{"id":5116,"date":"2006-10-22T23:20:39","date_gmt":"2006-10-22T23:20:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/the-monastery-1.html"},"modified":"2006-10-22T23:20:39","modified_gmt":"2006-10-22T23:20:39","slug":"the-monastery-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/the-monastery-1.html","title":{"rendered":"The Monastery?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Did anyone watch it? I forgot. "The Monastery" being the Learning Channel’s attempt to duplicate the BBC program of the same name.<\/p>\n

The show’s website<\/a><\/p>\n

The Monastery of Christ in the Desert<\/a><\/p>\n

(And those of you who have been hanging around The Internets since the beginning know that the Monastery of Christ in the Desert has a had a strong, helpful web presence for a very <\/em>long time, in Web Years.)<\/p>\n

A post from the Beliefnet Pop Culture blog <\/a><\/p>\n

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It\u2019s here that five men from all walks of life have come to sort out their spirituality. Some, like the television writer Tom, have had a loose faith in God tested by addiction or tough experiences. Others, like a former gang member-turned-counselor and a Satanist-turned-Episcopalian, are looking to develop a strong devotion. Still others have no faith at all. They learn how to pray eight hours a day, work and eat in silence, and each is mentored by one of the monks to seek God. Not all of them make it, and those that do don\u2019t do so in predictable ways.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A review in the Seattle paper<\/a>  – says it’s nice but not exactly stirring television.<\/p>\n

The Fort Worth paper:<\/a><\/p>\n

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This might have worked better as a two-hour documentary — and without the reality-show elements. Except for Alex, who never stops smiling even though he seems perpetually angry, the men are so uniformly low-key that they don’t hold your attention. And Alex’s bull-headedness quickly becomes annoying. Tom does do well in confessional talk-to-the camera interviews, perhaps because he has had some TV-directing gigs in his past, but everything he says is so measured, it practically feels rehearsed.<\/p>\n

Two of the monks — Abbot Philip Lawrence and Brother Joseph Gabriel — give the documentary a boost, especially Gabriel, with his quiet discipline and adherence to faith in the face of adversity.<\/p>\n

The five men are all assigned individual mentors, and those one-on-one discussions can be revealing, but I wish the program had spent more time addressing Jon’s struggle with why God allows suffering, a question that many people wrestle with. Other questions are left unanswered: Warren, the most spiritual of the men, is a former Satanist, but we get only the scantest indication of what led to his 180-degree conversion.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}