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Desert Fathers and Mothers: Early Christian Wisdom Sayings—Annotated & Explained is unavailable, but you can change that!

The desert fathers and mothers—ordinary Christians living in solitude in the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Arabia—chose to renounce the world in order to deliberately and individually follow God’s call. They embraced lives of celibacy, labor, fasting, prayer and poverty, believing that by denouncing material goods and practicing stoic self-discipline, they would find unity with the...

ministry. It is where each of us is called to begin our renewed path toward the Divine. Scholar of religion Andrew Harvey once wrote, “The things that ignore us save us in the end. Their presence awakens silence in us; they refresh our courage with the purity of their detachment.”8 One of the goals of spiritual life in desert tradition was detachment from our desires and agendas. Being in the desert landscape reminds us of what that means on a visceral level. The harshness of that landscape helps
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