the-history-of-lent-how-long-did-it-really-last/https://therepository.org/ancient-paths/ep05-the-history-of-lent-how-long-did-it-really-last/Tue, 27 Oct 2026 13:00:09 +0000Ask 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 a historian said that no two churches counted it the same way. We translated the Latin of Egeria's account ourselves, from the critical edition of 1898, and counted her days against the letters of Athanasius and two church historians.https://therepository.org/ancient-paths/ep04-the-imitation-of-christ-who-really-wrote-it/https://therepository.org/ancient-paths/ep04-the-imitation-of-christ-who-really-wrote-it/Thu, 22 Oct 2026 13:30:08 +0000The 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 of Brother Thomas Kempis. For two centuries scholars argued over what that signature proves. We read the codex he signed, page by page in its facsimile, beside an edition of the Arona manuscript that started the quarrel.https://therepository.org/ancient-paths/ep03-julian-of-norwich-why-she-wrote-all-shall-be-well/https://therepository.org/ancient-paths/ep03-julian-of-norwich-why-she-wrote-all-shall-be-well/Mon, 19 Oct 2026 16:00:29 +0000Julian 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 question she kept asking, why God did not prevent sin. We read her two versions side by side, the short one, which survives in a single manuscript, and the long one she wrote some twenty years later, and we show what she changed.https://therepository.org/ancient-paths/ep02-saint-catherine-s-at-sinai-why-it-was-never-destroyed/https://therepository.org/ancient-paths/ep02-saint-catherine-s-at-sinai-why-it-was-never-destroyed/Sat, 17 Oct 2026 13:15:04 +0000Saint 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 and fell around it. We read the two oldest witnesses in their own languages, the emperor Justinian's historian Procopius in Greek and the pilgrim Egeria in Latin, and set them beside the roof beams, the mosaic, the decrees in the archive and the icons.https://therepository.org/ancient-paths/ep01-saint-anthony-why-thousands-followed-him-to-the-desert/https://therepository.org/ancient-paths/ep01-saint-anthony-why-thousands-followed-him-to-the-desert/Fri, 16 Oct 2026 15:30:38 +0000In 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 comes from one book, written by Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, who knew him. We read it in Greek, translated the key passages ourselves, and set it beside the documents of Roman Egypt: a tax edict, a village papyrus from 324, and the travellers who tried to count the monks.