Call number
271 BUR
Status
Available
Call number
Pages
352
Description
Growing scholarly debate in recent years on the religious world of late antiquity has focused new attention on the quest for holiness by early Christian monks known as the desert fathers. This book explores the setting within which their early monastic movement emerged.
Publication
Oxford University Press (1993), 352 pages
ISBN
0195083334 / 9780195083330
Collections
Media reviews
Fides et Historia
But these limitations are no more than minor blemishes on a superb piece of scholarship that deserves to be widely read.
Church History
Another door is unlocked by this remarkable volume. For years histories of spirituality have chided Protestants for having no spirituality. With the appearance of this book and its persuasive conclusion that scripture was part of the life-book of the desert fathers and mothers, the case denying
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Protestant spirituality falls. Protestants have always nurtured a spirituality dependent upon scripture. Show Less
Journal of Religion
Interpretation
Burton-Christie's engaging examination of the desert fathers (and mothers) should prove to be a valuable resource not only for those with technical interests in either hermeneutics or asceticism but also for those who are seeking a profoundly scriptural form of Christian spirituality.
Catholic Historical Review
A rapid enumeration of the themes of this book does little justice to its nature. Like the sayings of the Apophthegmata themselves, its rich texture of argument and evocation deserves to be pondered by students of Christian spirituality in a receptive but questioning spirit.
Theological Studies
B. aims to elucidate the heart of the desert experience, the monk's desire to imitate Christ and the great figures of the Bible by being transformed through the biblical word ceaselessly pondered. He succeeds. The result is an extremely helpful and well-written study of desert spirituality firmly
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grounded in the texts, both biblical and monastic. Show Less
Review & Expositor
Nevertheless, this work offers a detailed hermeneutical construal of the diverse and often ambivalent ways in which the monks of the desert both interpreted scripture and were themselves interpreted by the scripture. A better understanding of this ancient hermeneutical circle challenges
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contemporary Christians who claim to live under the rule of Scripture to deepen their own practice of holy living. Show Less
Worship
The result is a convincing demonstration that the desert monks, far from being misguided eccentrics, were in fact men and women who were formed by Scripture and who achieved a remarkable degree of wisdom.
Horizons
This is such a masterful and important book that one hesitates to point out that it suffers from a common fault in modern historiography. I wonder, though, whether it is not time to use more inclusive terminology by speaking of desert mothers as well as fathers or referring simply to desert
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ascetics or monks. The desert attracted women as well as men, and Burton-Christie has rightly given attention to at least a few important women, such as: Ammas, Syncletica, and Theodora, whose sayings enriched the corpus. Show Less
Perspectives in Religious Studies
The Word in the Desert is an exciting book written from a principled criticism of Scripture and with a committed sympathy for desert spirituality in its origins and modern resonances.
Cross Currents
Those interested in early Christian interpretation of Scripture and its intersection with religious life, or the relation of orality to literacy, will find much to mull over in Douglas Burton-Christie's The Word in the Desert.