The connection points I hear to monasticism, nearly everywhere in the emerging spiritual landscape,

are beyond intriguing. The wandering, ascetic, eccentric sages known as the desert fathers and mothers,

the visionaries like Benedict or Francis or Ignatius of Loyola across the many centuries

in which Catholicism was the only way to be Christian.

They all emerged at a distance from a church they experienced to have grown imperial, externally domesticated,

and inwardly cold, out of touch with its own spiritual core.

And there is a kindred shift in the nuns generation of young Christians, including

evangelicals and others, people who have not rejected the faith of their childhood, but grew up

allergic to stridently and determined to reform it.

This is becoming wise, an inquiry into the mystery and the art of living.

I'm Krista Tippett.

One pivotal, loosely federated movement is called the new monasticism.

Shane Claiborne is now one of its guiding lights and at 40 one of its elders.

He is a lanky, charismatic, dreadlocked figure who looks like he might have been at home with the desert fathers and mothers.

While at Eastern University outside Philadelphia, an evangelical

college with a long history of social action, he and some friends became involved in championing

and caring for a large number of homeless people who had moved into an abandoned church in

North Philadelphia and were facing forced removal. The irony was not lost on them.

You know, I start reading this stuff that Jesus said, and I'm just like, man, does anyone really

believe this anymore? And Mother Teresa was one of those people that I felt just lived so

magnetically and authentically the simple words and teaching of Jesus. So we wrote her a letter,

you know, and we said, hey, we don't know if you give internships out there in Calcutta, but we would love to

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