Where God Happens: Discovering Christ in One Another

The place "where God happens," according to Rowan Williams's striking new reading of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, is between each other. It's a truth that we of the twenty-first century most urgently need to learn in order to heal the experience of alienation that has become endemic to our age, and these odd and appealing ancient figures, surprisingly, hold keys to this healing.

The fourth-century Christian hermits of Egypt, Syria, and Palestine understood the truth of Christian communit...