The Conferences summarizes important conversations that Cassian had with elders from the monastery at Scetis (Wadi en Natrun in the western Nile delta) about spiritual and ascetic principles. Cassian shares the wisdom and insights of the venerable abbots Abraham, Chaeremon, Moses, Paphnutios, Serapion, Daniel, Theodor, Serenus, and Piamon, among others. The topics of these conversations ranged from divine gifts, perfection, prayer, and promises to mortification, lust, penitence, friendship, and renunciation.

It is often said that the Orthodox Church is a hospital and that our understanding of salvation is therapeutic. Here Met. Kallistos explores what this means in many different ways, and helps us to understand more deeply our relationship with Christ the physician of souls and bodies, who came to save and to heal both us and the world.

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is one of the greatest guides to human flourishing ever written, but its length and style have left many readers languishing. How to Flourish is a colloquial new translation by Susan Sauve Meyer that makes Aristotle's timeless insights about how to lead a good life more engaging and accessible than ever before.

The Eastern Christian tradition is filled with theological and spiritual riches. In Passions of the Soul, Rowan Williams opens up the great classics of Eastern Christian writing to show how it can help us to understand and cope with the ups and downs of modern life. With compelling and illuminating insight, he shows the cost of living in a culture that is theologically and philosophically undernourished, working with a diminished and trivialized picture of the human self.

Origen (c. 185-c. 253) was the most influential Christian theologian before Augustine, the founder of Biblical study as a serious discipline in the Christian tradition, and a figure with immense influence on the development of Christian spirituality. This volume presents a comprehensive and accessible insight into Origen's life and writings, written and compiled by Joseph W. Trigg, a leading Origen authority. An introduction analyzes the principal influences that formed him as a Christian and as a thinker.

Early in her career, Elaine Pagels changed our understanding of the origins of Christianity with her work in The Gnostic Gospels. Now, in the culmination of a decades-long career, she explores the biggest subject of all, Jesus. In Miracles and Wonder she sets out to discover how a poor young Jewish man inspired a religion that shaped the world.

Sitting in stillness, the practice of meditation, and the cultivation of awareness are commonly thought to be the preserves of Hindus and Buddhists. Martin Laird shows that the Christian tradition of contemplation has its own refined teachings on using a prayer word to focus the mind, working with the breath to cultivate stillness, and the practice of inner vigilance or awareness.

From the philosophy of Aristotle and Confucius, to Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae, to the paintings of Raphael, Botticelli, and many more, fascination with the virtues has endured and evolved to fit a wide range of cultural, religious, and philosophical contexts through the centuries. This Very Short Introduction audiobook introduces listeners to the various virtues: the moral virtues, the intellectual virtues, and the theological virtues, as well as the capital vices.

Bloomsbury presents The Way of St Benedict by Rowan Williams, read by Peter Noble. With typical eloquence and wisdom, in The Way of St Benedict Rowan Williams explores the appeal of St Benedict’s sixth-century Rule, showing it to be a document of great relevance to present day Christians and non-believers at our particular moment in history.

The influence of Plato, his Dialogues and his ‘Academy', cast a long shadow. Around 35 Dialogues, almost all featuring Socrates as the principal figure, are generally ascribed to Plato and form one of the most important threads in Western philosophy. These four Dialogues may fall into the ‘Attributed Texts' category, but they are of sufficient interest to warrant study in our time and when set against the principal canon.

The preaching of the truth, brother, and the confession of Orthodoxy is more needful for us than everything else, and we must make this confession before all mankind. For this is the foundation of all who believe. On account of this confession Peter was called blessed and was appointed to bear the keys of the kingdom of God. Paul, too, bore the hope of receiving the crown of life, since he kept and preached the faith. Indeed, the whole choir of the saints who did likewise and finished the race well has been glorified. We must also build up our neighbor, as much as we are able.

Pliny the Younger (61 CE-c. 113 CE) was a well-connected official in the Rome of the first century, and it is through his ten Books of Letters that we have one of the liveliest and most informal pictures of the period. As a lawyer and magistrate, he rose through the senate to become consul in AD 100 and therefore corresponded with leading figures including the historian Tacitus, the biographer Suetonius, the philosophers Artemidorus and Euphrates the Stoic and, most notably, Emperor Trajan.

How to Win an Election is an ancient Roman guide for campaigning that is as up-to-date as tomorrow's headlines. In 64 BC when idealist Marcus Cicero, Rome's greatest orator, ran for consul (the highest office in the Republic), his practical brother Quintus decided he needed some no-nonsense advice on running a successful campaign.

Romanos straddled the worlds of antiquity and Byzantium, and his hymns are a unique fusion of classical rhetoric, Syriac poetry, and the theology of the Cappadocian Fathers. Scripture comes to life in his hymns, inviting the faithful to encounter biblical events in their own liturgical experience, where the human-divine encounter was enriched with sacred music and holy ritual, amplifying moments of desire, sadness, and joy.

Available as an audiobook for the first time ever, Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life invites you to adopt Nouwen as your personal spiritual guide. Each session was carefully prepared by Dr. Michael Christensen, an award-winning professor of Christian ministry and practice, and Dr. Rebecca Laird, who was Nouwen’s student at Yale Divinity School. Like other volumes in The Nouwen Trilogy, this audiobook collects Nouwen’s unpublished homilies, interviews, classes, and speeches, as well as excerpts from his published writings.

The digital era is beset by distraction, and it feels like things are only getting worse. At times like these, the distant past beckons as a golden age of attention. We dream of recapturing the quiet of a world with less noise. We imagine retreating into solitude and singlemindedness, almost like latter-day monks. But although we think of early monks as master concentrators, a life of mindfulness did not, in fact, come to them easily.

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is one of the greatest guides to human flourishing ever written, but its length and style have left many readers languishing. How to Flourish is a colloquial new translation by Susan Sauve Meyer that makes Aristotle's timeless insights about how to lead a good life more engaging and accessible than ever before.

How to Win an Election is an ancient Roman guide for campaigning that is as up-to-date as tomorrow's headlines. In 64 BC when idealist Marcus Cicero, Rome's greatest orator, ran for consul (the highest office in the Republic), his practical brother Quintus decided he needed some no-nonsense advice on running a successful campaign.

How to Say No is a delightful collection of brief ancient writings about Cynicism that captures all the outrageousness, wit, and wisdom of its remarkable cast of characters—from Diogenes in the fourth century BCE to the column-stander Symeon Stylites in late antiquity.

Who doesn't worry sometimes that smart phones, the Internet, and TV are robbing us of time and preventing us from having a life? How can we make the most of our time on earth? In the first century AD, the Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger offered one of the most famous answers to that question in his essay "On the Shortness of Life"—a work that has more to teach us today than ever before.