Illuminates a text that until now has intimidated the general reader.Focuses on seven themes that recur throughout the five-volume workâ?"repentance, the heart, prayer, the Jesus Prayer, the passions, stillness, and theosis.

"Filled with centuries of wisdom.... Wonderfully explains and simplifies this difficult [text]."
-Religious Book Club

"An invaluable treasury of wisdom?. Offers a simple guide to the way (through one's heart) and means (through prayer) of arriving from the spiritual starting-point (of repentance in the heart) to the wonderful destination (of stillness and salvation) found in the love of divine beauty."
-John Chryssavgis, author of Light through Darkness: The Orthodox Tradition

"Successfully acquaints the reader with [the Philokalia's] origins, context, import and influence."
-American Vedantist

"Fully accessible to professional theologians, lay Christians and spiritualists alike. An invaluable addition to spirituality and Christian literature shelves."
-Midwest Book Review

"Like water in the desert ? invites us not only to go deeper into the life of prayer but takes us off the treadmill of endless self-invention. A clearly and beautifully annotated text that will make the Philokalia accessible to a new generation of readers. A gift for our time."
-Fr. Alan Jones, dean, Grace Cathedral, San Francisco; author of Soul Making and The Soul's Journey

"[An] authoritative resource?. Will go far toward making one of the great treasures of Eastern Christian spirituality accessible to followers of Christ in the West."
-Frederica Mathewes-Green, author of The Illumined Heart and Facing East

"Eastern Orthodox Christian teachings on prayer, watchfulness and stillness have much to say to the Quaker tradition."
-Quaker Life