In this short book, Ian Adams captures the essential genius of the monastic tradition and combines it with his own experience as poet, family man and abbot of a 'new-monastic community' to address the disease of so much of our contemporary ways of living. His book gives simple, practical inspiration for 'ordinary living' and re-calls monks and nuns, friars and sisters tot he passion of their founders as it asks: "How did the dynamic way of the passionate, scandalous re-imaginer Jesus give way to so much that is passionless, repressed and safe?"-Abbot Stuart Burns OSB