“Night in the Desert: An Ancient Monastic Ecology of Darkness.”

“The hesychia of the night is enough for us if our thoughts are wakeful towards God.” This saying from the Apophthegmata Patrum suggests the importance of the night in early Christian monastic experience. This talk will consider the meaning of night in the desert as early Christian monks lived and imagined it. It will also ask how this ancient monastic “ecology of darkness” can help us recover a sense of the immense value of the night at a moment when the twenty-four-hour economy and unceasing light pollution are threatening to banish darkness completely from our world.”

About the Speaker

Douglas E. Christie, Ph.D. is Professor Emeritus of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He is the author of The Word in The Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (Oxford, 1993), The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Note for a Contemplative Ecology (Oxford, 2012) and The Insurmountable Darkness of Love: Mysticism, Loss and the Common Life (Oxford, 2022). He has been awarded fellowships from the Luce Foundation, the Lilly Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. From 2013 to 2015, he served as Co-director of the Casa de la Mateada study abroad program in Córdoba, Argentina, a faith-based program rooted in the Jesuit vision of education for solidarity. He lives with his family in Los Angeles.

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