In this EHoP Mystics Series video, Claire Bischoff teaches about the Desert Mothers: their lives, historical context, and spirituality.
“Within the Roman Empire, at the very beginning, Christianity was illegal. There were various periods of persecution of Christians over the first couple hundred years. And so very early on, one of the key ideas of how people could follow Jesus was in martyrdom.
“In the early 300s, Christianity will first become legal. A couple decades later it will become the official religion of the Roman Empire. Once Christianity becomes legal, martyrdom no longer was one of the ways of following Christ. So one of the questions that followers of Christ had, as Christianity is in this ascendancy, is, how do we live as one in Christ? For the desert monastics, their way of life is one of the answers to this question.”
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