This book is for those who yearn for a spiritual life that has depth and intellectual challenge. It is a thinking person's guide to the spiritual life written for the smart seeker who wants to be fully attuned to God, fully interactive with other believers, fully connected to the wider world in which humans live, fully engaged with the physical universe, fully committed to service to the poor and disenfranchised, and, finally, fully postmodern. Adopting a literary device first used in the fourth century by the Desert Father Evagrios Pontikos, Richard Valantasis offers a "century" of spiritual texts - a hundred short essays from 800 to 900 words - on a hundred spiritual themes. Believing that "tradition is the action of the Holy Spirit making available the wisdom of the past in a new idiom and a time," Valantasis moves from the pre-modern spiritual world of the Christian tradition to the postmodern realities of our current world, and back again.

Table of Contents

Sample entries; Conversion; Sanctification; Incarnate Living; Discernment; Divine Indwelling; Union with God; Ennui; Progress; Holy Dying; Habitual Prayer; Thorns and Impediments; Praying the Bodies; Spiritual Direction; Emotional Ecology; Seeing Double; The Body Transparent; Temptation; Consolations; The Devil; Visions of Deification; Humility

Author Biography

Richard Valantasis is uniquely equipped to write this book. Raised and immersed in the Greek Orthodox tradition, he's been an Episcopal priest for 30 years. In addition to his activities as parish priest and spiritual director, he is Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Iliff School of Theology. He is the author of Spiritual Guides of the Third Century and The Gospel of Thomas, and editor of Religions in Late Antiquity in Practice and Asceticism (with Vincent Wimbush).