This is an interesting collection of sayings from female ascetics in early Christianity -- interspersed with meditations on their modern meaning by Laura Swan.

Her commentary is devotional rather than scholarly. She sees desert asceticism as a way to revitalize the modern Christian community and restore an authentic faith and a sense of a God who “does not want to be tamed, controlled, or pasteurized” (157). However, the value of her meditations is dependent upon want a reader wants from the book.

Given the difficultly of digging out the Lives of female ascetics from under the mountain of hagiography of male ascetics, Swan's work is valuable as a collection. Unfortunately, her summaries of the lives and sayings of the desert mothers, while accessible, feel overly simplified. All of the information is filtered through Swan’s vision and this adds another degree of separation on top of the separations already created by years of oral transmission and then the hagiography of the early church. Ultimately, we are further removed from the desert mothers than they would have otherwise been.

Swan makes a critical error when she lumps desert ascetics, urban ascetics, and deaconesses together under the term desert mothers. This imposes an artificial unity of thought, belief, practice, context, and experience on the women of the early Christianity. This error is similar to the tendency of modern feminist scholarship to group all women together in this vague category of women’s experience with little regard for the differences in experiences that are created by socio-economic class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, and – in feminist theology – in which branch of Christianity a woman is located. This false grouping forces homogenization of ideas rather than the “prophetic freedom” Swan praises in her epilogue. While she has taken steps toward prophetic freedom in recognizes that the gender of the desert mothers differentiates their experience and message from that of the men of the time, she has not in this book truly allowed the women of early Christianity to speak for themselves. ( )

This is a great collection of sayings from the desert mothers. Unfortunately, the writer Laura Swan tends to be both preachy and too facile with popular psychobabble. I skipped Swan's ruminations on the desert mothers to read only the mothers' words themselves -- and was amply rewarded. ( )