Scholar & author Derek Bickerton has been nice enough to send me a copy of his latest novel (and in exchange, a copy of my Patron Saints for Postmoderns will soon be on its way to him). Bickerton is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii, author of several widely-praised books on language, and novelist with a thing for church history. His new novel (he has written several others) is called The Desert and the City. I confess I’m still only a few pages into the book, but so far I’m enjoying the ride. And when the highly respected scholar Benedicta Ward, editor of the Penguin Classics and Cistercian Studies editions of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, calls your desert fathers novel “charming and sensitively done,” then you’ve clearly got something.
Here’s the back cover blurb:
“It is late in the 4th century AD and Zachary, a young Greek fromm Alexandria, has decided to become a hermit. Spurned in love, he ventures to the fringe of the desert to join a colony of Christians. Continue reading
Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians
Grateful to the dead 