Monasticism is all the rage these days, at least within over-educated Evangelical circles, and I can’t help but contrast this fascination with another parallel trend: that of Evangelical disavowals of “religion”.

The two trends are incompatible, of course, because ascetic communities are nothing if not religious, on the one hand, and on the other: I’ve yet to find an “irreligious” Evangelicalism that has a healthy biblical read on the communion of the saints.

And while I’m generally distrustful of Christians withdrawing from society, monasticism has its place, if it is able to properly function as a specialist organ of the church. See, for example, the scholastic monks who, during the dark ages, painstakingly preserved and reproduced scripture. 

Anyway, I enjoyed Into Great Silence, a documentary about the Carthusian monks of Alpine France. These folks are as severe as anyone in the Christian world, and yet: more successfully communal and even multi-ethnic than most churches.